SOURCE: "Vilfredo Pareto," in Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present, Polity Press, 1987, pp. 12-33.

In the following essay, Bellamy takes issue with critics who perceive a significant ideological discontinuity between Pareto's earlier and later writings.

Pareto, when studied at all, is generally interpreted in two apparently mutually exclusive ways. Economists regard him as a classical liberal, who made important contributions to the theory of rational choice underlying the defence and analysis of market mechanisms. Sociologists and political theorists, by contrast, tend to dismiss his ideas as crude and illiberal—as attacking the role of reason and democracy in politics, and exalting the use of force by an elite to impose its will on the populace. The two images are said to correspond to different periods of his life. The first belongs to the early phase when, as an engineer and later a...