Pareto and the logico-experimental method: interpretations and overruns

This article re-evaluates the methodological approaches used by Pareto in economics and sociology. The first part presents the state of the art on this issue. The second part evaluates Pareto’s logico-experimental method in terms of its analytical stakes compared with Walras’s rational method, and then from the perspective of its practical forms. The third part examines the stages that define Pareto’s experimentalism in sociology. A fourth part shows that the author uses Mill’s concrete deductive method in economics and sociology. The fifth part highlights that Pareto favours a more hypothetical and deductive approach in pure economics, close to the “null hypothesis” method advocated by Popper. A sixth part emphasises, however, that Pareto also uses, in sociology, the inverse deductive method that Mill also envisages for this discipline.