Abstract

The "Treatise on General Sociology" of Vilfredo Pareto is published in France in 1917, the year of Emile Durkheim's death. In 1918 and 1920, Maurice Halbwachs issued two reviews for the "Revue d'économie politique", revealing its nature of careful reader and interpreter of the Italian sociologist. This paper follows the main lines of Halbwachs's reading of Pareto's work and illustrates the cultural context it evolved in. Halbwachs review focuses on two main questions: 1) The main lines of the classification of actions, feelings, judgments and reasoning that the Treatise put forward. In 1938, Halbwachs resumed the Paretian classification of «residues» and «derivations» in the paper La psychologie collective du raisonnement, and explains the social logic of reasoning as a process that originates from the «currents of social thinking» acting in the individual. 2) Economic development, which Halbwachs attach high relevance. Halbwachs recalls some of Pareto's thoughts and deepens the reasoning that François Simiand developed in the Durkheimian school, in an attempt to reveal what the sociology of knowledge can make for economic sociology, originating a «sociology of economic knowledge». Halbwachs explains how it is possible to express in economic terms a great variety of feelings, values, ideas, acts and events that are proper to sociology, but economy shouldtake into account in its analysis.