The Mind and Society

Vilfredo Pareto's Trattato di Sociologia generde appears in this English edition as the realization of dreams and efforts that extend over fifteen years. My first moves towards the introduction of this work to the English-speaking world go back to 1920 and they were successful in the sense that from that date an eventual publication of the Trattato in English in some form or other was assured. I had published what I believe to be the first American note on Pareto December 3, 1915 {Nation)^ and the second in 1916 {hiter-national Year Boo^). These two articles were anterior to Professor Robinson's now famous footnote on Pareto in his Mind in the Making, 1921. I reviewed Pareto's Trasformazione delta demo-crazia, with allusions to the Trattato in the New York Herald, April 19, 1922, and gave what I believe to have been the first American course on the Trattato in Will Durant's Labor College in New York in the autumn of that same year. I introduced Pareto for the first time to large audiences at meetings of the Foreign Policy Association in New York in December, 1923, and in Philadelphia, January, 1924, and lectured on him again at Columbia in the summer of 1924 and during the spring of 1925. An article called "The Myth of Good English" which I published in Century, August, 1925, and which Edward Valentine Mitchell, of Hartford, included in his Essays of 7925, made explicit reference to Pareto's theory of group-persistences. Disregarding the much writing and lecturing that I did on Pareto between 1925 and 1930, I will note that an article I published in Nation, May, 1926, in view of a certain resonance that it chanced to obtain in the West, I at the time regarded and still regard as the beginning of the Pareto vogue in America. To summarize, and saving correction, the enterprise that finds its completion in these volumes was at least five years old at the time of the opening of Professor Henderson's epoch-making seminar in Harvard; eight years old when Mr. Aldous Huxley first called public attention to Pareto in England; thirteen years old at the time when the Pareto vogue burst upon us in full force as the result of Mr. Canby's notes in the Saturday Revietd/ of Literature, and of Mr. DeVoto's brilliant, spirited and effective campaign in that same review and in Harper's, 1933.