An image in a curved mirror: Pareto’s critique of Marxist science
Joseph V. Femia
Writing in Capital, Marx described himself as a scientist, who – like a natural scientist – seeks to penetrate beneath the surface appearance of things to reveal the essence of reality. In a famous passage, he asserted that ‘a scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses’ (Marx 1976: 433). Marx’s ‘humanist’ followers, notably Lukács and Gramsci, have chosen to play down Marx’s scientific pretensions, almost as if the Great Man had not quite understood the implications of his Hegelian leanings. More generally, however, Marx’s disciples have stoutly defended his credentials as a scientist, even comparing him to Copernicus and Darwin. Plekhanov, for example, characterized Marxism as ‘objective truth, and no “fate” will move us any more from the correct point of view, discovered at last’. The science of man will of course ‘make new discoveries’ but these, according to Plekhanov, ‘will supplement and confirm the theory of Marx, just as new discoveries in astronomy have supplemented and confirmed the discovery of Copernicus’ (1956: 194–5).
Opponents of Marxism have found these claims laughable. Karl Popper, one of the more prominent critics, derided Marx and his followers as scientific imposters, whose vague and elastic terminology allowed them to ‘explain away’ whatever phenomena that might seem to render their theory erroneous. Consider the supposed tendency for the rate of profit to decline as capitalism progresses. Marx admits that there are countervailing factors which might cause the rate of profit to increase, though he insists that at some unspecified point in the future, the downward tendency will assert itself. This type of prediction is impossible to test, and testability is for Popper the key distinction between a scientific theory and a metaphysical one. It must be possible to state the exact conditions under which, through observation or experimentation, the theory can be falsified. Marxism, in his opinion, is an elaborate tautology, protected from refutation by its basic circularity. Once it is accepted that the ‘essence’ of history is to reveal its inevitable and final destination, communism, every apparently contrary fact can be subsumed in the general narrative, sometimes with the help of the dialectical method.
The arguments ‘for’ and ‘against’ Marxist science themselves suffer from a degree of circularity, as they are invariably based on contestable depictions of the scientific method. The debate is also polarized, with critics and defenders alike feeling that they must come down hard on one side or the other. It is therefore interesting to note that Vilfredo Pareto, the eminent economist and sociologist, whose attitude to Marxism was definitely oppositional, advanced a surprisingly measured evaluation of Marx’s scientific claims. S. B. Finer has described Pareto’s magnum opus, Trattato di Sociologia Generale, as ‘a gargantuan retort to Marx’. This is more or less true, but we must also point out that the text rarely mentions Marx by name. Neither in his Trattato (translated into English as The Mind and Society) nor in his other works did Pareto present a systematic critique of his illustrious predecessor. For the most part, the Italian sets out his own ideas on methodology and society and refers to Marx only in passing. As Finer puts it, Pareto’s strategy is not so much confrontation as ‘envelopment’. Rather than contradicting Marx’s concepts and categories, he ‘transcends’ them, or broadens them out so that Marxist propositions become special cases of a much more general theory (Introduction to Pareto 1966: 77–8). With respect to Marx’s concept of ideology, Pareto expands it to include Marxism itself. Class exploitation is transcended by the more general concept of ‘spoliation’, which encompasses all cases in which one group of people (legally) acquires the wealth produced by others. Nor did he deny the Marxist proposition that people were motivated by economic interests – but he also drew attention to other, equally important sources of motivation that Marx ignored, such as human predispositions or sentiments.
To Pareto, Marx’s mistakes, or ‘blind-spots’, fit into a pattern. While acknowledging that Marx aspired to a scientific analysis of society, and praising him for his ambition, he thought that Marx’s admirable intentions were constantly being subverted by the ‘essentialism’ he inherited from Hegel, as well as by the intense moralism he inherited from the Utopian socialists. By way of preliminaries, it would be useful to outline what Pareto meant by science and the scientific method.
