doi:10.1093/cje/beaa044
Advance Access publication 11 September 2020
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved.
Pareto’s Trattato di Sociologia Generale: a
behaviourist ante litteram approach
Roberto Marchionatti and Fiorenzo Mornati*
The paper deals with the changing relationship between economics and sociology in Pareto’s thought and suggests a new interpretation of this relationship. Pareto’s opus magnum in the field, the Trattato di Sociologia Generale (1916, French ed. 1917), is usually considered the result of the abandonment of economics by the late Pareto in favour of another field of interest, sociology—the realm of the analysis of non-rational actions—and on the basis of this interpretation it has been largely neglected by economists. This paper maintains that the sociology of the Trattato has to be considered not as an abandonment of interest in economics, but rather as a programme for the reconstruction and transformation of economics in a perspec-tive that today could be called ‘behaviourist’.
Key words: Vilfredo Pareto, Trattato di Sociologia, Economics and sociology, Behaviourism
JEL classifications: B1, B3
1. Introduction
Vilfredo Pareto is traditionally considered one of the most important economists in history, and his thought is viewed as a fundamental step in the construction of modern economic theory. On the other hand, Pareto as a sociologist has had a very different fate. Among economists, with very few exceptions, his major work in the field, the Trattato di Sociologia Generale (1916, French ed. 1917), after an initial interest and posi-tive reception in Italy and France,1 has for long been little known or totally unknown: economists have usually considered it the result of the abandonment of economics by the late Pareto in favour of another field of inquiry—sociology—of scant interest to economic theoreticians. In the few cases in which economists have taken the Trattato into account, they have evaluated it rather negatively, above all in the English-speaking
Manuscript received 19 September 2019; final version received 18 May 2020.
Address for correspondence: Roberto Marchionatti, Department of Economics and Statistics Cognetti de
Martiis, University of Turin, Turin, Italy; email: roberto.marchionatti@unito.it
*Department of Economics and Statistics Cognetti de Martiis, University of Turin (RM and FM).
1 In France and Italy, Pareto was considered the founder of a general sociology, or an equilibrium theory
of both society and the economy, and praised for this by economists and sociologists: see Barone (1924),
Borgatta (1924), Pantaleoni (1924), Bousquet (1928) and Amoroso (1935). However, French and Italian economists’ real interest in Pareto’s sociology soon faded, giving way to a substantially superficial account (Busino, 1991).
world. The long review of its English translation in 1935 (with the title Mind and Society 20 years after its Italian first publication), by the young American economist Max Millikan in Econometrica, is a good example of this attitude, which henceforth be-came predominant (Millikan, 1936).2 Here, Pareto’s work is considered in a negative way, not only as
the most obscure and confused blend of sociological theory, classical antiquarianism, sheer vi-tuperation and sage comment on everything from metaphysics to obscenity. (Millikan, 1936, p. 324),
but also ‘a disappointing experience’ for ‘those [economists] familiar with the brilliant achievements of Vilfredo Pareto in mathematical economics’ (Millikan, 1936), as well as ‘disappointing’ also for sociologists, political scientists and natural scientists.
Among sociologists, the Trattato for a long time—with the exception of a short inter-lude of interest in Paretian sociology in the 1930s in the Harvard Pareto circle founded by the Harvardian scientist and sociologist Lawrence Henderson (Heyl, 1968; Isaac,
2008; Cot, 2011)—was mainly considered outdated, in any case of lesser value than
the works of the more important contemporary sociologists, primarily Max Weber. Among economists, the first important exception, in the English-speaking world, to the above-quoted negative opinions on Pareto as a sociologist is represented by J. A. Schumpeter.3 Even if he considered Pareto’s sociology to be defective, Schumpeter
(1949) thought that it contained an important message (‘a sermon’, he wrote), mainly
for economists, about the necessity to go beyond the hypothesis of rational behav-iour in order to explain the real behavbehav-iours of agents and groups. At the same time, however, Schumpeter accepted the division between Pareto as economist (the ‘the-orist’) and Pareto as sociologist introduced by the structural-functionalist American sociologist Talcott Parsons, who in the mid-1930s—when, like Schumpeter, he was a member of the Harvard Pareto circle—devoted many works to Pareto (Parsons, 1933, 1935, 1937).4 According to Parsons, Pareto considered economics to be the study of logical and rational action, while not-logical (in the sense of not- rational) action was considered to be the field of sociology. This division was then usually and acritically adopted by economists (and sometimes erroneously attributed to Pareto himself: see Swedberg, 1990), who have usually considered the term not-logical as a synonymous with irrational. In this perspective, understandably, the problem of the relationship between economics and sociology—actually a fundamental issue for Pareto as we will see—has been neglected.
2 An article by the Italian Paretian economist Luigi Amoroso on Pareto as economist and sociologist
written in the French–Italian tradition of positive, and partially uncritical, evaluation of the Trattato, was published two years later in Econometrica, without any reference to Millikan’s review or attempt to respond to his criticisms (Amoroso, 1938).
3 On the relationship between Schumpeter and Pareto on sociology, see Perlman (1987) and Shionoya (2007). After Schumpeter, among the few economists who paid attention to Pareto’s Trattato in the post-WWII period, the American economists and historians of economics Warren Samuels (1974) and Vincent
Tarascio (1976, 1983) deserve special mention.
