[In the following essay, Lerner offers a highly critical view of P areto 's sociological thought.]

Take a Machiavelli, with his amazing sense of the springs of human conduct and his cynicism about ethics; soak him in the modern worship of scientific method; hard-boil him in a hatred for democracy in all its manifestations; fill him with an intense animus against proletarian movements and Marxian theory; add a few dashes of economic fundamentalism; stir it all with a poetic feeling about the ruling élite; sprinkle thoroughly with out-ofthe-way erudition; season with a good deal of acuteness and homely wisdom; and serve at interminable length. If you follow this recipe you should have something that resembles Pareto's treatise on The Mind and Society.

I do not want to underestimate the personal achievement that these four volumes represent. Here is prodigality—of ideas, of learning, of spleen. Here is a far-flung exploration of history and human foibles, in two thousand pages with an enormous footnotage. Here are a million words, and many of them not at all foolish, poured into the huge mold of an argument. Pareto was an old man, well on toward seventy, when he wrote mis work. He could look back on a career in which he had been successively mathematician, engineer, political journalist, professor of eco nomics at Lausanne. Now, almost alone on his large Swiss estate, suffering from heart disease and insomnia, surrounded by his cats whom he adored and relatively unmolested by the pallid democratic beings whom he despised, he gathered his strength for his greatest effort. It would chart human history and social behavior, as cold and unswerving in its course as the calculations of the movements of the heavenly bodies.

Although he failed (as anyone would fail in such an effort) his failure has a ring of greatness in it. But over this greatness there hangs the pall of death. Written on the eve of the World War, in the midst of class tensions such as the great strikes in France and the Red Week in Italy, mis book bears on it marks of the death agony of a culture.

Pareto seeks to apply the logico-experimental method of celestial mechanics to the very uncelestial events of this planet. Nothing will be held valid except what can, if necessary, be reduced to graphs and algebraic symbols. As though by a compulsion neurosis he plasters almost every page with manifestoes of this intent. His search for purity of method takes on the aspect of a religious quest. The reader stands uncomfortably in the presence of someone who is being washed of all bias in the blood of the scientific lamb.

Let it be said unmistakably that such a logico-experimental man as Pareto sets himself up for, squeezed dry of all emotion and values, never existed except possibly on Swift's island of Laputa, where the inhabitants cut their clothes by trigonometry. Everything valid in Pareto's method can be summed up in the injunction that applies in every field to think as rigorously, honestly, realistically as possible. The rest is mumbo-jumbo. When a social scientist seeks to wrap himself in a divine objectivity you can make a shrewd guess that he is either naïve and is looking for a false sense of security, or that he has his tongue in his cheek and is trying to hide something, or else that he is more or less willfully obscuring the basic issues of social policy involved.

Pareto's central theory, that of residues and derivations, is in reality a brilliant intuition. Stated baldly it holds that human behavior is irrational (non-logical); that it is based on certain deep-lying drives (residues) in human nature; and that theories, theologies, programs, faiths are so many variable expressions (derivations) of these underlying drives. But before he is through with his theory Pareto has analyzed, classified, and subclassified these residues and derivations until he has made the whole thing cumbersome, arbitrary, and just a bit absurd. He groups the residues into six general classes; of these I take it that the "instinct of combinations" covers the drive toward inventiveness and intelligence, and that "group persistences" are what American social thought has termed, with a varying emphasis, traditions, folk-ways, institutions. The derivations are grouped into four classes. Each of the classes is minutely subdivided. The entire structure is a triumph of ingenuity and shows a taxonomic talent of the first order. But when you try to use it bewilderment turns into chagrin and finally into despair.

I do not mean that the game lacks its attractiveness. Take any item of behavior on the part of your pet aversion in politics, and place its various elements in Pareto's tables of residues and derivations. It can become a fine art of annihilation. It is the Benthamite calculus of today. A Pareto scholar should not lack for mental stimulus the rest of his life, and there will be so many amateur Paretians among American intellectuals that I make bold to prophesy a seven-year plague of residues and derivations. But as a working instrument of analysis Pareto's scheme has some essential defects. He has not decided in what sense his residues are basic and in what sense his derivations are derivative. At times he seems to regard the residues as instincts, at other times as deep-lying "hungers" or human tendencies of an ever-vaguer character; often (as in the case of many of the group persistences) they are only socially conditioned folkways or traditions. The derivations are sometimes the logical coating that we apply to our own non-logical actions in order to save face, and sometimes the tricks and stereo-types by which we manipulate the actions of others. The whole scheme suffers from being a classification on a single plane rather than an analysis on various planes, and leaves in darkness the basic problem of sociology—the relation of invariant traits to the variable conditionings of cultures and institutions.

