The Mind and Society

1916 book by Vilfredo Pareto

The Mind and Society

Italian cover

Author| Vilfredo Pareto
Original title| Trattato di Sociologia Generale
Translator| Andrew Bongiorno, Arthur Livingston, James Harvey Rogers
Language| Italian
Subject| Sociology
Genre| Nonfiction

Publication date

| 1916

Published in English

| 1935
Media type| Print
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Literature

* The Rise and Fall of the Elites (1900)
* Political Parties (1911)
* The Mind and Society (1916)
* Revolt Against the Modern World (1934)
* The Rage and the Pride (2001)

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The Mind and Society (Italian: Trattato di Sociologia Generale, lit. "Treatise on General Sociology") is a 1916 book by the Italian sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923). In this book Pareto presents the first sociological cycle theory, centered on the concept of an elite social class.

The Mind and Society has been named, by Martin Seymour-Smith, as one of the most influential books ever written. The English edition was published in 1935. An abridged version, Compendium of General Sociology (Italian: Compendio di Sociologia Generale), was published in Italian in 1920 and English in 1980.

## Summary

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The book characterises human acts as mostly 'non-logical': not conducive to an intended goal. However, it notes how people try to explain such conduct as logical anyway, and these explanations have developed into many magical, metaphysical, and moral theories. The author identifies categories of instinctive tendencies behind such theories, including 'combinations' (creative syntheses, such as superstitious associations) and 'group-persistences' (deeply held preconceptions, such as belief in a god or reified abstraction like Justice or Progress).

He then investigates how the sentiments that motivate these tendencies affect the prosperity of a society. Here, the author sees the relative intensities of these sentiments in a population, especially those of combinations versus those of group-persistences, as an important social force. In his view, this force acts on and reacts to other forces, such as economic factors, as part a dynamic social system in which cyclic patterns are noticed. For example, the economic ingenuity spurred by the instinct for combinations is a cause of and is rewarded in times of increasing economic prosperity, but this instinct also leads to the financial manipulation that is one cause of later periods of economic decline, during which a society relies more on those who had the instinct to save money, motivated by the sentiments of group-persistence.

Another such pattern is the circulation of elite: the instinct for combinations among the elite social class allows it to find ways to improve societal prosperity, incentivising an increasing dominance of those sentiments in the elite to the detriment of the group-persistences, leaving them less able or willing to justify the use of force and thus vulnerable to replacement by a new elite, especially if they do not allow such highly capable individuals a chance to enter the elite more freely, and thus a new elite able to arouse sentiments of group-persistences in the masses tends to take over.

## References

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* Bongiorno, Andrew (November 1930). "A Study of Pareto's Treatise on General Sociology". American Journal of Sociology. 36 (3): 349–370\. doi:10.1086/215412. ISSN 0002-9602. S2CID 144674233.
* Burnham, James (1943), "Pareto: The Nature of Social Action", The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, The John Day Company.
* Farina, Giulio; Pareto, Vilfredo (1980), Compendium of General Sociology, University of Minnesota Press.
* Pareto, Vilfredo (1935), The Mind and Society [Trattato Di Sociologia Generale], Harcourt, Brace.

## External links

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* The Mind and Society at Internet Archive
* First dozen pages of the book
* First three chapters of the book

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Vilfredo Pareto

Books|

* The Rise and Fall of the Elites (1900)
* The Mind and Society (1916)

Concepts|

* Circulation of elites
* Ophelimity
* Pareto efficiency
* Pareto principle

Miscellaneous|

* Italian school of elitism

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*[lit.]: literal translation