Vilfredo Pareto is one of those long-forgotten theorists whose prolific writings have been steadfastly ignored for nearly a century by social scientists across every academic discipline and ideological outlook. Pareto is typically included among the post-1900 European “elite theorists” alongside Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and occasionally Max Weber. Their work pointed toward inherent centralizing and oligarchical tendencies at work in modern society beneath the outer appearances of liberal democracy, calling attention to what they understood as myths of popular sovereignty, electoral politics, and parliamentary debates. Whatever the formal structure of governance, they argued, a small minority was destined to govern. Exploring these and other issues, Joseph Femia has written a well-crafted, compact, and tightly-argued book suggesting that it is time to rediscover what is valuable in Pareto's dense body of work.

A rather cursory survey of significant literature reveals that indeed Pareto has had little if any influence in the leading texts of political theory—which at most contain infrequent passing references to him as one of the “elite theorists,” part of a tradition now assumed to be obsolete. One exhaustive social theory volume widely used in university courses, George Ritzer's Contemporary Social Theory (2005, revised), makes reference to hundreds of social and political theorists but ignores Pareto altogether. Probably the seminal work in later power-elite studies, C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite (1956) has nothing to say about Pareto—nor do subsequent influential texts such as G. William Domhoff's Who Rules America? (2002, revised). Thus, even in the very field of study where Pareto might be considered to have made enduring contributions, his work is neglected as if he never put pen to paper.

Femia addresses this seemingly puzzling “quarantine” of Pareto, hoping to find answers to the conundrum. One possibility is that Pareto's work—as in his vast and cumbersome Trattato di Sociologia Generale, or General Treatise on Sociology (1916)—was much too labyrinthine and turgid for even the most dedicated readers to effectively decipher. The work, moreover, is filled with endless digressions and detours. Another possibility is that, as an engineer by training, Pareto was so obsessed with bringing scientific methodology to the social sciences that his writings seem devoid of intellectual creativity and compelling prose. Yet another possibility—one favored by Femia—is Pareto's close association with fascism toward the end of his life, when Benito Mussolini, attracted to Pareto's uncompromising critique of liberal democracy, made him Senator of the Kingdom of Italy. Although Pareto died in 1923, before Mussolini's consolidation of dictatorial power, the theorist of power has ever since been identified as either a proto-fascist or an ideological “precursor” to Mussolini's rule. Yet a final possibility, which Femia briefly considers but quickly rejects, is that Pareto's work never really furnished enough theoretical substance or analytical power to merit a place among the leading European writers of the period. While Femia strives to make a convincing argument for Pareto's rediscovery (or, better, discovery), for this reviewer, the case turns out to be far from convincing.

Femia imbues Pareto's work with much greater coherence than the reader will find in the original work. His body of theory winds eventually toward a critique of liberal democracy—what Pareto, influenced by Machiavelli's emphasis on the role of power, force, and conflict in politics, calls “demagogic plutocracy.” The Treatise embellishes a frontal attack on the myths and pretensions of parliamentary democracy that anyone familiar with the Marxist tradition (or indeed with Mosca, Michels, and Weber) will quickly recognize. Beneath the façade of liberal structures and norms, the close observer cannot fail to detect the overwhelming power of a tiny minority of elites, a “gang of plutocrats,” whose position comes largely from the capacity to amass and deploy huge amounts of wealth, often tied to elaborate systems of patron-client relationships well known to have prevailed in Italy. Pareto views this minority as cohesive but not, as Marx theorized, rooted strictly in class or property relations; elite power cuts across class lines, even at times incorporating elements of the organized working class into the elite stratum, and stems from broader institutional complexes. Elite domination is perpetuated by ideological myths concerning self-rule, will of the people, the common good, and so forth—a phenomenon Weber would call “legitimacy” and Antonio Gramsci “hegemony,” although Femia strangely never explores these obvious parallels. In Pareto's view, elections are nothing more than a devious sham to conceal the real centers of power, as are parliamentary deliberations, insofar as elites always have the power to manipulate or overrule these processes. Pareto believed that class analysis was entirely too narrow and mechanistic to grasp this reality, and that Marx had failed to capture the increasing social and political complexity of modern society.

One problem with these arguments—many of them compelling as far as they go—concerns Pareto's tautological framework: Rather than an explanatory theoretical structure, we have instead a basic set of (circular) assertions typically cloaked in simplistic psychological assumptions (the sway of self-interest, etc.) that Pareto believed must be the foundation of any social or political theory. His psychological grounding in fact goes nowhere, as it sidesteps questions of historical and structural context, not to mention empirical specificity. Hence, rather than some kind of conceptual move beyond Marxism, Pareto's elite theory amounts to a rather profound step backward. Further, despite its grand scientific pretenses, the work is ultimately driven by a set of somewhat questionable normative assumptions—a deep attachment to laissez-faire economics, a view of government power as innately destructive, a commitment to pure individual autonomy beyond even the most extreme tendencies of classical liberalism. For Pareto, moreover, the psychological (and organizational) fixity of elite power subverts any possibility of theorizing change, rendering his insights essentially ahistorical and inert: Because (existing) power relations are understood as inevitable, they wind up fixed, unchangeable, impervious to creative human intervention. Here as elsewhere, unfortunately, Pareto's writing tends to generate far more obscurantism than illumination. Whatever positive constructs it might have carried forward (as in the critique of liberal democracy) were already contained in the work of others—for example, Marx's more sophisticated deconstruction of state power under capitalism and Michels's thesis that institutionalization produced by bureaucracy gives rise to oligarchy—while its supposedly novel features merely obscure the structural component of power relations. (Strangely, Femia's account, which briefly discusses Mosca, contains not a single reference to Michels, whose writings offer far more fascinating insights than those of Pareto.)

None of these problems, it should be emphasized, have much to do with Pareto's reported love affair with fascism. Indeed there is relatively little fascist content to his work, as Femia rightly stresses. Among many points of difference, we need go no further than the role of the state, glorified of course by Il Duce and other fascists, viewed as an authoritarian imposition and hostile to individual freedom by Pareto. The main convergence is that, in the end, both despised Marxism and the socialism it spawned. Mussolini did find Pareto's penchant critique of liberal democracy inspiring, but this critique had long been a staple of Marxism, which, after all, Mussolini fully embraced in his younger years.

Femia acknowledges most of these flaws in Pareto, conceding at various points in Pareto and Political Theory that his work lacks structural and empirical specificity even as it makes grandiose claims of scientific rigor and political novelty. Yet, according to Femia, there is much to value and carry forward in Pareto's contributions—so long as one is patient enough to find and digest it. The main difficulty, he insists, is that Pareto has been unfairly tainted as one of the intellectual forces behind fascism, as virtually a mentor to Mussolini. Leaving aside the problem of fascism, Femia strains tenaciously to defend Pareto from charges of “vacuousness” (p. 115). But the defense, at least to this reviewer, remains unpersuasive.