Here are 100 books that Pareto on Policy fans have personally recommended if you like
Pareto on Policy.
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I was trained as a philosopher and have been a professor of philosophy for more than three decades. Beginning with Plato, I have been persuaded that reason is powerful. I am also a social theorist and have published scholarly books on Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Raymond Aron. Yet Pareto’s writings have convinced me that people are most often motivated by interests and passions and then use reasons to justify their behavior. Plato showed people as they ought to be; Pareto showed them as they are. Philosophy is important, but so is Pareto’s social psychology.
This is the best book to start your journey in understanding Vilfredo Pareto’s sociological writings
I recommend this bookbecause it not only contains some of Pareto’s most important writings in a remarkably readable translation but also because S.E Finer provides an outstanding and lengthy introduction to many crucial aspects of Pareto’s sociology.
Finer was one of the most talented and objective scholars to write on Pareto’s thinking.
I was trained as a philosopher and have been a professor of philosophy for more than three decades. Beginning with Plato, I have been persuaded that reason is powerful. I am also a social theorist and have published scholarly books on Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Raymond Aron. Yet Pareto’s writings have convinced me that people are most often motivated by interests and passions and then use reasons to justify their behavior. Plato showed people as they ought to be; Pareto showed them as they are. Philosophy is important, but so is Pareto’s social psychology.
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.
I was trained as a philosopher and have been a professor of philosophy for more than three decades. Beginning with Plato, I have been persuaded that reason is powerful. I am also a social theorist and have published scholarly books on Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Raymond Aron. Yet Pareto’s writings have convinced me that people are most often motivated by interests and passions and then use reasons to justify their behavior. Plato showed people as they ought to be; Pareto showed them as they are. Philosophy is important, but so is Pareto’s social psychology.
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.
I was trained as a philosopher and have been a professor of philosophy for more than three decades. Beginning with Plato, I have been persuaded that reason is powerful. I am also a social theorist and have published scholarly books on Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Raymond Aron. Yet Pareto’s writings have convinced me that people are most often motivated by interests and passions and then use reasons to justify their behavior. Plato showed people as they ought to be; Pareto showed them as they are. Philosophy is important, but so is Pareto’s social psychology.
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.
This collection examines the work of the Italian economist and social theorist Vilfredo Pareto, highlighting the extraordinary scope of his thought, which covers a vast range of academic disciplines. The volume underlines the enduring and contemporary relevance of Pareto's ideas on a bewildering variety of topics; while illuminating his attempt to unite different disciplines, such as history and sociology, in his quest for a 'holistic' understanding of society. Bringing together the world's leading experts on Pareto, this collection will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of sociology and social psychology, monetary theory and risk analysis, philosophy and…
I am currently a Professor of Sociology at George Mason University, a Research I Institution, and have now published 9 books. Until I wrote the book Christianity and Sociological Theory, I was a traditional sociologist, one who abided by the tenet of the discipline to profess neutrality in one’s scholarly work. My book, The Not So Outrageous Idea of a Christian Sociology, is not only my most controversial book, given its criticism of contemporary sociology, but also my most personal book.
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.
What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory.
Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite the vast differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there…
I’ve been writing about birth for decades – how it became a medical process, managed by a surgical specialty in a factory-like setting. I’ve worked with contemporary midwives who are trying to reclaim birth, to move it back home, back to physiological and loving care. And over and over again, I see the similarities to the other gate of life – how death and dying also left home and went into the hospital, where people die, as they birth, pretty much alone – with perhaps a ‘visitor’ allowed. Covid made it worse – but in birth and death, it allowed the hospitals to return to what medicine considered essential: medical procedures, not human connections.
Sometimes I think people just don’t get smarter, or write smarter books, than Ehrenreich, so of course, in a 5 best list, I’m going to put one of hers up. The title of her book comes from obituaries – at a certain point, not entirely clear just when, a death does not have to be explained. When a 93-year-old dies, we don’t have to ask ‘of what?’ the way we do when a 47-year-old does. And yet – what about 73? We ask, and we blame: did they smoke? Not exercise? Eat poorly? Not get screened early enough?
While others have focused on the over-medicalization of dying, the repeated hospitalizations, the tubes, and wires, Ehrenreich is looking at the medicalization of living to be old – living from one wellness activity to the next, interspersed with medical testing. In a world in which ‘health’ means medicine, health care means insurance…
We tend to believe we have agency over our bodies, our minds and even our deaths. Yet emerging science challenges our assumptions of mastery: at the microscopic level, the cells in our bodies facilitate tumours and attack other cells, with life-threatening consequences.
In this revelatory book, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that our bodies are a battleground over which we have little control, and lays bare the cultural charades that shield us from this knowledge. Challenging everything we think we know about life and death, she also offers hope - that we find our place in a natural world teeming with animation…
I’m a trained microbiologist who received my doctorate from the University of Washington and who has long been fascinated by the natural world—whether microscopic or gigantic, within us or all around us. For more than 20 years, I’ve also been an award-winning science writer who has written for publications like The New York Times, Nature, Wired, and Scientific American. Ever since I wrote about the incredible ability of fecal transplants to cure a deadly bacterial infection, I’ve been obsessed with books that explore how the seemingly gross or ordinary things we often dismiss as lacking value have the power to transform both us and the planet.