4 The most important of these writings is of course his major opus The Structure of Social Action (1937).
Here, Parsons drew on elements from the works of several European scholars (Weber, Pareto, Marshall and Durkheim) to develop a systematic theory of social action. Part II of the book, entitled ‘The emergence of a voluntaristic theory of action from the positivistic tradition’ devotes three chapters (V, VI and VII) to Pareto’s sociological work. ‘His work – Parson writes - … provides one of the most promising points of departure for the type of theory in sociology and the related social sciences in which the present study is interested’. (p. 460).
In fact, and more generally, for a long time, there was no effective communica-tion between economists and sociologists, who simply ignored each other. This sep-aration between economics and sociology has been challenged by some economists, in particular, since the 1970s. The issue was addressed in two different ways. From a rigorously neoclassical point of view (creating an approach which afterwards be-came an important part of recent neoclassical economics), Becker (1976) extended the domain of the microeconomics of rational choice to encompass areas like crime, racial discrimination and family: topics that had traditionally interested only sociolo-gists. Partly as a result of the controversies raised in the economists’ community by Becker’s contributions, some economists began to use sociological insights in their work. Akerlof’s (1984) work, in particular, has been considered the more remarkable alternative to Becker’s approach. Instead of trying to use the economics model to ex-plain non-economic behaviour, Akerlof introduced elements from the non-economic social sciences directly into economic analysis. His strategy was called by himself ‘psycho-socio-anthropo-economics’.
On the other hand, sociologists have become increasingly interested in economic topics. Initially, in the 1980s, attempts were made to construct a new type of sociology based on the rational choice model, thus showing a significant influence of economics on the research agendas of sociologists (Coleman, 1984, 1986; see also Baron and
Hannan, 1994). Then the field of economic sociology suddenly boomed, showing
evi-dence of a convergence of interest between sociologists and economists.
A curious aspect of this revival of interest in the relationship between economics and sociology is the substantial absence of Pareto. Only recently has the traditional Parsonian interpretation of Pareto’s work begun to be challenged and an increasing interest in Pareto as a theoretician of human behaviour in a wider sense, including reason and emotions and passions, gained ground essentially in the field of sociology. We observe a reassessment of Pareto’s sociology on the threshold of the new mil-lenium by (mainly) sociologists and (to a lesser extent) economists (e.g.Zafirovski
and Levine, 1997; Zafirovski, 1999; Busino, 2000, 2010; Steiner, 2000; Aspers, 2001;
McLure, 2001, 2005; Bruni, 2002; Dalziel and Higgins, 2006): the emerging idea is
that Pareto moved towards sociology in an attempt to integrate economic phenomena into a broader framework.5 Actually, this new interpretative perspective of the Trattato di Sociologia may be of interest for economists dissatisfied with the current state of mainstream economics: the Trattato may assume a meaning rather different from that traditionally attributed to it by economists, and a new interpretation of his work from the point of view of economic theory can be offered. In particular, the Pareto of the Trattato may be fruitfully interpreted as a behaviourist economist.
From this perspective, this paper develops a new interpretation of the relationship between economics and sociology in Pareto. Based on all Pareto’s thought and corres-pondence made available by the complete edition of his work and on the new Pareto intellectual biography (Mornati, 2018A, 2018B), it shows, first of all, that Pareto’s interest in sociology can be dated earlier than traditionally thought, at the same time
5 For example, Aspers (2001) writes: ‘Pareto started out his career in the social sciences as an economist,
but moved towards sociology with an outspoken attempt to integrate the study of economic phenomena in a broader sociological framework’ (Aspers, 2001, p. 521). And then he underlines: ‘The main point is that there is a combination of actions that are in the economic sphere, but that are non-logical. These constitute what I here call economic sociology’ (p. 528).
when his interest in economics began.6 From here, it is possible to interpret the Trattato not as an ‘abandonment’ of interest in economics, but rather as a new phase of the re-lationship between economics and sociology in Pareto’s reflection and as a programme for the reconstruction and transformation of economics. In fact, this programme was launched when Pareto became aware of the limits of economics as a theory of rational choice—a theory that Pareto himself had contributed to creating more than anyone else at his time.7
In order to support this interpretation of the Paretian research programme, this paper provides an excursus on the relationship between economics and sociology during the entire period of Pareto’s reflection, which can be divided into three phases. In Section 2, the relationship between economics and sociology is examined in the period before the Cours d’économie politique and in the years of the Cours (1896–97). In Section 3, the relationship is examined in the period 1898–1907, that is, in the years of the ‘rigorous revision of my works’ between the Cours and the years of the Manuel d’économie poli-tique. In Section 4, the following period is examined, and in particular the years of the Trattato, when the relationship between economics and sociology was subjected to a complete re-examination. Section 5 concludes with brief discussion of the relationship between Pareto’s theoretical analysis in the Trattato and the ‘post-neoclassical’ behav-ioural developments of economic science which testify to the surprising current rele-vance of Pareto’s thought for contemporary economists.
