Pareto's Concept of Demagogic Plutocracy

Abstract

Despite his status as a founder of modern social science, Pareto receives little scholarly attention. In particular, his penetrating discussion of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ (his term for the liberal state) has been strangely ignored by analysts of Western, or ‘bourgeois’, democracy. While Marx’s scattered and inconsistent remarks on ‘the capitalist state’ have spawned a vast literature, Pareto is lucky to be acknowledged in a footnote. Consider the exemplary case of David Held, a theorist of great repute, who managed to write a 321–page textbook called Models of Democracy without once mentioning Pareto’s name.1 Why has Pareto been ‘put in quarantine’?² One reason is surely the irritating nature of his masterwork, Treatise of General Sociology (published in 1916).³ Even his admirers describe this work as ‘monstrous’ – disorganized, unnecessarily long, full of pedantic distinctions, and continually interrupted by digressions, and by digressions within digressions.