Pareto's emphasis on the irrational mind will, however, have an abiding influence. He is, in a sense, the Bentham of the irrational. In fact, he is strikingly like Bentham in many of his mental traits—his narrowness, his formalism of reasoning, his crotchets and obsessions, his Linnaean bent of mind, his barbarous terminology. Somewhere during his life he picked up a corrosive realism which eats through surfaces to reveal non-logical traits in man that are unlovely to those who believe in Homo rationalis. But the theory of residues is one of the few glimpses of this sort into the depths of life that the reader gets from Pareto. He is otherwise dismally bare of the sudden insights that one finds in Swift or Nietzsche. What Pareto gives best is not a rigorously valid analysis of the irrational, or an artistic probing of it, but a fascinating travelogue through its darkest àfricas. He roams through history and ethnology, a rather ponderous Frazer, finding instances of how men have used magic and it has passed for reason.

Clearly Pareto must be seen as part of the revolt against reason, swelling the anti-intellectualist currents of the past half-century. He must therefore be related to Nietzsche, Bergson, Sorel, Freud, Lawrence, and Spengler. What partly obscures this connection with them is that while they celebrate man's irrationality, he is content to lay it bare; and while they throw scientism over-board, he holds onto it, and in fact celebrates it. In this respect Pareto, despite his merciless attacks on Comte, Buckle, and Mill, represents a carry-over from the positivist thought of what John Strachey has called "the century of the great hope."

But this attempt to reconcile a current of intellectualism with a current of anti-intellectualism pervades the whole school of social psychology. Pareto's book was contemporary with Graham Wallas's Great Society, Trotter's once-famous herd books, Le Bon's crowd books, and McDougall's instinct books, as well as a host of lesser siblings. It shares their loose and ramshackle instinct psychology, and it shares also their sense of how blind or stupid or animal-like the masses of men are when they vote or fight or unite to revolt. The Pareto vogue, on account of the peculiar translation lag, comes fifteen years after the social-psychology vogue. But the generation that feels itself on the brink of revolutions should accept the emphasis on the irrational as eagerly as the generation that felt itself on the brink of a catastrophic war.

Unlike his theory of how we think, Pareto's social theory is like an iceberg: much the greater and more sinister portion of it lies beneath the surface. It is most clearly intelligible if it is referred back to the outlines of Marxian thought, for its underlying intention is to build a counter-system to Marxism. Marxian social economics and its theory of surplus (exploited) value are matched (as developed in Pareto's earlier books) by a "pure" economics with its famous Paretian law of the distribution of income, in which income distribution is shown to follow the same curve as the distribution of ability traits. The Marxian doctrine of the class struggle is matched by the Paretian theory (borrowed from Mosca) of the circulation of the élite. Marxian economic determinism as a theory of social causation is confronted by a theory of society as a web of interdependent and mutual relations. The Paretian theory of revolution ignores the Marxian emphasis on the movement of economic forces which prepare the ground, and concentrates on the resistance that the élite can offer through their morale, and on the weakening of proletarian leadership by class circulation. Finally the Marxian dialectic of history is matched by a semi-Spenglerian theory of rhythmical undulations in history, in which the moving forces are not the changes in the materialist basis of society but the waxing and waning of group persistences.

The central thread that runs through this network of theory is the notion of a militant élite. In the theory of class circulation the men of strength and intelligence come to the top; but there is a continuing process of decadence among them, a sloughing off of the old rot and a drawing upon new vigor. Their susceptibility to the residue of combinations weakens the élite, while the masses are retaining their stamina because of their susceptibility to the group-persistence residue. Thus the matter of relative stamina in the ruling and the underlying class at any time furnishes the rationale of revolutionary success or failure. It is the militant and cohesive élite that can become the decisive force in history. Pareto seems to have been influenced, through his friend Sorel, not only by the Bergsonian élan vital (in the form of class stamina) but also by Sorel's theory of violence. To Sorel violence had a transcendent and cleansing virtue, and helped to keep the body politic sturdy. Pareto's ultimate exhortation to the élite is to keep its spinal column straight and its fighting instincts in trim—and the ruling classes in Italy and Germany have illustrated his thesis.

This confronts us with the much debated question of Pareto's relation to fascism. In any sense of direct participation or influence, Pareto's fascism has been negligible. Mussolini's insistence that his mind was shaped as a student under Pareto at Lausanne, and his offer (unrejected) of senatorial honors to Pareto after his march on Rome, are inconclusive. They prove less about Pareto than they do about Mussolini's desperate efforts to rig up a respectable intellectual lineage for his own fascism.

What is much more to the point is that Pareto's theory and his preconceptions follow the approved pattern of fascist thought as we have come to recognize it. At the core of Pareto's attitude is a hatred of socialism and a contempt for democracy. He uses the epithet "socialist" vaguely, as many Americans do today with "communist," to describe anything from unemployment insurance to feminism and the new criminology; but he never utters it without a hiss. In his earlier book, Les Systèmes Socialistes, he was chiefly concerned to show socialist doctrine to be fallacious, crotchety, millennial; but in this book, more than a decade later, it is hard to find even a vestigial scholarly urbanity in discussing it. He seems to regard socialism as the final term in democratic degradation, since it has not only given a new messianism to labor movements but has even corrupted the élite.

