Pareto Politcal Theory

iPareto and Political Theory

Although Pareto is considered a ‘founding father’ of both sociology and mathematical economics, his contribution to political theory has been largely neglected. This new book fills this gap by offering a critical examination of Pareto’s significance for political theory. Joseph V. Femia builds a case for Pareto’s importance as a thinker who reflected on the mostfundamental issues of political discourse: individualism vs. holism; science vs. hermeneutics; laissez-faire vs. social engineering; and value relativism vs. moral absolutism. In all these debates, Pareto offered provocative insights. Perhaps the most original of these was his identification of ‘residues’, or basic instincts and sentiments, as the chief motive force in political life and as the sourceof all our ideas and ideologies. Armed with this theory, Pareto dismissed the Enlightenment faith in human reason. Femia, in his critical but sympathetic analysis, refutes the familiar charge that Pareto was a form of proto-fascist and instead locates him in the Machiavellian tradition of ‘sceptical liberalism’, which scorns metaphysical abstraction and assigns ontological primacy to theindividual. The book concludes with a fascinating comparison between Pareto’s scepticism and that of recent postmodernist thought, which also debunks the ‘grand narratives’ of historical progress. This insightful text will be of great interest to students and scholars of Political Philosophy, Sociology and History. Joseph V. Femia is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Liverpool. He is theauthor of several books, including Machiavelli Revisited (2004) and Against the Masses: Varieties of Anti-Democratic Thought since the French Revolution (2001).

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
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