time: the refreshing river 



had studied this as carefully as that of Pareto, the suggestion could 

 hardly have been made that Pareto was the first to elaborate the concept 

 of the social system as an equilibrium mixture, alteration of which 

 at one point duly affects all the other points. 



But where the system of Pareto differs most profoundly from that 

 of Marx seems to be that Pareto's is an "idealistic" as opposed to a 

 materialist one. Pareto pays a great amount of attention to the first 

 two factors mentioned above; the sentiments and the verbal elabora- 

 tions, which he calls respectively Residues and Derivations. He is 

 therefore much more of a psychologist than Marx, for whom all 

 ideological "superstructure" is secondary, though in its turn reacting 

 back. Translated into psychological terms. Residues would be com- 

 plexes, and Derivations would be rationalisations, but the translation 

 would leave a good deal to be desired. Residues are well explained 

 by Henderson as follows: for ceremonial purification some peoples 

 have used blood, the ancients used water, and water is still used in 

 christian baptism to symbolise the effacement of sin. In these pheno- 

 mena there are manifested at least two sentiments, the sentiment of 

 integrity of the individual, and the sentiment that actions favourable 

 to this integrity can be perform^ed. These are Residues. They may be 

 thought of as the residuum left after all the variable features of the 

 phenomena have been dissected away. But the phenomena also include 

 explanations of these ritual processes. These are Derivations. An 

 extremely large part of Pareto's book is devoted to analysing and 

 classifying residues and derivations. He evidently regards them not 

 as secondary effects of changes in the productive economic relation- 

 ships of men, but as primary causative agents in human mass actions. 



The interest of this classification and analysis can hardly be dis- 

 puted. But most of its details are disputable, as Borkenau demonstrates, 

 and it is when we pass to other aspects of Pareto's work, such as his 

 theory of elites and his treatment of utility, that the extreme dis- 

 advantages of his purely idealist approach make themselves felt. His 

 theory of elites is completely vitiated by the improbable assumption 

 that the class-stratification of modern European capitalism corresponds 

 to some biological or genetic differences in the classes concerned. 

 Borkenau's chapters on this subject are especially damning. Pareto 

 assumes, moreover, as a basic point of his analysis, that class-domina- 

 tion must exist, since the special demands of a given society will lead 

 to special treatment for those who possess the special abilities it most 

 requires. This could not for a moment be accepted by those who 



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