THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY 



which followed the victory of the Italian national cause in 1866, but 

 instead of being temporarily alienated from the ideals of his father's 

 generation, he retained to the end a positive hatred for them. He is 

 continually attacking humanitarianism, the "god of progress," etc. 

 Trained as an engineer, he occupied a high post in the Italian railways, 

 and was for a long time active in the effort to induce the government 

 of the day to adopt the principle of free trade, which he believed to 

 be an essential condition of economic prosperity. This led to a conflict 

 with the governm^ent so severe that he had to go into retirement. 

 Before long, however, he was invited to occupy the chair of econo- 

 mics at the University of Lausanne, and from 1894 to 1923 he lived at 

 Celigny "shutting out the troubles of the world, cultivating and 

 storing the finest wines and fruits, and enjoying the material and 

 spiritual pleasures of life." It is striking that one who has been called 

 the chief theoretician of Italian Fascism should have been an aristocrat 

 by birth, the son of a revolutionary father by upbringing, a dis- 

 appointed politician in middle life, and a sybaritic Professor in old age. 

 How did Pareto go to work ^ L. J. Henderson (himself one of the 

 greatest living biologists) shows^ that he tried to apply to the social 

 sciences, where the variable factors are the natures and interactions of 

 human beings, the concepts of equilibrium which have been found so 

 essential in the physical and biological sciences. First of all, however, 

 Pareto's treatise is not "normative"; that is to say, he is concerned 

 with "what men do, and not with what they ought to do." He is 

 interested in the concept of the social system. His social system 

 contains individuals roughly analogous with the "components" of 

 the thermodynamic physico-chemical systems of Willard Gibbs. It is 

 heterogeneous, i.e. in physico-chemical terms, it contains various 

 "phases," for the individuals are of different families, trades, and 

 professions, associated with different institutions and members of 

 different economic and social classes. And as Gibbs considers tempera- 

 ture, pressure, and concentrations, so Pareto considers "sentiments'* 

 or^ strictly speaking, the manifestations of sentiments in words and 

 deeds; "verbal elaborations," and economic interests. The analogy 

 with the Gibbs system drawn by Henderson is illuminating, but 

 neither he nor other commentators, such as Borkenau,^ seem to have 

 sufficient acquaintance with the work of Marx and Engels. If they 



^ Pareto's General Sociology: A Physiologist's Interpretation by Lawrence J. Henderson 

 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1935). 



^ Pareto by Franz Borkenau (Chapman & Hall, London, 1936). 



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