2. Economics and sociology in Pareto, I. 1876–1896/97
2.1 From the early writings to the Cours d’économie politique: economics as a first approximation and sociology as a synthesis
Economics and sociology are intertwined in Pareto’s thought from the beginning. In fact, Pareto’s initial interest in sociology was contemporary to that in economics, in the mid-1870s, as part of a more general interest in the construction of a science of society
(Mornati, 2018A). At that time, his main source of sociological thought was the work
of the British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer, who applied evolutionary theory to the study of society (Spencer, 1862–63). The close dependency between social and economic phenomena is a key idea expressed in Pareto’s pre-Cours writ-ings (see the writwrit-ings collected in Pareto, 1974, and his correspondence with Maffeo Pantaleoni (Pareto, 1984)). Addressing, in this context, the problem of the relative relevance of the economic phenomenon in social life (e.g. Pareto, 1891), Pareto notes that it is a mistake to always attribute to the economic phenomenon ‘the main part in the society’s life’ (Pareto, 1891, p. 219): observation and history show that also moral
6 The Trattato di sociologia, Pareto wrote in a letter to Guido Sensini of 5 April 1917, just after its
publi-cation, is the book ‘where the study of twenty years is incorporated’ (Pareto, 1975, I, p. 958), that is, since 1896–97. This statement should be interpreted as referring to the period when the Trattato was effectively written, and not as a reference to the beginning of his interest in sociology.
7 Our interpretation was partially anticipated in Tarascio (1983), who maintained that ‘The Trattato was
more than an attempt of social science; it was a program for the reconstruction of economics in particular, and the social sciences, in general. This reconstruction involved a widening of the scope of economic and other social phenomena and the development of a theory of history to deal with the evolutionary character of human societies’ (p. 119). Our interpretation also shares many points of interest with Steiner (2000),
McLure (2001) and Bruni (2002).
and religious phenomena usually play an important role in human action.8 Above all, considering that the causes of human actions are generally very numerous, Pareto emphasises that ‘a theory focused on one of them is only a partial theory’ (Pareto, 1893, p. 46). Therefore, the problem is that of making a general theory of human action, or a sociology.
Teaching at the University of Losanne presented Pareto with the opportunity to pro-vide a first (but quite structured) formulation of his general theory of human action, as documented in the sociological part of his Premier cours d’economie politique appliquée (1893–94, pp. 1–26), then developed in his Cours d’économie politique (1897, pp. 1–71, 347–96). Notably, in §625 of the Cours, he introduced the concept of an evolutionary state of equilibrium between internal and external forces.9 He writes:
observation shows that the life of social aggregates represents a certain state of equilibrium be-tween a great deal of forces which can be divided into two categories … the external and the internal forces.
Pareto’s concept of evolutionary social equilibrium as the result of the pressure of external forces on internal ones refers to the conception of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck—to whom, according to Pareto, can be traced back Spencer’s pos-ition as well as those of two leading contemporary scientists, whose work was well known to Pareto: the French zoologist Yves Delage and the German botanist Wilhelm Pfeffer. These references show that the evolutionary theory to which Pareto refers is the neo-Lamarckian evolutionary theory, in particular in its French variant.10 In this theoretical context, Pareto emphasises the ‘real fact’ represented by the adaptation of human society to the environment.
How is a scientist to deal with human society’s equilibrium? In his Premier cours d’économie politique appliqué, Pareto (Pareto, 1893–94, p. 3) stresses that the mech-anical analogy, of frequent use in economics by marginalist economists, is limitedly
8 In his correspondence with the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce in the 1890s, Pareto affirmed
that ‘the part of the moral phenomena in social life is indisputable’ and added that it was not clear to him ‘which is the part of them compared to that of economic phenomena’ (Pareto, letter to Benedetto Croce, 24 December 1896, in Pareto, 1975, I, p. 317). Croce’s confutation of the theory, which considers only the economic factor (the reference is to the Marxist materialistic conception of history—Pareto alludes to Croce’s paper Sulla concezione materialistica della storia, La Critica sociale, 1896, pp. 188–90, where Croce, discussing the recent positions expressed by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola, maintained that ‘the alleged reduction of history to economic element is a crazy thing’, Pareto, 1975, p. 188), according to Pareto, confirms the mutual dependence of social and economic phenomena, a fact of which, he emphasizes, social scientists should be constantly aware in their studies.
9 The internal forces are represented by what in the Trattato would be called ‘residues’, ‘derivations’,
‘élites’ and ‘interests’, while the external forces are physical factors like climate and soil.
10 As shown by Nye (1986), Pareto derived many of his ideas on evolution from French sources. Nye (1986) explains that ‘the various theoretical and empirical problems of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory in the period between the early 1880s and 1900 encouraged the growth of rival explanations of evolu-tionary change, among them neo-Lamarckism, orthogenesis, and a variety of systems based on mutations. Eventually, of course, these rival theories were weakened following the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics, but before WWI there was a genuine competition among these theories, which was nowhere more true than in France.’ (p. 100). Neo-Lamarckism was championed by biologists like Edward Perrier, Alfred Giard and Yves Delage (see, in particular, Delage, 1895). On Pareto and sociological evolutionism in the second part of 1890s, see Mornati (2018B).
