Vilfredo Pareto in the context of "Talcott Parsons"

Medical sociology is the sociological analysis of health, Illness, differential access to medical resources, the social organization of medicine, Health Care Delivery, the production of medical knowledge, selection of methods, the study of actions and interactions of healthcare professionals, and the social or cultural (rather than clinical or bodily) effects of medical practice. The field commonly interacts with the sociology of knowledge, science and technology studies, and social epistemology. Medical sociologists are also interested in the qualitative experiences of patients, doctors, and medical education; often working at the boundaries of public health, social work, demography and gerontology to explore phenomena at the intersection of the social and clinical sciences. Health disparities commonly relate to typical categories such as class, race, ethnicity, immigration, gender, sexuality, and age. Objective sociological research findings quickly become a normative and political issue.

Early work in medical sociology was conducted by Lawrence J Henderson whose theoretical interests in the work of Vilfredo Pareto inspired Talcott Parsons' interests in sociological systems theory. Parsons is one of the founding fathers of medical sociology, and applied social role theory to interactional relations between sick people and others. Later other sociologists such as Eliot Freidson have taken a conflict theory perspective, looking at how the medical profession secures its own interests. Key contributors to medical sociology since the 1950s include Howard S. Becker, Mike Bury, Peter Conrad, Jack Douglas, Eliot Freidson, David Silverman, Phil Strong, Bernice Pescosolido, Carl May, Anne Rogers, Anselm Strauss, Renee Fox, and Joseph W. Schneider.

Antonio Francesco Gramsci (UK: /ˈɡræmʃi/ GRAM-shee, US: /ˈɡrɑːmʃi/ GRAHM-shee; Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo franˈtʃesko ˈɡramʃi] ; 22 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and politician. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926, and remained in prison until shortly before his death in 1937.

During his imprisonment, Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis. His Prison Notebooks are considered a highly original contribution to 20th-century political theory. Gramsci drew insights from varying sources—not only other Marxists but also thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Georges Sorel, and Benedetto Croce. The notebooks cover a wide range of topics, including the history of Italy and Italian nationalism, the French Revolution, fascism, Taylorism and Fordism, civil society, the state, historical materialism, folklore, religion, and high and popular culture.

Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras (French: [valʁas]; 16 December 1834 – 5 January 1910) was a French mathematical economist and Georgist. He formulated the marginal theory of value (independently of William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger) and pioneered the development of general equilibrium theory. Walras is best known for his book Éléments d'économie politique pure, a work that has contributed greatly to the mathematization of economics through the concept of general equilibrium.

For Walras, exchanges only take place after a Walrasian tâtonnement (French for "trial and error"), guided by the auctioneer, has made it possible to reach market equilibrium. It was the general equilibrium obtained from a single hypothesis, rarity, that led Joseph Schumpeter to consider him "the greatest of all economists". The notion of general equilibrium was very quickly adopted by major economists such as Vilfredo Pareto, Knut Wicksell and Gustav Cassel. John Hicks and Paul Samuelson used the Walrasian contribution in the elaboration of the neoclassical synthesis. For their part, Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu, from the perspective of a logician and a mathematician, determined the conditions necessary for equilibrium.

The Lange model (or Lange–Lerner theorem) is a neoclassical economic model for a hypothetical socialist economy based on public ownership of the means of production and a trial-and-error approach to determining output targets and achieving economic equilibrium and Pareto efficiency. In this model, the state owns non-labor factors of production, and market simulations are used by the planning organs to allocate final goods and consumer goods. The Lange model states that if all production is performed by a public body such as a democratic state, and there is a functioning price mechanism, this economy will be Pareto-efficient, like a hypothetical market economy under perfect competition. Unlike models of capitalism, the Lange model is based on direct allocation, by directing enterprise managers to set price equal to marginal cost in order to achieve Pareto efficiency. By contrast, in a capitalist economy, private owners seek to maximize profits, while competitive pressures are relied on to indirectly lower the price; this discourages production with high marginal cost and encourages economies of scale.

This model was first proposed by Oskar R. Lange in 1936 during the socialist calculation debate, and was expanded by economists like H. D. Dickinson and Abba P. Lerner. Although Lange and Lerner called it "market socialism", the Lange model is a form of centrally planned economy where a central planning board allocates investment and capital goods, while markets allocate labor and consumer goods. The planning board simulates a market in capital goods by a trial-and-error process first elaborated by Vilfredo Pareto and Léon Walras. The Lange Model is in practice a type of centrally planned economy and not a type of market socialism.