Like Marx, Pareto believed that the techniques of the natural sciences were appropriate to the study of society and history. A mechanical engineer by university training, he aimed ‘to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, chemistry’ (Pareto 1935: para. 20). His views on epistemology and ontology were broadly positivist. Scientific theories are true or false by virtue of their correspondence to a mind-independent world. In a well-known passage, he summarizes his method rather starkly:
We are following the inductive method. We have no preconceptions, no a priori notions. We find certain facts before us. We describe them, classify them, determine their character, ever on the watch for some uniformity (law) in the relationships between them. (Pareto 1935: para. 145)
Elsewhere he says that we ‘start with facts to work out theories’, the obvious implication being that we take ‘only experience and observation as our guides’ (1935: paras. 69, 6). Such statements make Pareto sound like a pure empiricist, but he accepted that theory construction required an element of deduction, and he also hastened to point out that ‘abstraction is, for all the sciences, the preliminary and indispensable requirement for all research’. Abstraction, he notes, is used for purposes of simplification, to aid both analysis and computation. One form involves stripping away certain properties of a system in order to focus on those properties the scientist wants to study. In rational mechanics, for example, bodies are reduced to physical points, while in pure economics, we reduce real men, with all their passions and prejudices, to the calculating machine that is homo economicus (Pareto 1972: 12–13). Moreover, Pareto reminds us that the terms used in science are themselves abstractions and correspond to reality only within certain limits. Take ‘clay’. We give the name of ‘clay’ to a compound of a number of chemical elements and the name ‘humus’ to a compound of a still larger number of chemical elements. The line drawn between the two compounds is obtained by abstraction (Pareto 1935: para. 2544). Positivism is sometimes caricatured as ‘vulgar empiricism’, but Pareto – as we can see – underlines the need for ‘hypothetical abstractions’ of one sort or another to enable scientists to uncover the regularities in complex systems where multiple categories of facts intermingle (Pareto 1935: paras. 2397, 144). He accepts that there is something ‘subjective’ and ‘arbitrary’ about such abstractions that our scientific theories are partly a human invention and not merely a mirror reflection of external reality (Pareto 1972: 12). Yet these theories will stand or fall depending on whether or not they conform to factual observation: ‘Theories, their principles, their implications, are altogether subordinate to facts and possess no other criterion of truth than their capacity for picturing them’ (Pareto 1935: paras. 69, 63).
The limitations of induction, as formulated by Hume, did not seem to trouble Pareto. According to the Scottish philosopher, there was no logical reason to believe that because the sun rose yesterday, and this morning, it would certainly do so tomorrow. The general point is that accumulated observations of empirical regularities can never establish the truth of a scientific theory. Popper was most exercised by this ‘problem’, claiming that it rendered positivism’s ‘verification principle’ useless. Hence he offers his fallibilistic conception of science as progressing through ‘conjectures and refutations’. What makes a theory scientific is its falsifiability – its ability to be stated with sufficient exactitude so that it can be clearly refuted by empirical evidence.
Although Pareto was long dead when Popper put forward his views, we can be sure that the older man would not have been impressed. In fact, Pareto shares Hume’s scepticism about induction as a means to definitive truth, but he does not believe that this in any way discredits the inductive method. He insists on the ‘relativity’ of all scientific theories. Even in the experimental sciences, where controlled laboratory experiments are the norm, ‘absolute certitude’ does not exist: the physical or social scientist can speak ‘only of greater or lesser probabilities’. In some cases, ‘such probability is slight, for others great, and for still others so great as to be equivalent to what in ordinary parlance is known as certainty’ (Pareto 1935: para. 540). The fact that no scientific law or theory can be verified in the strictest sense of the term is just a statement of the obvious, since science is, by its very nature, ‘limited, relative, in part conventional’. Scientific laws ‘imply no necessity’. They are just ‘contingent’ hypotheses, ‘serving to epitomize a more or less extensive number of facts and so serving only until superseded by better ones’ (Pareto 1935: para. 69n.3 and 69). However, Pareto is willing to use the language of ‘proof’ and ‘verification’ as long as it is understood that these terms do not denote mathematical certainty (Pareto 1935: paras. 69, 2398–9).
