Compendium of General Sociology

by Vilfredo Pareto

Compendium of General Sociology was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) was a social scientist who plated a significant role in the development of sociology, economics, and political science. Society, to Pareto, was governed principally by non-rational forces, and he was critical of all rational explanations and ideologies. He contributed to the development of functionalist and systems theories of social and economic life and was a major influence on the work of talcott Parsons. He was also and advocate of empirical and experimental methods in the social sciences as well as of mathematical sociology and economics. Pareto's classic work, the Trattato di Sociologia Generale (1916), was published by his student Giulio Farina in 1920. Farina was able to rely upon Pareto for corrections and approval of the abridgement. Now, for the first time, this abridged work is available in an English translation, as the Compendium of General Sociology. Elisabeth Abbott participated in the Livingston-Bongiorno translation of the complete Trattato in the 1930s, and she has drawn upon that notable translation (now out of print) in her work on the Compendium. A substantial introduction by sociologist Joseoh Lopreato of the University of Texas provides a historical context for Pareto's work and calls attention to the main lines in his thought.

Genres: Politics, Sociology, Political Science

471 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto, born Wilfried Fritz Pareto, was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist and philosopher. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices.

He introduced the concept of Pareto efficiency and helped develop the field of microeconomics. He also was the first to discover that income follows a Pareto distribution, which is a power law probability distribution. The Pareto principle was named after him and built on observations of his such as that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He also contributed to the fields of sociology and mathematics.

Reviews

[Илья Дескулин · Rating 4 out of 5]

Positivism, cynicism, non-partisanship, eugenics, cliodynamics... Pareto is still well ahead of 99% of political theory written these days.