In the Trattato, Pareto rejected social Darwinism because of its finalist implication that the end result of evolution is ‘good’. Nonetheless, he did not dismiss evolutionary theory. Pareto’s evolutionary ideas in the
Trattato were examined by Houghton and Lopreato (1977) but in their effort to characterize Pareto as a pre-cursor of modern sociobiology, they seemed to go too far (see also Lopreato, 1980).
useful in the analysis of this equilibrium.11 In fact, even if many social phenomena re-semble the mechanical phenomenon of a material point subject to the action of many forces, so that the mechanical analogy seems to be applicable in the explanation, there is a crucial difference: in sociology, it is not possible to have exact formula as in mech-anics (or comparable ones). As a consequence, the exact output of two or more causes which act on a social phenomenon is generally ignored. We can only say that the re-sultant is generically dependent on the direction of the acting forces. Moreover, in the analysis of social equilibrium, Pareto adds in the §§584 and 586 of the Cours, we have to renounce making use of ‘mathematical reasoning’ because the value and nature of functions involved in sociological studies are ignored.
From the methodological point of view, Pareto addresses the problem of how to deal with the different phenomena influencing the social equilibrium, adopting what he considered to be the criterion in building a scientific theory: that is, the method of ‘successive approximations’, which certainly worked well in physics. In a famous table in the note of the §592 of the Cours, Pareto outlines the analogies between mechanical and social phenomena and describes the method to be applied to study ‘the relations of production and wealth between men’. He begins by pointing out that:
Given a society, we study the relations of production and wealth between men, abstracted from other circumstances. We obtain thus a study of political economy. … If we consider homo oeconomicus who acts only as a result of economic forces we obtain the pure political economy which studies ophelimity in abstract terms … From pure political economy comes applied pol-itical economy, which does not consider solely homo oeconomicus, but also other models of man closer to reality. Men have also other characteristics which are studied by other particular sci-ences … As a whole they constitute the social scisci-ences
And ‘since it seems useful to give a name to the science that achieves this synthesis, we may … call it sociology’ (Pareto, 1899, p. 150).
3. Economics and sociology in Pareto, II. 1897–1907
3.1 The complexity of social equilibrium and Pareto’s theoretical impasse
The starting point of the analytical construction of the Trattato can be located in 1897, on the occasion of an unexpected event: the request, on the eve on the second se-mester of the academic year 1896–97, that Pareto teach a course of sociology at the University of Lausanne in substitution of the professor appointed of the course of sociology, who has suddenly become unavailable. Pareto accepted the invitation (see
Mornati, 2018B).
In the inaugural address of his new course (Pareto, 1897A), Pareto, drawing on his previous work, identified the aim of sociology among social sciences. After defining sociology as the science that ‘considers social phenomena as a whole and in their re-ciprocal interactions’, and after pointing out that sociology, ‘like all the social sciences’, is partly descriptive (when it studies the real movements, i.e., ‘the successive passages from one social equilibrium position to another’), and partly hypothetical (when it studies virtual movements, i.e., the hypothetical shifts from the real equilibria, in order
11 On the significance of the mechanical analogy in economics, see Ingrao and Israel (1990), Ingrao (1991) and Marchionatti and Gambino (1997). On the role of the mechanical analogy in all of Pareto’s work, see McLure (2001).
to determine ‘what are the effects for people’) (Pareto, 1897A, p. 49), he declared that the aim of sociology is to inquire too into ‘the various concepts of social phenomena which individuals develop’, without omitting the causes of the errors, for example, those very common ones ‘which consist of a priori conceptions of phenomena’ (Pareto,
1897A, p. 53).
Starting from these premises, Pareto began the analytical construction of his soci-ology. He rejected the ‘Robinson Crusoe model’ of an isolated man because, he wrote, only the characters of men living in real societies are known (e.g. Pareto, 1904). He realistically assumed that a society is ‘an heterogeneous and hierarchical aggregation’
(Pareto, 1905, p. 5) and that ‘the forces determining social equilibrium are extremely
various and complex’ (Pareto, 1898, p. 102). The fundamental point of Pareto’s sociological analysis is thus represented by the definite recognition that ‘man is an extremely complex being’ (Pareto, 1897B, p. 509) and that ‘reason is not of help in human action: only emotions, passions, interests move it’ (Pareto, letter to Maffeo Pantaleoni, 5 February 1898, in Pareto, 1984, II, p. 163). So Pareto (Pareto, letter to Maffeo Pantaleoni, 17 May 1897, Pareto, 1984, p. 73) divided human actions be-tween logical (those, a few, which are driven by reason and which are studied by pure political economy) and non-logical (those, the majority, driven by emotions, passions and interests and which are studied by sociology stricto sensu): the latter constitute ‘the cement’ of the society (Pareto, 1905, p. 107). The analytical distinction between the two classes of actions arises from the observation that ‘every sociological phenomenon has two forms, often completely different’ which change in a reciprocal way: they are an objective form which establishes relationships between real things, and a subjective form which establishes relationships between states of mind. (Pareto, 1900, 402)
Logical and non-logical actions are also expressed by Pareto in the distinction (Pareto, 1910, p. 306) between the actions presenting ‘means appropriate to ends’ and ‘logically connect means and ends’ and those without these properties. From the point of view of those who act (or subjective point of view), ‘almost all human actions have to be included in the first class’: therefore, it is only from the objective point of view (i.e. the point of view of those with wider knowledge) that the distinction in more classes can be carried out.
Human actions can be investigated, Pareto (1898, p. 102) points out, not only on the analytical level but also ‘synthetically, by studying them as a whole and through their results’, following a necessarily empirical method: we are indebted to it ‘almost entirely for our small amount of knowledge about social phenomena’. Pareto (1899, p. 150) adds that ‘proceeding synthetically, applied political economy could end up considering all the characters of the real man and so become sociology’: However, it is appropriate that ‘it stops when the man considered is no longer an homo oeconomicus’, making room, ‘in order to proceed further’ (Pareto, 1899), for sociology understood as the synthesis of all the social sciences.