Because scientific laws are merely statements of probability, it is often hard to specify the conditions under which they would be ‘falsified’, in Popper’s sense. The problem is especially acute in those sciences, such as celestial mechanics or sociology, where the use of experimentation is next to impossible, making it difficult ‘to unravel tangles of many different uniformities’ (Pareto 1935: paras. 100–1). When looking at human history, then, the best we can do is to ‘determine the probable course of social development in the future’ (Pareto 1935: para. 140). Historical movement, Pareto says, is especially difficult to predict because it takes on an ‘undulatory form’:
You find a certain characteristic which . . . is more and more accentuated as time passes; you would be wrong to conclude therefrom that the movement will continue indefinitely and that the society concerned will keep moving towards a certain objective. A reaction against the prevailing trend may well be in the offing, and the emergence of a movement in a contrary direction may not be long delayed. (Les Systèmes Socialistes, in Pareto 1966: 129)
Of necessity, any historical laws we discover will be laws of tendency only. The fact that such laws are too equivocal to admit of outright disproof would not be a matter of concern to Pareto. We do not abandon scientific theories because they generate a few inaccurate predictions. The laws of meteorology, for example, are not fatally contradicted by X number of mistaken weather forecasts. The acceptance or rejection of scientific theories is, to Pareto, a much more fluid process, where the boundary between ‘proof’ and ‘disproof’ cannot be defined in advance. Science, he believes, is a ‘progressive’ activity in the literal sense of the word. It is constantly adding to its fund of facts, ‘so that sooner or later a lack of accord develops between the actual multiplicity of facts and the arbitrary multiplicity of the theory’. Eventually, the discrepancy becomes clear to everyone, though those who support the failing theory will at first make every effort ‘to squeeze the facts into the theory’, by the use of ‘rescue hypotheses’ of diminishing degrees of plausibility. In the long run, however, ‘facts are tougher and more durable than theories’. A ‘tipping-point’ is reached, where the need to broaden or replace the old doctrine comes to enjoy near-unanimous agreement (Pareto 1935: para. 2400n.1). ‘The logico-experimental sciences’, in Pareto’s memorable phrasing, ‘are made up of a sum of theories that are like living creatures, in that they are born, live, and die, the young replacing the old, the group alone enduring’. Whereas faith and metaphysics aspire to an ultimate, eternal resting place, science ‘knows that it can attain only provisory, transitory positions’ (Pareto 1935: para. 2400).
The critique of Marx
Although he considered Marxist science to be deeply flawed, Pareto nevertheless thought that Marx had made great scientific discoveries, upon which a genuine science of society could be built. The key Marxist insight, according to Pareto, was to draw a distinction between the surface appearance of society, on the one hand, and the underlying reality, on the other. Individuals and groups are often unaware of the forces prompting their behaviour and ascribe their actions to imaginary causes which differ considerably from the real causes. Struggles between competing elites, for example, are often seen as struggles for justice or liberty, even by the elites in question. Theological dissensions, always couched in high principle, are mainly ‘veils cloaking exclusively worldly interests’. Greed and self-aggrandizement lurk beneath the ‘lofty declamations’ of those who rule, or seek to rule, us (Les Systèmes Socialistes, in Pareto 1966: 137). Indeed, terms such as ‘justice’ and ‘morality’ are historically contingent in their meaning, reflecting the needs of dominant social groups. When Pareto declares that ‘most men make convictions of their interests’, he is deliberately echoing Marx’s point that ‘most men’ will justify actions that are advantageous to them with ‘empty, high sounding, emotional formulas’. Ideas – that is to say – are weapons in the conflict between classes and groups, ‘the tokens of which are to be found on every page of history’ (Les Systèmes Socialistes, in Pareto 1966: 140–1). For him, Marx was ‘entirely right’ to emphasize class struggle and the centrality of exploitation: ‘The struggle of some individuals to appropriate the wealth produced by others is the great factor dominating all human history’ (Cours d’Economie Politique, in Pareto 1966: 117).
So what went wrong? Why was Marx’s science of society only half-baked? Why did he fail to take his brilliant insights to their logical conclusions? Pareto’s answer was fairly straightforward. Marx, mistrusting the evidence of his senses, ultimately betrayed the scientific (or ‘logico-experimental’) method and deduced facts about reality from abstract, a priori ideas: when the facts did not support his preconceptions, so much the worse for the facts. The supposed scourge of German metaphysics and French Utopianism could not in the end resist their seductive charms. To be more specific, Pareto concluded that Marx’s scientific aspirations were thwarted by both essentialism (derived from Hegel) and moralism (derived from his socialist forebears). In examining Pareto’s critique, let us take each category in turn.
