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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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I'd never heard of "The Mind and Society" so I had a poke about. https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/search/author/Vilfredo%20Pareto are selling a new copy for £26. But wait, that is only volume 1. Where is volume 2? Checking https://archive.org/details/ParetoTheMindAndSocietyVol4TheGeneralFormOfSociety/Pareto%20-%20The%20Mind%20and%20Society%20Vol%204%3B%20The%20General%20Form%20of%20Society/page/n11/mode/2up?view=theater there are four volumes, a total of 1900 pages. Pareto seems to be stacking his concepts, maths style, with Greek letter names.

My Dover edition of The Prince runs to 71 pages of ordinary English. Brevity and language make it accessible to a boy, even if the topic does not. But is "The Mind and Society" not a little heavy going?

He's wordier than I like, but the whole psychological model of tendencies within society and the theory of residues is a valuable insight that you won't substantially find in other authors.

I'll easily concede a boy would benefit from the cliff notes version of all these. Which thankfully does exist in Parvini's The Populist Delusion. But it's still an overview rather than the thing in itself.