However, following this new line of inquiry, Pareto quite rapidly arrived at the con-clusion that ‘it is difficult to separate economics from the other social sciences’ (Pareto, 1907, p. 160). This statement, which makes the main problem of his inquiry explicit, represents the crucial turning point of Pareto’s thought in around 1907.12 He became
12 Pareto’s article written in 1907 (‘L’économie et la sociologie au point de vue scientifique’), as well as
another article written in 1913 on the interdependence between economic prosperity and cycles in social state, represent important methodological anticipations of the Trattato.
increasingly aware of the complexity of the economic issue and the difficulty of dealing with it. In fact, it is to that period that, in our interpretation, can be attributed the fol-lowing, well known, statement by Pareto in his Jubilee Address (1917):
At a certain point of my researches in political economy I arrived at a dead end (via senza uscita). I saw the experimental truth but I could not reach it. Several obstacles stopped me: among the others, the mutual dependency of social phenomena, which does not allow complete isolation of studies on the different types of these phenomena, and opposes the indefinite progress of one of them if this is deprived of the help of others (Pareto, 1917, p. 67)
This passage highlights the fundamental methodological and epistemological issue of Pareto’s theoretical inquiry. His economic research until then had been founded on the idea that economic theory is a first approximation in the construction of the science of society, but the evolution of Pareto’s research, which followed the experimental method, that is, the method of science—it was the method that also sociology had to follow because contem-porary sociology’s backwardness was due, according to Pareto, to the fact that it still had not adopted the experimental method—brought him into collision with the impossibility of reaching the experimental truth. This persuaded him to believe that he had arrived at ‘a dead end (an impasse)’, because, as he writes in the above-cited 1917 passage, the studies of different types of social phenomena cannot be entirely isolated, dividing homo oeconomicus from homo politicus from homo religiosus, etc.: that is, it is not possible to make a clear-cut separation among disciplines in the field of social sciences. The mutual dependency of social phenomena, Pareto emphasises, cannot be grasped and examined in this way.
In particular, Pareto writes, ‘there is no doubt that very often the conclusions of economic theories are not verified … How to overcome this difficulty?’ Pareto suggests three possible ways out:
We can fully repudiate economic science … We can resign ourselves to this lack of correspond-ence and say that we are looking for not what is but what should be … Lastly … we can inves-tigate whether the lack of correspondence results from the fact that some effects, studied in a separate way, could be modified by other effects that we have ignored. (Pareto, 1917, pp. 67–68) In his Trattato di Sociologia, Pareto chose to follow the third path, undertaking a lengthy gestation work far from ‘the paths usually beaten by official sociology’ (Bobbio, 1964, p. 31). The Trattato di Sociologia constitutes the way out. In this sense, it is a new meth-odological turning point in Pareto’s research. In other words, Pareto became aware of the inadequacy of the method of successive approximations beyond a certain level of complexity. At the same time, he continued to use this method in the elaboration of his sociology in the specific sense that in this way he could ‘ignore the details in order to focus on the phenomenon in its main parts’ (Pareto, Trattato, §69). Consequently, we can say that Pareto substantially passed from the method of successive approxima-tions—legitimate and effective if used within specific disciplinary fields where the level of complexity is limited—to a holistic approach dealing with the social phenomenon in its entirety and complexity. In other words, the main issue becomes no longer the continuous refinement and extension of a theory within a single discipline but the con-struction of a new paradigm appropriate for the level of complexity to address. In this sense, Pareto, in his Trattato, brought about a new scientific revolution in economics after that of the end of 1890s.13 Hence, we can say that the genesis of the Trattato arises
13 In around 1899–1900, Pareto discussed the conditions for economics to be a science and traced the
methodological outlines of a new economic theory (see Marchionatti and Gambino, 1997).
