Carl Friedrich and the Cancellation of Pareto

Vilfredo Pareto was given a major reputational boost by the efforts, at Harvard, of L. J. Henderson and the prominent figures he influenced. Carl J. Friedrich was close to this group, but during WWII wrote a scathing attack on his theory of elites and on Pareto generally. Although the attack was misleading, it reflected Friedrich’s own political commitments, which themselves had to be reconciled with “democracy” and anti-elitism. The critique damaged Pareto’s reputation, but is of interest as a defense of the newly emerging elite of which Friedrich was a part at Harvard. The argument Friedrich made replaced the traditional notion of democracy with one which accommodated a form of governance that depended on the shared “instinct of workmanship” of the rulers and the ruled, and avoided the question of the status of bureaucrats, which Friedrich had elsewhere regarded as the distinguishing feature of the modern state. Pareto had a response to this, which noted the admiration of the planners who had emerged during his lifetime, whom he regarded as a characteristic governing class. He commented that this was a sign of a society that was moving away from freedom. Friedrich shared this sense, but endorsed it, dismissing freedom as a nineteenth-century problem.