Essentialism
Although Pareto was generally hostile to historical teleology, he did believe that science had progressed through the ages from the Aristotelian essentialism that saw reality as purpose-driven, either by divine providence or by a telos inherent in things, to ‘modern science’, whose principles are wholly ‘subordinated to experience’, and whose only ‘purpose’ is ‘to replace figments of the imagination with the results of experience’ (Pareto 1935: paras. 13, 2395). In medieval ‘science’, the facts had to accord with the inferences deducible from general principles – themselves the product of religious dogma or introspection rather than observation. It is often assumed that the growing prestige of the empirical method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries put an end to the influence of essentialism in scientific discourse. Pareto begged to differ. While theology has loosened its grip on the educated mind, it has been replaced, in some quarters, by a kind of metaphysical spiritualism, associated with the likes of Hegel and Kant, which gives ‘the name of “science” to knowledge of the “essences” of things’, to knowledge of principles and ‘the necessary relations between facts’ (Pareto 1935: paras. 19, 530). Even theories that aspire to logico-experimental status, that claim to be based on the facts of experience, sometimes betray a metaphysical bent, elevating principles to a ‘quasi-independent subsistence’ (Pareto 1935: para. 63). There is an approach to experimental sciences, says Pareto, that sees its task as identifying the ‘higher principles’ or ‘essential relations’ or ‘inner necessity’ that govern the workings of reality. For those who adhere to this approach, the statement ‘Water solidifies at 0 degrees centigrade’ contains ‘something more than a mere epitome of experiments’ – there must be some ‘essence’ or principle of necessity that makes the statement true for all time (Pareto 1935: paras. 528–31). Once established, these abstractions are allowed to determine the facts of the world rather than the other way round. The idea that science is fallible and cumulative, that theories are necessarily incomplete and constantly open to improvement, is abandoned in the search for ‘absolutes’ (Pareto 1935: paras. 106, 108).
This ‘metaphysical’ vision of science described (perhaps tendentiously) by Pareto clearly resembles what is now called scientific or ‘critical’ realism (see, e.g. Bhaskar 1978), and a convincing case can be made that Marx’s method of analysis does indeed conform to its basic tenets (Walker 2001, Conclusion). As we have seen, Marx maintained that the goal of science was to discover the ‘inner nature’ or ‘real motions’ of phenomena, which are ‘not perceptible to the senses’. This view of the scientific method has become rather fashionable – at least among philosophers. Pareto of course regarded it as backward and regressive. In what particular ways, according to him, did it lead Marx astray?
Pareto thought that Marx was right to stress ‘the fact that economic factors modify social institutions and doctrines’. Too often human history is pictured as a logical progression of ideas, as if our material interests counted for nothing in the story of mankind. But Marx proceeds to strain the credulity of his readers by more or less ignoring other factors which ‘are not reducible to purely economic categories’. In other words, the materialist theory of history has its point of departure in a principle which is true, ‘but it errs in trying to claim too much: a claim taking it beyond the conclusions which are legitimately derivable from experience’ (Les Systèmes Socialistes, in Pareto 1966: 126–7). Through a combination of observation and introspection, Marx thinks that he has uncovered the essential structure of human development. There is no way, however, that this type of reductionism could be verified by observation alone, for empirical evidence tells us that human events are ‘determined by the concurrent action of large numbers of conditions’ (Pareto 1935: para. 137). Social causation, says Pareto, ‘is extremely complex and cannot be reduced to a single factor’ (Les Systèmes Socialistes, in Pareto 1966: 137). Any objective consideration of economic interests, for example, would reveal that they are themselves modified by prevailing sentiments and ideas. Monism, according to Pareto, is abstract inference; pluralism is observational reality.
Having ‘discovered’ the hidden generative mechanism of social evolution, Marx then defines ‘class’ in purely economic terms and decides that only two – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – matter in capitalist societies. Never mind that, in the real world, there are an ‘infinite number’ of groups with different interests whose conflicts shape historical and social development. Ethnic and religious struggles, Pareto reminds us, are often far more intense than class (in the Marxist sense) struggles. Marx’s theoretical priorities, however, dictate that all such struggles are reducible to esoteric economic cleavages, notwithstanding any evidence to the contrary (Les Systèmes Socialistes, in Pareto 1966: 140–1).
At this point, you may be wondering why a man who insisted that abstraction was central to the scientific enterprise should be so critical of Marx’s use of abstraction. A defender of Marx might say that he was simply distinguishing ‘essential’ from non-essential properties of society in order to isolate causal chains, in much the same way as the neo-classical economist assumes perfectly rational and informed economic actors in order to analyse supply and demand. Yes, there is an element of simplification, but it helps us to demonstrate how fundamental properties of the system generate common patterns among disparate phenomena. For Pareto, however, abstraction is not the goal of scientific analysis – we are not searching for an ‘essential structure’ that defies sense perception. Abstraction is, instead, merely a heuristic device. Once it has done its work, we must, in his words, ‘return to the concrete from the abstract’, by filling in the missing details. Any economist who thinks that producers and consumers really are perfectly rational, or that markets really are perfectly competitive, would be a poor economist (Pareto 1972: 12–16). Abstraction is useful only if it helps to illuminate the facts of experience, not if it distorts them. For example, assuming that there are only two classes in capitalist society might enable us to identify an important dynamic of social change. While this could be useful as an initial approximation to reality, the complexity of the actual world can only be captured by ‘the method of successive approximations’, which gradually brings theory in line with multi-dimensional reality (Pareto 1972: 9). Marxist essentialism, in Pareto’s view, disfigures reality, offering only ‘an image in a curved mirror’, where the form of the object is ‘altered by refraction’ (1935: para. 253).