from an economics problem, that is, the failure of the programme of economic theory founded on the hypothesis of homo oeconomicus and on the associated method of in-quiry, that is, successive approximations. As he writes:
I saw that … I had done wrong in excessively restricting the study … within the specific limits of political economy … It is not sufficient to recognize the mistakes of a work: it is necessary to correct them … Driven by the desire to introduce an essential complement to the studies of political economy … I was induced to write my Trattato di sociologia (Pareto, 1975 [1917], p. 68)
4. Economics and sociology in Pareto, III
4.1 The Trattato di Sociologia, a programme of reconstruction of economics
In the fundamental §2022 of the Trattato, Pareto explicitly recognises again the limits of economic science and explains the reasons why, to establish the science of society, it is necessary to create a new sociology, of which economic science would be only a part characterised by a lower level of social complexity. Pareto writes:
Several economists now realize that their science yields results more or less divergent from the real social phenomenon and they have become aware of the need to improve it. However, they are wrong about the path to follow in order to achieve that aim. They persist obstinately in wanting to obtain solely from their science what is needed to get close to the real phenomenon, when, in fact, it is necessary to resort to other sciences, and to reason specifically, not marginally, about an economic issue … It is necessary to think about the interweaving of the outcomes of economics with the other social sciences … To neglect the reciprocal dependency of social phenomena … is one of the main obstacles to the experimental progress of social sciences. (§2022, our italics)
The aim of the Trattato is indeed to provide the definitive basis of a general theory of human action. Pareto’s starting point is to recognise that individuals do not act in a wholly rational way. He, therefore, tackles the problem of how to analyse such behaviour. The method of inquiry is still the method adopted at the beginning of his theoretical reflection and which, in his work on reconstructing economic theory, radic-ally differed from Walras’s14: the logical–experimental method (i.e. the classic method of science), where with ‘experimental’ Pareto meant the description of facts (see
Marchionatti and Gambino, 1997; Marchionatti, 1999; Bridel and Mornati, 2009).15
He restates in the Trattato:
We start from the facts to build theories, and we always make sure to move away from facts as little as possible. We do not know what the essence of things is, and we do not care about it, be-cause such inquiry falls outside our field. We search for the patterns exhibited by the facts, and we call these patterns ‘laws’ … Laws are hypotheses which serve to summarize a more or less large number of facts, and they are valid only until they are replaced by other, better hypotheses. (§69)
14 Pareto relationship with Walras is complex. On the one hand, he regarded the concept of general
equi-librium as Walras’s greatest legacy, and he always recognized his debt to Walras. On the other hand, from the methodological standpoint, he moved away from Walras. From the middle of 1890s, the difference between the two economists became clear with Pareto’s critique of Walras’s Etudes d’économie sociale, where Walras applied economic theory to real problems, which seemed to Pareto vitiated by metaphysics.
15 The meaning of ‘experimental’ applied to social sciences is largely discussed in the Trattato, and
con-tinued to be a subject Pareto devoted his attention to also in the following years. In particular, he returned to this issue in his final article written for the Giornale degli Economisti entitled ‘Economia sperimentale’. His importance lies above all, as McLure (2007, p. 85) writes, in ‘its differentiation between the economic and sociological parts of economic phenomena’ (for a discussion, see chapter 5 of McLure, 2007).
From this ensues a fundamental implication in support of the unavoidably historical character of the inquiry:
Every inquiry is temporary, relative and yields results which are more or less probable … Every proposition that we state … must be understood as expressed with the following caveat: within the limits of time and experience known to us. (§69)
The logical–experimental method is a combination of the rational (or deductive) and empirical (or quantitative–descriptive) approaches; it is substantially a re-denomination of the method called ‘concrete-deductive’ by John Stuart Mill in his System of Logic.16 It consists of an initial induction, from the phenomena ob-served, of common characteristics. These give rise to theoretical deductions, which are then compared with the real facts to verify their accordance. This comparison makes it possible to generate new inductions which necessitate modification of the theoretical schema, and so on. Hence, theories are ‘confutable’: the best scien-tific criterion, Pareto writes following Mill, is that of ‘freely criticizing’ the theories (§657). On this matter, in a letter to Pantaleoni (Letter to Maffeo Pantaleoni, 22 May 1921, in Pareto, 1984, III, p. 283), Pareto writes:
My Trattato di sociologia is a very imperfect attempt to introduce in the social sciences that rela-tivity which, in a much more perfect way, has been introduced in the physical sciences. The gradual trend is from the metaphysical absolute towards experimental relativity.
An important difference in the application of the experimental method in the Trattato compared to Pareto’s earlier economic works consists in the fact that here the inductive analysis component is strengthened. Pareto repeatedly emphasises that the drivers of research must be ‘experience and observation’ (§6): both of them are essential to address issues more complex than those analysed in a purely economic inquiry. In fact, Pareto notes that ‘individuals put together’ do not repre-sent ‘a simple sum’. On the contrary, ‘they form a compound which, like chemical compounds, may have properties which are not the sum of the properties of its components’ (§66).
Pareto’s empirical research uses history, statistics and observation. It intervenes at the beginning as well as the end of the process of scientific inquiry. At the beginning, it has the task of finding empirical uniformities able to define hypotheses on the basis of which to build a theoretical model. These hypotheses, Pareto emphasises, must be ‘realistic’ and must be persuasive. In fact, from the very beginning, in his Considerazioni (Pareto, 1892, p. 409, 411), Pareto had maintained that the hypothesis of homo oeconomicus ‘perfectly fore-sighted and perfectly rational’ was a simplistic hypothesis to be accepted only with great care.17 Pareto constantly expressed a methodological position favourable to the realism of theoretical hypotheses and opposed to unjustified abstractions: this position is a cor-ollary of his experimental method, and it implies the explicit rejection of non-verifiable hypotheses because they have to be considered unscientific according to the experimental method. Empirical analysis then plays a crucial role in the research process: that of com-paring logical deductions with the observable facts. Simple observation, statistics and his-tory are the three different ways to verify theories according to Pareto. Statistics have a
16 On the relationship between Pareto and Mill on method, see Marchionatti and Gambino (1997). 17 In fact, it seems that here Pareto reiterates Edgeworth’s criticism of Walras on the excess of abstraction
in the Walrasian pure political economy (see Marchionatti, 2004).
fundamental role,18 but, moving towards the Trattato di Sociologia, Pareto assigns an in-creasingly important role to history. As he wrote already in the Manuale (1906): ‘History is useful because … it compensates for the experiments which are not possible to perform; hence the historical method is good’ (§35).
