Pareto's Irrationalism

Abstract

This paper argues that the notoriously disordered and contradictory nature of Pareto's last and greatest work, the Trattato, is largely attributable to the place he was cast in the development of European social thought. Pareto set out to construct a rationalist-positivist model in the tradition of Bentham and Comte. But his acquaintanceship with a rising intellectual tradition, generally associated with the name of Nietzsche, confronted him with psychological and individualist themes which both revealed how little human action is governed by reason, and put in question the hypothetico-deductive model of Western science and its belief in objective truth. Pareto's resulting intellectual uprootedness translated itself into his last work. This work gained the virtue of presenting an original perspective on social behaviour, but suffered at the same time from not finding a methodology appropriate to its new interests. This paper also aims to show the centrality of Nietzsche's influence on Pareto, an influence almost completely neglected in the secondary literature.