For Pareto, the most egregious example of the inadequacy of Marxist essentialism is the theory of value. He thinks that ‘value’ is a ‘mystical, metaphysical entity’, which ‘may mean anything’ and has ‘come to mean nothing at all’. He is quick to point out, though, that Marx and his followers are not the only guilty parties here. Classical and neo-classical economists – including Leon Walrus, his friend and mentor – also felt the need to distinguish ‘value’ from ‘price’. But, to Pareto, saying that ‘price is a concrete manifestation of value’ is about as informative as saying that ‘a cat is a concrete manifestation of “felinity”’, whatever that might be. The concept of ‘value’ takes us into the nebulous realms of metaphysical abstraction, where empirical verification is rendered impossible (Pareto 1935: paras. 61n.1, 62, 62n.1). Even if value did exist as a distinct entity, it was completely arbitrary for Marx to say that it depended on human labour power alone. What about human tastes, limitations of supply, costs of production (apart from labour) (Pareto 1972: 177–9)? Of course, Marx could protest that Pareto’s criticism is simply reflecting appearances – merely describing the external phenomena of life as they seem and appear, whereas his own theory of value identifies the hidden internal structure of capitalism, which is the extraction of surplus value. Pareto’s rejoinder would be to ask how Marx arrived at this hidden structure. A proposition may be considered true either because it conforms to experimental reality, as confirmed by sense perception, or because it is in logical accord with some chosen standard situated outside objective experience – with divine revelation, or with concepts the human mind finds in itself (Pareto 1935: para. 16). Since Marx obviously ruled out divine guidance, we are left with introspection as the path to scientific truth. Having started from the premise that science was an observational form of human inquiry, Marx ended up with some quasi-Platonic notion of innate ideas allowing us to distinguish what is ‘real’ from what is only ‘apparent’. In Pareto’s scheme, there are no innate ideas, but there are innate human sentiments, or basic attitudes (Pareto calls them ‘residues’) which exert a powerful influence on the way we think and act. Human beings, he observes, are emotional rather than rational creatures, though the range and intensity of emotional responses may vary from one social context to another. Given its logico-experimental shortcomings, Marx’s theory of surplus value must be construed as a reflection of underlying sentiments, including a desire to identify with the oppressed masses. It tells us something about the genesis of ideas and the evolution of social psychology; it tells us nothing objective about economics (Pareto 1972: 328–9). Nor, in Pareto’s opinion, would refuting it actually refute Marx’s socialist outlook, which like all ideologies is rooted in sentiment. No amount of factual analysis can refute articles of faith (Pareto 1935: para. 2316n.10). Because of its intense moralism and its refusal to dissociate faith from experience or reason, Pareto saw Marxism as a secular religion. Its essentialism originated in the religious impulse, which, in all its forms, aims to constrain human behaviour within a coherent framework of ‘ought’ demands.
Moralism
Pareto considers the desire to improve mankind as the enemy of social science. He scorns ‘the mania for preaching to people as to what they ought to do . . . instead of finding out what they actually do’ (1935: para. 277). Even those, like Comte and Marx, who purport to study society objectively, find it hard to resist the temptation to leave ‘the scientific laboratory’ and ‘step over into the pulpit’ (Pareto 1935: para. 253). Pareto is adamant that science deals only with propositions that are susceptible to experimental/observational proof, and that this would exclude ‘ought’ propositions. In true positivist fashion, he insists on a dichotomy between facts and values, denying that an ‘ought’ proposition can be derived from a factual statement (Pareto 1972: 19–21). He recognizes that social scientists, like all human beings, will have preferences and prejudices. From the remotest times to the present day, commentators on society have wanted to believe that their value judgements have somehow been confirmed by experience. But this is simply mental laziness masquerading as objective analysis. Social scientists must put their personal values to one side, or at least make every effort to do so, and stop pretending that scientific analysis can issue or validate ‘ought’ propositions, ‘as if it were a God’ (Pareto 1972: 25).