After outlining the ‘methodological preliminaries … now we will study human ac-tions’, thus Chapter II of the Trattato begins. Pareto writes:
We are following the inductive method. We have no preconceptions, no a priori notions. We find certain facts before us. We describe them, classify them … and see if we can identify some uniformity (law) in the relationships among them … We begin to interest ourselves in human actions. (§145)
On examining ‘the real and complex phenomena’ (§842), Pareto resumes the already-defined concepts of logical actions and non-logical actions. Many economists, Pareto writes, saw—or at least glimpsed—also non-logical actions in their analyses, but they did not make a theory of them, preferring to assume the theoretical centrality of logical actions. An obvious reason for this attitude was, Pareto suggests, that it is easier to de-velop a theory of logical actions:
We all have in our minds the means to produce logical inferences, and nothing else is needed. Instead, in order to develop a theory of non-logical conduct, we have to consider hosts of facts, even extending the scope of our research in space and time … In short, for those who want to frame such a theory, it is a long and difficult task to find outside themselves materials that their mind supplied directly with the aid of mere logic when they were dealing with logical conduct. (§262)
This can explain the development and relative great importance assumed by economics among the social sciences. However, its heuristic inadequacy makes it necessary, ac-cording to Pareto, to move the economic conception of human behaviour forward, to investigate non-logical behaviour, and ‘make a theory’ of it. Pareto writes: ‘Many human actions … are performed instinctively, mechanically, as a consequence of habit’ (§157). In fact ‘non-logical actions originate chiefly in particular mental states, senti-ments, subconscious feelings, and the like’ (§161): this fact is the logical starting point of the inquiry. Non-logical behaviour is equivalent to the a-logical instinct in animals, which, together with the reason, still exists in mankind, Pareto maintains.19
Pareto writes that individuals seek to give a ‘logical appearance’ to their actions: that is, they tend to transform non-logical actions into logical actions by expressing them
18 Statistics play a fundamental role in Pareto’s reflections—‘the progress of political economy will depend
in large part on the search for empirical laws, drawn from statistics, to be compared with the known theoretical laws, or able to give rise to new theoretical laws’ (Pareto, 1907, p. 366). Among the few marginalist economists sensitive to the use of statistics—Schumpeter lists Pareto together with Cournot, Jevons, Marshall, Edgeworth and of course Fisher (1954, pp. 961–62)—Pareto gave contributions in the field important from the technical point of view (Chipman, 1976) whose importance was recognized by the economic statisticians of his time, for example by the American Henry L. Moore, who attributed to him a role of pioneer in the foundation of eco-nomic statistics (Moore, 1908). In turn, Pareto stresses, in a letter to Moore of November 1908, that he sub-stantially agrees with Moore about the necessity of ‘completing the theories through the observation of facts and the search for their empirical’ and adds ‘This is the only way to obtain scientific progress’. Particularly important is the observation made by Chipman (1976) that, in his methodological contributions, Pareto anticipates the subsequent developments of econometric methodology, ‘which stress errors of aggregation and specification’ (p. 157), more than the first ‘practitioners of Econometrics’ and their acritical faith in quantitative techniques (Morgan, 1999). On Pareto and his influence on the econometric movement through the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s, see (Marchionatti, 2009) and (Marchionatti and Mornati, 2016).
19 Busino (1967, p. 65) writes that, in his elaboration of the logical/non-logical taxonomy, Pareto was
inspired by the classification of the French entomologist Jean-Henry Fabre (an ‘inimitable observer’, as Charles Darwin (1859) called him) and by the works of the French zoologist Edmond Perrier.
through moral, religious or other theories. This process of rationalisation can be con-sidered as composed of two components: a constant component (a non-logical core which is the expression of human emotions attributing a symbolic value to the facts), and a variable component (the interpretations given by individuals to justify their actions). In fact, Pareto writes, those who carry out non-logical actions consider them from the lo-gical point of view. Pareto emphasises the historical significance of these interpretations: Our inquiry clearly shows the presence of the following characteristics …: 1) there is a non-logical core comprising certain acts, certain words, that have specified effects, such as a hurricane or the destruction of a crop; 2) from this core a number of branches of logical interpretations radiate … 3) logical interpretations assume the forms that are most generally prevalent in the ages in which they are evolved. They are comparable to the styles of clothes worn by people in the cor-responding period … (§217)
The constant component is called ‘residue’ and the variable component ‘derivation’. Therefore, according to Pareto, at the origin of human action, there are primary im-pulses and their expression, that is, the residues. They are behaviours which are the re-sult of the joint action of genetic and cultural factors, which Pareto divides into classes and types. The derivations, that is, the false rationalisations of non-logical actions, give a logical appearance to passions and sentiments. They are what have been called ‘ideologies’ (Busino, 1967, p. 69). Residues and derivations mediate the relationship between primary impulses and actions. This set of forces shapes the society. The repre-sentation of this set is Pareto’s aim in the Trattato di sociologia.
