Vilfredo Pareto and the Liberal Doctrine of Class Conflict

Few economists are as often and as highly celebrated for their knowledge of modern intellectual history as Albert O. Hirschman. Yet Hirschman is obviously at a total loss when confronted with a clear statement of the liberal doctrine of class conflict, in Vilfredo Pareto’s Cours d’économie politique (1896–97). Here Pareto speaks of the struggle to appropriate the wealth produced by others as “the great fact that dominates the whole history of humanity.” To Hirschman’s ear this “sounds at first curiously—perhaps consciously—like the Communist Manifesto.” But Pareto quickly “distances himself from Marxism” by using the term “spoliation,” and by ascribing spoliation, or plunder, to the dominant class’s control of the state machine. Evidently, Hirschman has not the slightest inkling that Pareto was presenting, in the customary terminology, a generations-old liberal analysis that goes back at least to the first decades of the nineteenth century.

--Ralph Raico, "The Conflict of Classes: Liberal vs. Marxist Theories," in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), 185.