Círculo De Pareto

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THE HARVARD "PARETO CIRCLE"

by Barbara S. Heyl

The concepts of social system and social equilibrium have been key ideas in sociological theory and have been debated from pre-Comtian times to the present. But these concepts enjoyed a special importance during the 1930s and early 1940s for a group of scholars at Harvard. These men were interested in Vilfredo Pareto, whose sociological writings were based on a mechanical model of society 'as a system of mutually interacting particles which move from one state of equilibrium to another'.[1] The group consisted of such men as George C. Homans, Charles P. Curtis, Jr., Lawrence J. Henderson, Joseph Schumpeter, Talcott Parsons, Bernard DeVoto, Crane Brinton, and Elton Mayo.[2] This paper concentrates on four of these men - Homans, Henderson, Parsons, and Brinton - in an effort to study in depth the sources of their conceptions of society as a system with a built-in homeostatic tendency.

The four men under study had all read Pareto's sociological writings, and his ideas became an integral part of their scholarly production during the 1930s. Two of them, Henderson and Homans, wrote books which dealt solely with Pareto's writings.[3] A third, Parsons, wrote a lengthy analysis of Pareto's ideas in Structure of Social Action[4] And Brinton wrote two books in the 1930s in which he relied heavily on Paretan ideas.[5] In addition, three of the men - Parsons, Henderson and Brinton - wrote articles during the 1930s which were either explicitly on the works of Pareto or made reference to him.[6] A later part of this paper will trace the use of the specific social system, and equilibrium concepts from Pareto in the writings of the four scholars.

The impact of Pareto's ideas on these men was clearly important, not only as an impetus for the use of social system concepts, but also as a foundation for much of their more general theoretical thinking. But while attempting to uncover the intellectual influences on the four men, one should ask why Pareto won such a warm reception at Harvard during this time.

One aspect of the university climate during the 1930s was the widespread popularity of large-scale historical frameworks employed to describe socio-political phenomena. The Marxist framework was particularly in vogue. But Pareto's writings, too, posited such a grand historical theory, and, moreover, it seemed to provide an alternative to the Marxist approach.[7] One of the four men under study, Homans, has made explicit that one reason for his enthusiasm for Pareto was precisely the fact that Pareto gave him a response to the Marxists during this period. Homans writes:

As a Republican Bostonian who had not rejected his comparatively wealthy family, I felt during the thirties that I was under personal attack, above all from the Marxists. I was ready to believe Pareto because he provided me with a defense.[8]

Crane Brinton, too, indicated that the group of Harvard faculty members keenly interested in Pareto was somewhat harassed by leftist groups. He has recently recalled:

At Harvard in the thirties there was certainly, led by Henderson, what the then Communists or fellow-travelling or even just mild American style liberals in the University used to call 'the Pareto cult '. The favourite smear phrase for Pareto . . . was 'Karl Marx of the bourgeoisie'. The Pareto cult was never one that influenced a majority of the faculty, but it had fairly wide repercussions.[9]

Henderson, whose method in discussion was said to be only 'feebly imitated by the pile-driver'.[10] was apparently often in debate with people he felt over-emphasized the rationality in men's behavior - people he called 'liberals' .

In his warfare with these liberals Henderson would use Paretan, indeed Machiavellian, terms which seemed to cast doubt on his own belief in any real goodness in men, in any validity for the great traditions of American democracy. The liberals, of course, replied with their then favorite word of abuse - 'fascist'.[11]

It appears, then, that the Marxists and the Paretans frequently confronted one another at Harvard in the 1930s. Moreover, it is likely that others, with Homans, embraced Pareto's ideas, if not in reaction to the prevailing Marxist notions on campus, then as a useful defense in debate against them. Another source of the enthusiasm for Pareto felt by the four scholars discussed here - Homans, Henderson, Parsons and Brinton - was their contact with one another at Harvard in this period. If a group of men share an interest in the ideas of one man, and if they meet occasionally to discuss those ideas, their interest in their subject will tend to grow. Thus, the theses of this paper are that the reliance on social system and equilibrium concepts developed through the interaction among these men, and more specifically, that a careful reading of their works, combined with a study of their friendships during the 1930s, reveals that the individual who most influenced Homans, Brinton and Parsons with regard to social system concepts was Lawrence J. Henderson. The paper has three parts. The first establishes that the four scholars met periodically during the 1930s and early 1940s to 'talk shop', and also that they had read one another's writings. The second part traces the use of the concepts of social system and equilibrium and the analogies employed by the authors in their major works during this period. Finally, in the third part, the characteristic approaches of these authors are compared to determine whether Henderson was indeed the one who shaped the thinking of the other scholars regarding these concepts.

I. Interaction within the 'Pareto Circle'

Membership in at least three social-intellectual associations brought these four men into regular contact during the 1930s. The first time they came together for frequent discussions on Pareto was in the fall of 1932 when Lawrence Henderson organized a seminar on Pareto's sociology. Henderson was a physiologist; by the time he was 48, he was well established in his field and had proven to be a tough-minded methodologist. At about this time he read Pareto's sociological writings and was extremely impressed with the Italian's efforts to apply scientific methods of analysis to social phenomena. From 1926 to 1932 Henderson read carefully the bulk of Pareto's work and became convinced that his approach was of momentous importance. He decided to conduct a seminar on Pareto, and early in the 1932 academic year he began recruiting faculty members to be participants. Schumpeter, DeVoto, Brinton and Parsons all came. Henderson's good friend Charles P. Curtis, Jr., a Boston lawyer and a Harvard Fellow,

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