Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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two very different types of personality. It will show that these were influenced both 
by Pareto’s experiences of Italian political and economic life, and by that dual 
typology of ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’ which Niccolò Machiavelli had famously incorporated 
within his political writings. This chapter will also explore key concepts in Paretian 
sociology, as a prelude to closer consideration of his political-sociological thought, 
which deals chiefly with how these two personality types are distributed throughout 
political elites.
Chapter three will then look more closely at Pareto’s assumption that it is legitimate 
to describe political elites in terms of how his two political types are distributed 
throughout them. This idea will require considerable reworking before it can be taken 
seriously. It will be argued that Pareto was really concerned with describing political 
subcultures in psychological terms. In order to revive his theory, it will be argued 
that there are good grounds for supposing that members of political collectivities will 
often possess very similar personality traits which come together within dominative 
configurations to give each collectivity what might variously be termed its distinct 
‘social personality’, its ‘ethos’ or ‘silent understandings’, or even, in some cases 
where the collectivity in question has a long history, its ‘central tradition’. 
Some of these arguments will refer to socialisation factors which explain why 
individuals tend to accommodate themselves to collective personalities, thus 
ensuring these persist over time despite personnel circulation. It will also be argued, 
however, that collective personalities are likely to exist in order to fulfil a necessary 
function, which is to allow political collectivities to respond in relatively consistent 
and predictable ways – and hence with collective assent from their memberships 
– to decision-making problems characterised by cognitive indeterminacy. Cognitive 
indeterminacy, it will be argued, is not only endemic to political life but is also 
deepening and spreading throughout an increasing number of political issue areas 
as industrial societies grow more complex. This will give rise to the following 
suggestion: if cognitive indeterminacy increasingly characterises the problems 
faced by political decision-makers, then the personality traits which define political 
cultures and subcultures may exert increasingly decisive influences upon political 
elite behaviour. This thought will allow chapter three to run to the conclusion that 
the Paretian approach to sociology, which deals with how major personality traits are 
distributed throughout political elites, stands ready to become an increasingly useful 
tool for social scientists.
In chapter four, the focus will shift from sociology to political psychology. 
Pareto’s two very different kinds of personality pattern – which, to reiterate, follow 
Machiavelli’s ‘lion’ and ‘fox’ typology – will be explored more thoroughly. The 
various individual differences which distinguish these two psychological types will 
be laid together along a multi-trait person continuum and each will be analysed 
in turn. A large volume of psychological theory (much of it psychoanalytic) and 
correlational research evidence will be assembled for this purpose. It will become 
clear that, without exception, all of these individual differences correspond to widely 
researched psychological constructs. This theory and evidence will also help indicate 
whether these individual differences align along a multi-trait person continuum as 
Pareto envisioned. Here, Pareto’s insight as a lay psychologist will become even 
more apparent.

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Introduction
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Finally, in chapter five, Pareto’s political sociology will be put to the test. 
This will involve looking to see whether personality traits are distributed within 
the Westminster Parliament as Pareto would have envisioned. We will see that 
psychometric techniques make it easy to measure differences at the level of social 
personality both within and between the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat 
parliamentary parties. Here, we will see that Pareto’s psychological insight has real 
value by alerting us to axes of difference which exist therein at the level of social 
personality. Drawing once more upon chapter three’s argument that social personality 
might increasingly play an important role in contributing to policy processes, it will 
be concluded that further efforts should be made to measure and monitor these 
things. This chapter will conclude by considering whether findings suggest Vilfredo 
Pareto’s bridge from classical sociology to political psychology deserves further 
traffic, thereby raising Pareto’s status as a classical sociologist. 

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Chapter 2 
Pareto’s ‘Psychologistic’ Sociology
2.1  Pareto and Marx
Pareto acknowledged a great debt both to Karl Marx and to one of his Italian 
popularisers, Achille Loria (Bellamy 1987, 19). He even referred to the idea of class 
struggle as ‘profoundly true’ (Burnham 1943, 191). Moreover, the language of Marx 
and Engels’ ‘Communist Party Manifesto’ finds clear echoes in Pareto’s claim that 
‘the struggle to appropriate wealth produced by others is the great fact that dominates 
the whole of human history’ (Hirschmann 1992, 55).
Yet Pareto was no Marxist. He took strong exception to that assumption of causal 
asymmetry between economic and political power which is most pronounced in the 
earlier works of Marx and Engels. Instead of agreeing with them that governments 
exist to ‘manage the affairs of the bourgeoisie’, Pareto treated what he termed the 
‘governing elites’ as psychologically and culturally homogenous entities which 
are shaped by complex social forces emanating not just from the economy. As we 
will shortly see when Charles Powers’ restatement of Pareto is explained, Pareto 
was interested in the workings of society on a grander scale. His concern to reveal 
the interactions between society, politics and the economy made the economic 
reductionism of Marxists seem narrowly focused by comparison. Indeed, his 
integration of economy within a wider social framework can be regarded as ‘his 
most interesting achievement, from an economic sociological perspective’ (Aspers 
2001).
A further contrast can be made between the Marxist doctrine of ideology, which 
views class ideologies as rationalisations of class interests, and Pareto’s belief that 
governing elites are culturally and psychologically predisposed to employ distinctive 
strategies or styles of governing, which may, depending upon circumstances, either 
advance or compromise their interests. This unique stress upon the potential for 
disparity between elite strategy and elite interest underpinned Pareto’s claim that 
previous social theorists such as Marx had neglected the irrational, or, as he preferred 
to say, ‘non-logical’ components in the thoughts and behaviours of elites, which 
Pareto viewed as arising, proximately at least, from ‘psychic states, sentiments, and 
subconscious feelings and the like’ (Pareto 1935, §161). For this reason, Pareto is 
often identified with that wave of thought commonly associated with Durkheim, 
Freud and Weber who, towards the end of the nineteenth century, all found ways to 
argue that irrational forces play a major role in social life (Madge 1964, 73).
More fully, we may say that Pareto’s sociological theory is concerned to a large 
extent with the idea that elites possess distinctive psychological characteristics which 
influence how they interact with non-elites, for better or for worse. The following 
three sections will now explore this idea in more detail, first of all by explaining 

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