Pareto's Trattato and the Cats of the Villa Angora

Even your brother-in-law knows about the 80/20 rule. That’s Pareto. What else is there to know? A lot and then again fundamentally not very much. The insidious thought that strikes - is this man nought but a montimbanco, a shouty village explainer? The best book is in the footnotes of The Mind and Society where he gives examples from the classics of his mysterious residues. There they are but he never really asks what is the nature of human consciousness such that derivations of that same residue should recur under different forms throughout history. The writhings of the shaman, the sportive lashes of the luperci and phenomena of the Welsh Revival are taken to arise out of the same irrational source. To take these manifestations as evidence of a noumenal structure is of no interest to the materialist, positivist, scientistic mind of Pareto. They are simply evidence of the continually morphing derivative that has taken on new habiliments. First principles are a matter for metaphysics which is bunk and a form of theology for the intelligentsia.

He wrote his Trattato Di Sociologia Generale (The Mind and Society trans. in 3 Vols.) from 1907 to 1912 pub.1916. He could have said what he had to say in one book; get out sharply, and gather the shed hair of his 16 (?) Angora cats to spin into yarn with which he might knit a jumper, a shield to repel the emanations of the Society for the Prevention of Vice to whom he frequently refers as the bearers of evil sentiment.

I’m enjoying this book, well 20% of it 80% of the time.