ABSTRACT
Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto were nineteenth-century liberals. Mosca emphasized the desirability of “juridical defense,” by which he meant civil liberties protected by judicial institutions independent enough to prevent persons in power from penalizing their rivals in order to further their own political prospects. He showed much sympathy for representative government and in 1927, as a member of the Italian Senate when it was succumbing to Mussolini’s Fascists, Mosca delivered a “funeral oration” for representative government in Italy. An engineer who turned to economics, Pareto, in an outpouring of articles and polemics during the 1880s and 1890s, excoriated Italian elites for perverting capitalism in order to serve their own plutocratic interests. In attempting to create a science of politics (Mosca) and a scientific theory of society tout court (Pareto), both men eschewed value questions and concentrated on factual matters. They took a broadly liberal orientation for granted. While not overtly a contribution to liberal thought, the elitist paradigm set forth by Mosca and Pareto is compatible with a version of liberalism, and it is worth ruminating briefly on this compatibility.
