Italian Thinker

THE MIND AND SOCIETY -- Vilfredo Pareto--Harcourt, Brace (4 vols., $20).

When in 1921 Professor James Harvey Robinson wrote approvingly of the work of Vilfredo Pareto in his The Mind in the Making, few U. S. readers had heard the name of that eminent Italian sociologist or knew what sort of ideas he had advanced in his nine fat volumes. Widely recognized in Europe as a social scientist of great originality and erudition, as a vigorous commentator on world affairs in French and Italian newspapers, as professor of political economy at the University of Lausanne, Pareto's transatlantic reputation grew slowly after his death in 1923 and was almost entirely limited to academic circles. Last week Professor Arthur Livingston looked upon the publication of his translation of Pareto's four-volume masterwork as the realization of 15 years of "dreams and efforts," the fruit of 9,000 hours of personal toil, a triumph over international difficulties, and claimed the honor of having been the first to publish a U. S. note on Pareto as well as the first to complete a translation into English of his subtle and difficult writing.

Few may follow Translator Livingston's example and read The Mind and Society 20 times; few may find it, as he does "the most significant book I have ever read without any exception whatsoever." But most readers will agree that the translation of so long and intricate a work, packed with cross-references, diagrams, mathematical equations, footnotes in many languages, quotations from modern and classical writers, represents a superb scholarly accomplishment.

The difficulties in translating Pareto date from 1922, when Publishers Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace attempted to secure translation rights from Pareto's Italian publisher, dickered until 1926 before they discovered that the Italian publisher did not control translation rights, that the publisher of a French translation controlled only French rights, that Pareto's widow alone could give them the world rights in English. With an agreement for world rights sealed and signed, with Professor Livingston started on the translation, it was discovered that a tentative translation of most of the text had already been completed by .Professor Andrew Bongiorno of Oberlin College, working with Professor James Harvey Rogers, who only thought of translation rights when the work was almost finished. After more negotiations Professor Bongiorno's draft was turned over to Translator Livingston, and five years later a faithful translation of the text, of the footnotes that made up a third of the entire work of 2,033 pages, was completed. More than a year was required for reading proof, checking references, making the 100-page index.

Estimates of the permanent value of Pareto's contribution to human thought range from the extravagant claims of disciples who rank him with Newton and Aristotle to the deprecations of Socialists who consider him a borrower from Marx and Sorel and damn him as the philosopher of Italian Fascism, whose appearance he predicted. Although Mussolini was inspired by Pareto, and made him a Senator, Translator Livingston doubts that Pareto approved of Mussolini or Fascismo, feels that his remarks when Mussolini took power were the expressions of a prophet's "I told you so!'' satisfaction.

Pareto was born in Paris in 1848 of a long line of Italian republicans and conspirators, worked as a railway and mining engineer for 20 years before becoming an unsuccessful politician and a successful professor. He had built up a reputation as an economist, married unhappily, accumulated a tremendous fund of information on history, literature, the natural sciences, before he was offered the chair of political economy at Lausanne in 1894. The untrained U. S. reader who opens The Mind and Society finds himself in a thicket of abstract statements and scholarly quotations, quickly discovers that Pareto's first purpose is to establish a strict political realism, to make sociology a pure science, comparable to astronomy or mathematics. Says the Italian professor: "We are in no sense intending ... to exalt logic and experience to a greater power and majesty than dogmas accepted by sentiment. Our aim is to distinguish, not to compare, and much less to pass judgment on the relative merits and virtues of those two sorts of thinking."

With philosophers who assume that man is motivated by reason Pareto had little patience, devoted much of his work to analysis of non-logical conduct, proposed to consider unscientific or illogical beliefs held by large numbers of people as social facts, of equal validity with facts established by scientific experiments. With but a small fraction of man's activity carried on in the light of actual conditions, most of his behavior has been dictated by irrational impulses to which Pareto gave the name "residues." In many instances complexes of feeling, instincts, "residues" persist from one age to another, while the rationalizations that explain them change. Together with a theory of "the circulation of the elite"--the elite consisting of a small number of strong, determined men rising above the masses--and a theory of oscillating social cycles, Pareto introduced drama, action and will into his explanation of social change.

Originally taken down as stenographic notes at Pareto's lectures, The Mind and Society reveals its origin by its formlessness, by its expositions abandoned half-complete, its digressions that often interrupt its arguments. Occasionally it reveals a trained lecturer's wit, and frequent sardonic asides suggest the old professor addressing students who have not won his respect. No democrat, Pareto would not simplify his thought for the masses, felt that the secrets of history were harmful to most. In his will were rigid provisions that no popular exposition of his ideas should preface his books: "My sole interest is the quest for social uniformities, social laws. I am here reporting on the results of my quest, since I hold that . . . such a report can do no harm. I should refrain from doing so if I could reasonably imagine that these volumes w:ere to be at all generally read."

In such comments as in the long discussion of sex as a residue that fills a great part of Vol. II, irreverent readers may get more than a fleeting glimpse of a great thinker in his more human and homely role as a cranky old professor, may echo with amusement Translator Livingston's grave comment: "In his treatment of the sex residue Pareto is less objective than is his wont."

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