Pareto and the Role of Government

One of the things I like about Vilfredo Pareto is that he was interested in the organizational structures of society - particularly governments. Through his early career, he was at times a capitalist, socialist and a communist. But in his later years he came to believe that all forms of government result in the same distribution of power and wealth (though of course to different sets of people). All governments, whether a communist one or democratic capitalist one,  result in a massive underclass and a small elite group controlling an overwhelming share of power and wealth.  With all forms of government sharing this common flaw, the best government is the one that maintains order while at the same time producing the least drag on society - i.e the one that is most efficient. One of Pareto's students at the Italian university where he taught was Benito Mussolini - who later claimed Pareto was the ideological inspiration of his Fascist government.

To quote Wilkipedia:

Pareto's discovery that power laws applied to income distribution embroiled him in political change and the nascent Fascist movement, whether he really sided with the Fascists or not. Fascists such as Mussolini found inspiration for their own economic ideas in his discoveries. He had discovered something that was harsh and Darwinian, in Pareto's view. And this fueled both the anger and the energy of the Fascist movement because it fueled their economic and social views. He wrote that, as Mandelbrot summarizes:

"At the bottom of the Wealth curve, he wrote, Men and Women starve and children die young. In the broad middle of the curve all is turmoil and motion: people rising and falling, climbing by talent or luck and falling by alcoholism, tuberculosis and other kinds of unfitness. At the very top sit the elite of the elite, who control wealth and power for a time -- until they are unseated through revolution or upheaval by a new aristocratic class. There is no progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud. Human nature is primitive, emotional, unyielding. The smarter, abler, stronger, and shrewder take the lion's share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate: One can, Pareto wrote, 'compare the social body to the human body, which will promptly perish if prevented from eliminating toxins.' Inflammatory stuff -- and it burned Pareto's reputation."^[4]

Pareto had argued that democracy was an illusion and that a ruling class always emerged and enriched itself. For him, the key question was how actively the rulers ruled. For this reason he called for a drastic reduction of the state and welcomed Benito Mussolini's rule as a transition to this minimal state so as to liberate the "pure" economic forces.^[6]

To quote Pareto's biographer:

"In the first years of his rule Mussolini literally executed the policy prescribed by Pareto, destroying political liberalism, but at the same time largely replacing state management of private enterprise, diminishing taxes on property, favoring industrial development, imposing a religious education in dogmas".^[7]

Karl Popper called him the "Theoretician of Totalitarianism".^[4]

source: Wikipedia

I'd like to think that Pareto was misunderstood.  He was an old man at the time and would die early in Mossolini's rule. I have read that Pareto also strongly favored freedom of the press and the rights of individuals. So rather than being a Fascist, he may have just as easily been ideologically closer to Goldwater Republicanism or libertarianism. But regardless of what you call him, I admire his intellectual curiosity, independence and courage. He stands apart from any particular form of government and instead asks questions about the properties of all governments and societies. He concludes that regardless of which particular government rules, there is a consistent underlying structure to society - one that follows the Pareto distribution.