But it is democracy that is the principal target. Pareto regards it, with humanitarianism, as the central deity of the new Pantheon that includes all the "modern Gods"—Progress, Tolerance, Democracy, Humanitarianism, Universal Suffrage, Solidarisai, Pacifism, Tolstoyism. Against these reigning divinities he hurls his Promethean defiance. He reveals the plutocratic character of modern democracy, in which cowardice skulks behind money to buy votes and bribe legislators. His rather unalgebraic symbolism to convey the temper of plutocratic democracy rests on the distinction between the Lions and the Foxes. The Foxes are the men of craft who replace the Lions, the men of force, in governmental posts in an attempt to buy off mass unrest instead of suppressing it. Being himself (to use William James's phrase) tough-minded, Pareto has an admiration not only for tough-minded thinkers such as Aristophanes, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Sorel, but also for ruthless leonine men such as Bismarck. The Foxes are eating away at the morale of the élite. They form an unholy alliance with plutocrats and trade-union leaders in order to keep peace and divide the spoils, and their method of keeping peace is direct bribery and social reform.

This raises the question of the exact nature of Pareto's class attitudes. An obituary notice called him "the bourgeois Karl Marx," and several American critics have taken up the expression and dubbed him the Marx of the middle class. In our American sense of middle class this would of course be wide of the mark. Pareto despised the indecisiveness of the middle class, its humanitarianism, its vulnerability to all the new modern cults and mass religions, its swarming democracy. If to be a fascist theorist is to be a theorist of middle-class revolt against the capitalists, as is sometimes asserted, Pareto does not fit the formula. Nor can he be called the theorist of the capitalist bourgeoisie, using the term in its stricter Marxian sense. Pareto draws a distinction in his thinking between the Speculators (whom he calls the S' s) and the investors or Rentiers (the R' s). In its European context this is a distinction between the predatory restlessness of the new plutocratic bourgeoisie, and the sturdy group persistences of the more conservative industrialists and the large landowners. I take it also that this is not very far from Feder's distinction in the early Hitlerite ideology between the interest slavery imposed by unproductive (Jewish) capital and the social beneficence of productive (Junker and Thyssen) capital.

Thus, the essence of Pareto's position is that of a capitalist-aristocrat who despises democratic equalitarianism and who seeks within capitalist society the more exclu sive and traditional forces that will renew its vigor and steel its resistance to the proletarian thrusts. Pareto was writing in a Europe that was already on the brink of the precipice. These volumes give evidence that he was quite realistically aware of the meaning of the deepening crisis, with its heightened nationalist feeling, its conflicting imperialisms, its huge scandals of political corruption, its class tensions. That meaning lay not in the road to war but in the road to fascism. Quite strikingly the pattern of Pareto's thought reveals that fascism was not merely a post-war growth but was already integral in the European situation in 1914. If Pareto was not a fascist theorist, then fascism may be said to have cast its shadow before in the shape of Pareto's treatise.

All this leads quite obviously to the conclusion that Pareto has not so much written a scientific work as a very able and vigorous polemic in defense of the traditional forces within capitalist society. And in doing so he has given us, as Plato did, a picture of his republic. Every social theorist gives his vision of the world, whether he presents it as scientific reality or Utopian dream. Even when he seeks to thrust his own values into the back-ground, they operate just as effectively as preconceptions. Pareto's values burst the mold of his elaborate scientific categories with an emotional force all the greater for his attempt at suppression. Every scientist is at bottom a poet, and any analysis of a society implies, on the writer's part, an ideal society. Dig deep into any social theory and you will strike a poetic myth.

What was Pareto's republic like? It must be remembered that Pareto's own origins were those of a capitalist-aristocrat. He was descended from a family of Genoese merchant princes whom Bonaparte elevated to the nobility and who afterward fought in the cause of Italian na tionalist liberties. He learned to hate, with an inverted Mazzinian intensity, the compromises of Italian and French democracy. His book seeks to evoke a polity in which the older aristocracy will come back to strengthen a decadent capitalist élite, and together the landed aristocracy, the rentier class, the army, and the most militant of the industrialists will carve out their world. They will sweep plutocratic democracy aside, suppress the proletarian rabble, and replace the false humanitarianism of the middle class by derivations from real group persistences.

It will be a republic ruled by fierce young conquering gods, continually renewed by fresh blood. And the ruling gods will not hesitate to use force, both as a way of holding the masses in their place and as a way of maintaining their fighting instincts. The trade unions will no longer be allowed to keep labor in feudal darkness. The masses will be so much material to be shaped in the image of the desires of the ruling gods: they will be valuable for harboring the group traditions and for their hatred of novelty, but the only art they need to know is the art of being ruled. As for the rest of the population, a Catonian severity will prevail toward anything humanitarian (even Christianity) that may weaken their primitive stamina. Criminals, pacifists, and socialists will be hunted down like disease-bearing rats. In war and in foreign affairs it will be the courage of the Lions that will be the glory of the republic.

But enough. It must be clear by now that if the real test of the validity of a republic is its capacity to get itself enacted, Pareto has the advantage. "That illustrious Greek dreamer," as he calls Plato, had to be content with his book. But Pareto's republic is now a reality: it is Hitler's totalitarian state.