Pareto was the product of a sector of the Franco-Italian civilization that is far removed from English and American currents of thought. Even within that sector his towering figure stood almost alone. Pareto cannot be pigeon-holed. He paid court to no “ism.” No creed or party can claim him as its own, although many creeds and parties appropriated fragments of the vast intellectual realm over which he held sway.
(Schumpeter, 1949, p.148)
Over the last century, academic seminars have fueled the development of the social sciences. Among the many seminars that took place at Harvard during the 1920’s and 1930’s, none have been as scrupulously studied as the famed “Pareto Circle.” From 1932 to 1934, biochemist and physiologist Lawrence J. Henderson organized weekly readings of the French translation of Vilfredo Pareto’s Trattato di sociologia generale (Traité de sociologie générale, 1968 [1916]), followed by Sociology 23 (1938-1942), a course devoted to the application of Pareto’s “conceptu...