The Four Paretos of Raymond Aron
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4885181 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stuart L Campbell (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1986 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 287 |
| Publication date | 1986-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2709815 |
| OpenAlex | W2330563229 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
This article originated in a November 1982 conversation with Raymond Aron (1905-83). Our discussion, largely concerned with Aron's political convictions during the interwar period, eventually focused upon the differences separating his prewar and postwar appraisals of Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). Although he acknowledged that a reorientation in political understanding partially accounted for his change of heart toward Pareto, Aron refused to allow the matter to rest on that note. To settle the question to his satisfaction, he closed our conversation by observing that, There are, after all, four Paretos, and I have written on each one of them. My purpose here is to survey Aron's several assessments of Pareto over nearly half a century, to show how those assessments reflect certain features of Aron's political thinking during that period and, finally, to indicate how Aron came to conclude that there were in fact four Paretos. Aron first analyzed the ideas of Pareto in 1936-37.2 He did so as a young and moderate leftist professor associated with Celestin Bougle's Centre de Documentation Social, where he devoted much of his effort to analyzing the nature and sources of German and Italian fascism. This investigation led Aron to the study of Pareto, whom he soon described as a contributor to and a participant in the fascist wave threatening to engulf Europe in a new series of wars. For the prewar Aron, fascism represented a virulent attempt to avoid a leftist revolution, and he portrayed Pareto as a fascist thinker whose sociology represented little more than a Marxian deviation turned to conservative purposes. The theory of ever-circulating elites exploiting society and the logico-experimental concept of residues, both of which emphasized the constancy of human behavior, served an obvious strategy. Pareto's sociology was a study in psychological uniformity that denied the relevance of history by gainsaying the possibility of progressive change. Struggle admittedly remained preeminent in human affairs, but unlike Marx, Pareto allowed no escape from a conflict whose source he
Aesthetics · Conversation · Economics · German · Left-wing politics · Linguistics · Pareto principle · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Sociology · Statistics · European Political History Analysis · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,36 |
| Citation span | 2015 - 2023 (9) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |