Vilfredo Pareto had the intense eyes of the polymath child of an exiled Italian aristocrat. He had tight curly hair and a massive curly beard. He was an everything person, that rare creature a Renaissance Man, he could talk civil engineering, economics, political science and philosophy, and he saw in sociology a deconstruction, a critique of the idea that systems progressed in a linear fashion. He was born in Paris in 1848, he died in Switzerland in 1923. And to be polite he may have been a little neurodivergent.
He proposed the idea of The Circulation of Elites. It was a theory about how bigwigs came in waves of passion and energy, they hung around for a couple of generations before drying up, becoming decrepit or corrupt, disappearing into the Cotswolds, Dordogne, maybe Rappahannock where they died of old age or a hunting accident. Pareto liked to think of his circulation of elites as "The graveyard of aristocracies." Indeed for the most part he saw the history of society as a history of a succession of aristocracies. The top looking down and slowly forgetting how to stay on top.
His book, Mind and Society, looked at something else. He'd concluded that we humans in our day to day are unlogical, we lack a logical relation with the world around us, our actions rarely produce what we intend them to produce and yet, by our own judgement, we continue to insist that yes we make absolute and perfect logical sense at all times.
Sure there's an element of "If you don't agree I'll punch you in the throat" in us people but the problem is we seem determined to spend many of our waking hours coming up with a whole bunch of magical, metaphysical and moral theories which in the light of day should make no logical sense whatsoever. For Pareto this unlogical relation with the world was a result of what he thought of as Instinctive Tendencies that were motivated by Sentiment. Naturally as a man of science, reason, an inheritor of the enlightenment and so on, he was required to think of and then produce lists of Instinctive Tendencies arranged into categories which could be studied in detail, and from which schemes might be hatched that would solve the problems of the Human Condition.
For Pareto, his purpose for wandering into sociology was the failure of mathematics to accurately predict human behavior. In his economics Pareto's response to the problem of measuring cardinal utility was to to decide it was unnecessary to know what satisfaction a person got from purchasing a widget. It was only necessary to know the ordinal utility, how many of this or that widget people purchased.
His thinking was sufficiently self absorbed for his work to be considered a precursor to the Fascism that swallowed the second quarter of the 20th Century. In the USA Pareto's ideas found a home in Harvard and dwelled mightily in the mind of the Machiavellian Talcot Parsons, a guru of US Business Management Studies which instructed bright young meteors on how to maintain an elite by squeezing the last drop of enthusiasm out of the unordained.
I raise the subject of Vilfredo Pareto for what came to be called the Pareto Number. The number originates in an observation Pareto made about land ownership in Italy, it traveled far in its notoriety. Apparently 80% of Italian land was owned by 20% of the people.
In the minds of other thinkers this 80:20 relationship reflected the relationship between cause and effect. In other words a small number of causes result in a larger number of results. And on it went. In the factory a small number of people cause all of the labor unrest. In the street a small number of agitators cause the riot, damage to property and ruined reputations.
Here, in my own world 20% of a population are wolves, 80% are sheep. Democracy is a method of determining the results of leadership quarrels amongst the 20% so that we sheep don't have to kill each other to decide disagreements between wolves.