This superb book was one of the first to raise the issue of how poorly we’ve considered our waste and what to do with it, and it was a big inspiration for me.
It’s thoughtful and incredibly well-researched, packed full of amazing historical details, and provides a compelling case for how and why we should get our shit together—literally. I learned so much from this book, and it really encouraged me to keep digging and exploring how we might reimagine our human output. Just an excellent read and a compelling case for change.
Produced behind closed doors, disposed of discreetly, hidden by euphemism, shit is rarely out in the open in 'civilized' society, but the world of waste - and the people who deal with it, work with it and in it - is a rich one.This book takes us underground to the sewers of New York and London and overground to meet the heroes of India's sanitation movement, American sewage schoolteachers, the Japanese genius at the cutting edge of toilet technology and the biosolids lobbying team. With a journalist's nose for story and a campaigner's desire for change, Rose George also addresses…
I am a historian and economist who is fascinated by the intersection of the economy and culture. This started for me with the idea that economic ideas were shaped by the cultural context in which they emerged, which resulted in my book on the Viennese Students. Over time it has expanded to an interest for the markets for the arts from music to the visual arts, as well as the way in which culture and morality influence economic dynamism. Economics and the humanities are frequently believed to be at odds with each other, but I hope to inspire a meaningful conversation between them.
Mainstream economic accounts of culture are prone to treat culture as a set of norms or informal institutions which constrain economic behavior: ‘don’t charge interest,’ ‘don’t sell kidneys,’ or ‘always tip at a bar’. Storr presents an alternative account of culture as the animating spirit of an economy, which he illustrates through various entrepreneurial spirits which shape the direction of an economy. This book is the perfect combination of serious anthropological theory (Geertz) and an appreciation of the market process. Culture is not that which obstructs market, but that what brings economies to life.
How does culture impact economic life? Is culture like a ball and chain that actors must lug around as they pursue their material interests? Or, is culture like a tool-kit from which entrepreneurs can draw resources to aid them in their efforts? Or, is being immersed in a culture like wearing a pair of blinders? Or, is culture like wearing a pair of glasses with tinted lenses? Understanding the Culture of Markets explores how culture shapes economic activity and describes how social scientists (especially economists) should incorporate considerations of culture into their analysis.
Although most social scientists recognize that culture…
I’m fascinated by systems of thought and very interested in understanding how we can improve our ability to create a better society for all. I think the past makes a good laboratory for investigating these kinds of questions. I got interested in early modern economic theory while researching the English East India Company for my dissertation in the sociology department of Columbia University, which was a great place for historical and computational sociology. I now teach economic sociology and theory as a professor at Yale University, another institution with amazing strengths in history, data science, and computational methods.
This is a serious scholarly investigation of the origin and eventual triumph of the efficient market hypothesis. Polillo is very smart and the theoretical sophistication high. It combines a thorough history with some extremely interesting ideas about thought, culture, and social processes fleshed out with several different methods of analysis and interpretation.
The Ascent of Market Efficiency weaves together historical narrative and quantitative bibliometric data to detail the path financial economists took in order to form one of the central theories of financial economics-the influential efficient-market hypothesis-which states that the behavior of financial markets is unpredictable.
As the notorious quip goes, a blindfolded monkey would do better than a group of experts in selecting a portfolio of securities, simply by throwing darts at the financial pages of a newspaper. How did such a hypothesis come to be so influential in the field of financial economics? How did financial economists turn a lack…
I write about pop culture and women’s history, often as it relates to the body and beauty. I’m intrigued by the ways women claim unconventional means of expression for their own beautification (such as tattooing) and how they harness beauty in the service of social and economic mobility (as in pageant culture). These books offer insight into the varied ways pageantry, from campus pageants to the Miss America stage, inform American identity and ratify the historian Rosalyn Baxandall’s belief that “every day in a woman’s life is a walking Miss America contest.”
A history of campus pageants going back to the 1920s,Queens of Academeconsiders not only their “calibrations of class and femininity,” but also their racial and (overwhelmingly Christian) religious underpinnings. Tice chronicles how campus competitions (many of which are feeder pageants for Miss America) allayed fears that educated women would renounce home and hearth, and traces the ways they’ve evolved to reflect social progress. Two chapters—“We are Here: Pageants as Racial ‘Homeplaces’ and Ethnic Combat Zones” and “Flesh and Spirit: Bibles, Beauty and Bikinis”—examine neglected aspects of pageant scholarship, showing how Black swimsuit contestants faced a unique challenge in deflecting the pernicious Jezebel trope by proving their worth through demonstrations of etiquette, grooming, and racial progress. Even male contestants swagger through these pages—including a Mr. Harvard hopeful who competed in see-through tape and rose-petal pasties.
Universities are unlikely venues for grading, branding, and marketing beauty, bodies, poise, and style. Nonetheless, thousands of college women have sought not only college diplomas but campus beauty titles and tiaras throughout the twentieth century. The cultural power of beauty pageants continues today as campus beauty pageants, especially racial and ethnic pageants and pageants for men, have soared in popularity.
In Queens of Academe, Karen W. Tice asks how, and why, does higher education remain in the beauty and body business and with what effects on student bodies and identities. She explores why students compete in and attend pageants such…