If we examine this representation from the point of view of the economist seeking to overcome the limits of economic science—which constitutes the background of Pareto’s mature sociological reflection—the main interest lies in isolating those elements which refer to a line of theoretical revision in Pareto’s work, until now scarcely noted by scholars, which leads to a draft of theory of ‘non-neoclassical rationality’, that is an (economic) theory able to deal, from the outset we could say, with a typology of actions more complex that those of homo oeconomicus, giving up on the simplistic, or, in Edgeworth’s words, too abstract hypotheses of pure economics. From this point of view, together with acknow-ledgement of the role of passions and emotions in determining human behaviour, the fundamental theoretical feature of Pareto’s analysis is its recognition that
human beings as a rule determine their conduct with reference to certain general rules (morality, custom, law), which give rise to greater or lesser numbers of [non logical] actions. (§160) In other words, Pareto maintains that human action is founded on rules and conventions (historically determined), concepts at the centre of contemporary post-neoclassical micro-economics, not to mention Keynes’ and Hayek’s theoretical approaches as precursors. Rules and conventions can be interpreted as the outcomes of the attempt to simplify behaviour in a complex environment only imperfectly known and knowable. As aimed at saving know-ledge resources in a complex environment, they can be considered as an attempt of rational behaviour (although imperfect—‘satisficing behavior’ as Herbert Simon called it).20,21
20 Referring to the studies on insects by Jean-Henry Fabre, Pareto notes that (§157) these rules of
be-haviour are followed by the majority for a certain period of time, even if they become counter-productive, but then are given up when ‘revolutionaries’ emerge. The ideas that the majority is conservative and that a mechanism of selection of rules, conservative and progressive, runs, are part of contemporary economic theory (see Kuran, 1988).
21 Jones (2003) maintains that Simon’s principle of intended rationality springs from Pareto and terms it
‘the Pareto-Simon principle’.
5. A behaviourist ante litteram revolution: concluding remarks
Our paper is part of the contemporary debate on Pareto characterised by the aban-donment of the traditional division between Pareto the economist and Pareto the soci-ologist. It has tried to show that the relationship between economics and sociology is a main issue in the whole Pareto’s scientific thought, and it interprets the Trattato di sociologia as a programme of reconstruction/transformation of economics able, beyond the limits of rational choice, to explain the complexity of human action.
Pareto’s interest in sociology, or better in the relationship between economics and sociology, traverses the various phases of his thought until the Trattato. The programme to reconstruct economics joins and overlaps with the more general programme to con-struct a science of society.
Pareto’s programme developed in three phases distinguished by increasing aware-ness of the complexity of the economic issue. It reached a crucial juncture in around 1907, when Pareto made the main problem of his inquiry explicit: to deal theoretically with real and complex phenomena which cannot be addressed simply with the succes-sive approximations method and starting from homo oeconomicus economics.
The Trattato, in its long and laborious search for a general theory of society, describes and analyses a world crowded with instincts, sentiments and emotions, and appears as ‘a “mon-strous” work’ (Bobbio, 1964, p. 21). However, the Trattato is also a great research lab— ‘Pareto’s works in progress in social sciences’, Busino (2010) calls Pareto’s sociology—where some crucial questions of contemporary economics are raised: in particular, the concept of rationality. In fact, to be found in the Trattato are many elements relating Pareto’s work to those subsequent theoretical developments which, rejecting both the extreme abstrac-tions and the imperialist attitude of neoclassical economics, developed a microeconomics based on the non-neoclassical hypothesis of rationality—or bounded rationality as Herbert Simon called it, or ecological, according to Gert Gigerenzer’s expression, to cite but two eminent contemporaneous theoricians of rationality—giving rise to a discipline which, in its reshaping of the fundamental categories of economics, draws on other social sciences. In Section 1, we suggested that the Pareto of the Trattato may be interpreted as a behaviourist economist. By this, we essentially mean that a fundamental point of accord between Pareto and modern behavioural economics lies in the questioning of the rational actor model.22 Another connection can be made between Pareto and contemporary behaviourist research. Taking into account the precarious epistemological status of human behavioural sciences— what has been called by Gintis (2007) the ‘scandal’ of a human behavioural science made of partial, conflicting and incompatible models of behaviour—Pareto’s contribution may be helpful for avoiding this scandal and contributing the process of (re-) unification of the human behavioural sciences, an issue of increasing importance in the recent literature.23
22 A crucial difference between Pareto’s approach and most of contemporary behavioural economics has
to be stressed: behavioural economics focuses on laboratory experiments and systematic variations from the rational actor model in terms of micro-foundations, whereas Pareto’s search involved the construction of a new general theoretical framework.
23 In some papers and books written in the last two decades (e.g. Gintis 2004, 2007, 2009, and also Gintis and Helbing 2015 on the relation between economics and sociology), the American economist and behavioural scientist Herbert Gintis investigated the conditions for constructing a unifying framework for behavioural sciences. In Gintis’s perspective, the task of leading the reform is assigned to biology: Edward Wilson’s sociobiology (in particular, Wilson, 1998) is a crucial influence on his proposal. This evolutionary perspective is combined with game theory (which Gintis defines ‘the universal lexicon of life’). Gintis’s multidisciplinary research has raised a living debate between non-orthodox economists, in the context of the broad discussion on the transformation of economics through collaboration with other disciplines (on this subject, see Colander, 2014; Davis, 2008; Hodgson, 2007, 2015; and Marchionatti and Cedrini, 2017).
After a hundred years, Pareto’s reflections in the Trattato seem to be still lively, exciting and relevant: powerful criticism of the limits of neoclassical microeconomics predominant among the economists, Pareto’s thought is an invitation to follow the practice of interdisciplinarity, in order to build a relevant theory of society.
Conflict of interest statement. None declared.
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