Prima facie, Marx would seem to agree with Pareto’s rigid separation of fact and value. When he informs us that historical laws are working ‘with iron necessity towards inevitable results’, he is, according to his own self-image, no more advocating those results than an astronomer is advocating the eclipses he predicts. At all times, Marx was insistent that his theory was explaining, not prescribing, and he dismissed other forms of socialism as Utopian moralizing. Yet his claims of scientific impartiality cannot be taken at face value. Even commentators who are sympathetic to Marx concede that his work ‘seems to incorporate moral judgements throughout’ (Walker 2001: 146; see, also, Geras 1983). The very language he uses, as Walker indicates, is often incompatible with a value-free approach. It is routinely observed that Marx equated the extraction of surplus value with ‘theft’ – but those looking for moralistic language need look no further than the word ‘exploitation’, which is value-laden and inherently negative in its connotations. If Marx had distinguished his moral judgements from his account of capitalism, then the Paretian standard of objectivity would have been preserved. It is by no means clear, however, that he made – let alone succeeded in – any such effort.
Pareto thinks that his interpretation of Marxism as a kind of religion can explain this baffling inconsistency in Marx’s theoretical perspective. Religions uniformly embody the belief that all things good are, almost by definition, verified by experience and logic. Fact and value never contradict each other. Everything must fit into the narrative of struggle between ‘light’ and ‘darkness’. Thus, in the Marxist religion, the labour theory of value, despite being empirically ‘absurd’, must be deemed scientifically true, because otherwise the capitalists would be justified in their extraction of profit (Pareto 1935: para. 2316n.10; Les Systèmes Socialistes, in Pareto 1966: 128). Such a discordant note would destroy the harmony of the theoretical framework.
The religion that Pareto perceives as closest to Marxism is Christianity. Both were, at least in their original forms, religions of the poor, which scorned material goods. Both exalt humanitarianism and altruism, and give objective form to the ‘subjective sentiment of asceticism’ (Pareto 1935: paras. 1799n. 1, 1859). And both had (and have) no chance of translating their ascetic, egalitarian vision into reality. Detachment from reality, according to Pareto, is a characteristic of all religions, as is deference to the authority of the ‘Founder(s)’. Marxists, he points out, ‘swear by the Word of Marx or Engels as a treasure-store of all human knowledge’, in the same way that Christians defer to the Gospel (1935: para. 585). And much like the early Christians, there are Marxists who are willing to sacrifice their entire lives to become apostles of the new religion. To Pareto, this intense moralism, this desire to hold oneself and others to ideal standards of behaviour, is distinctly odd, given that Marxism, in its scientific guise, insists on the relativity of morality.
Conclusion
For Pareto, the verdict we pronounce on Marxism will depend on whether we view it as a science or as a religion. With regard to the former, Marx could lay claim to some important scientific breakthroughs in the understanding of society: the role of class conflict and economic forces in history, the demystification of so-called objective morality. But the development of these insights, Pareto argued, was subverted by preconceptions and a priori ideas. However, if we look at Marxism as a religion, then its scientific shortcomings do not really matter:
As regards determining the social value of Marxism, to know whether Marx’s theory of “surplus value” is false or true is about as important as knowing whether and how baptism eradicates sin in trying to determine the social value of Christianity – and that is of no importance at all. (Pareto 1935: para. 1859)
The Marxist socialist doctrine of solidarity, for example, has no scientific validity whatsoever, but Pareto (writing in 1916) acknowledges that its ultimate influence on mankind may be positive. The social functions of religion are very different from those of science. Of course, if you disagree with Pareto’s conception of the scientific method, you will probably disagree with his critique of Marxist science. To my mind, however, Pareto made a powerful case for the proposition that Marx was trying, with limited success, to unify two contrary human impulses: the one that drives us to extend our knowledge of the external world and the one that impels us to seek the existential comfort of metaphysical postulates.
References
Bhaskar, R. (1978), A Realist Theory of Science. Brighton: Harvester.
Geras, N. (1983), Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend. London: Verso.
Marx, K. (1976), Capital, volume 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Pareto, V. (1935), The Mind and Society, trans. A. Bongiorno and A. Livingston (4 volumes). London: Jonathan Cape. First published in 1916 as Trattato di Sociologia Generale.
— (1966), Sociological Writings, trans. D. Mirfin and ed. S. E. Finer. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
— (1972) [1909], Manual of Political Economy, trans. A. S. Schwier. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Plekhanov, G. (1956) [1895], The Development of the Monist View of History. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Walker, D. (2001), Marx, Methodology and Science. Aldershot: Ashgate.