Books like Vilfredo Pareto

The Other Pareto contains one of the best accounts of Pareto’s thinking. He provides a fuller context regarding Pareto's place in social thinking. 

Bucolo began with Pareto’s early writings from 1872 and proceeds to provide an explanation of Pareto’s ideas until Pareto’s death in 1923. Bucolo provided massive quotations from Pareto’s writings to support and document his interpretation.

In Pareto on Policy, Warren Samuels attempted to provide a detailed commentary on Pareto’s Treatise on General Sociology or in the English language translation Mind and Society.

Samuel’s chapters all contain the term “policy” but the chapters themselves are focused on knowledge, power, freedom, control, and change. Samuel’s Pareto on Policy is the best commentary on Pareto’s magnum opus that I know.

Lawrence J Henderson was one of the first Americans to take Pareto’s writings seriously. He was a professor at Harvard during the 1930s, and this 1935 book was an outgrowth of his interest in understanding Pareto’s thought.

The subtitle "A Physiologist’s Interpretation" indicates that his approach to Pareto’s work differed from most because he was a natural scientist rather than a social scientist. As a physiologist, H. was able to recognize Pareto's engineering background with the recognition of universally valid laws, yet he was also able to see how Pareto was influenced as an economist where there are high degrees of regularity.

That makes him one of the best authorities on Pareto's "General sociology". Henderson could see generalities that most social scientists could neither understand nor appreciate. 

Joseph Femia has chosen 21 outstanding essays about Vilfredo Pareto, which are divided into three sections: Methodology, Social Theory, and Politics and Political Theory.

All 21 are important historical investigations of Pareto’s thinking. The best are two by Norberto Bobbio and those by James Lane and by A.J. Baker. Most importantly, Femia’s collection also contains S.E. Finer’s “Pareto and Pluto-democracy.”

As a philosopher who crosses several disciplines (sociology, economics, and theology), I really appreciated the way in which Pareto was shown in this book to transcend the boundaries between economics and sociology. There was no one except for Max Weber, who could move among disciplines as easily as Vilfredo Pareto. 

Professor Mann is the best macrohistorical social theorist I know.

The book is a clearly written analysis of the development of social formations from primitive societies, to the more developed societies in many parts of the world. As it combines a sophisticated conceptual homework with extensive empirical research the book will help the reader to grasp from where we are coming and where we are going.

I personally recommend the book. It is extremely valuable.

There has been more “grassroots” advocacy in the last 25 years than during any 25-year period in U.S. history. The Black Lives Matter, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, New Christian Right, and Tea Party movements are some of the biggest mass movements in our history.

When most people hear the word “grassroots,” they think of ordinary citizens mobilizing, marching, or protesting on important issues. But in this book, sociologist Edward Walker shows us that behind many instances of seemingly “grassroots” advocacy are legions of political consultants who sell their ability to mobilize ordinary citizens to their wealthy clients, including giant corporations and business-oriented interest groups.

This book is epiphanic. Most of us realize on some level that political consulting is a big business. But most of us—and I mean regular people and people like me who study politics for a living—assume that political consultants advise political parties and candidates for office on the… show more.

Since the recent passing of Peter Berger, Christian Smith is arguably the most well-known and influential sociologist working in the field of religion. 

In this book, Smith lays the groundwork for his vision of what it means to be a person, something so often overlooked in the social sciences. Smith claims that humans have a particular set of capacities and proclivities that distinguish them from animals. Despite the vast differences in humanity across cultures and historical eras, Smith offers the possibility that human beings have a universal human personhood. Humans, who, though part of the animal kingdom, are spiritual beings that have a moral and spiritual dimension.

This is something that I have been struggling with for years, and Smith simplified it.

Riess brought together nine of the most thoughtful historians and one outstanding non-fiction writer who understands the impact sports has made on American Jewish identity and culture.

I read these engrossing essays and can recommend them as a useful complement to Levine’s work and together they deepened my thinking on a subject that is more than just an academic exercise for me.

One of the world’s leading microeconomic scholars presents in this fascinating book brilliant insights about economic theory and its role in public policy.

Rubinstein challenges several central tenets of game theory, and sheds light on the role economics can and should play in society at large. The book presents economic theory through a series of fables.

The stories provide the basic insights of economics, but also enables us to critically evaluate the effect of implicit assumptions on the predictive power of economic theory and its moral implications.

When I first read this book, even though I hold a Ph. D in sociology, it changed my whole view of the discipline. 

I was very disappointed in graduate school at first. Then I read some of Peter Berger’s works, who until his recent death, was the most well-known sociologist of religion. He wrote about making the case for a supernatural reality. This was something that was, and, still is, considered heretical in sociology. 

I met Peter a few years ago and told him how he changed my view of sociology. He smiled.