Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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Underlying trasformismo, however, was a more deeply rooted system of 
‘clientelismo’ which led politicians to behave in this manner. This consisted of 
complex, shifting networks of patron-client relations which threaded ‘vertically’ 
between the Prime Minister, candidate-Ministers and elected deputies, extending to 
the masses via the media of the many local political and economic power-mongers: 
the ‘grandi elettori’. 
Citing Mosca, Zuckerman (1979, 47) mentions that in the south of Italy the grand 
electors were the large landowners and lease holders, while in the large cities they 
were lawyers, physicians, capitalists and ‘in general all those wealthy persons who 
because of their activities and professions acquire many relationships and a good 
number of clients and favour-seekers’. Pareto, however, also counted socialist and 
catholic labour organisations as a special category of collective grand elector. He felt 
that the partial co-optation of such organisations within the political establishment 
contributed, in the short term at least, to social stability. When, as would occur from 
Giolitti’s ministry onwards, leaders of socialist organisations were drawn within 
clientelistic alliances by patronage and by promises of piecemeal social reform, the 
consequence, as Pareto saw it, was to ‘decapitate’ working class organisations of 
their most talented leaders. Marx could thus be ‘put in the attic’ (Boggs, 1976, 50; 
Bellamy 1987, 21). This position is immediately notable for its consonance with 
Robert Michels’ argument for the inevitability of elite rule in his (1915) ‘Political 
Parties’, a work which has become famous for what Michels therein termed the 
‘iron law of oligarchy’. Michels’ famous law owed much to the fact that, as a 
member of the syndicalist wing of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, he had been 
disillusioned by the SDP leadership’s reluctance to contemplate the mechanism of 
the general strike as a means to gain power (Beetham 1977). This led Michels to 
theorise the leadership of the SDP, affiliated trade unions, and indeed the leaderships 
of new mass political parties in general, as possessing agendas distinct from those of 
ordinary members and followers. He saw for a basic need for ‘organisation’ whereby 
concentrated leaderships become increasingly necessary if they are to maintain 
control over bureaucratic structures which are growing large and complex; yet this 
need inevitably concentrates knowledge and expertise within these leaderships, 
which they may then use to impose their own agendas across the structures under 
their control. These agendas include, of course, leaders’ desires to maintain 
themselves in high office.  Hence for Michels, Germany’s workers’ organisations 
had effectively become dedicated to their own bureaucratic self preservation. Thus 
disillusioned with democratic politics, Michels went on to accommodate himself to 
the inevitability of elite rule, becoming a Politics Academic in Fascist Italy in 1928.
Italy’s Grand electors held a pivotal position within the social structure, influencing 
many whilst often remaining directly accountable to no-one. Their effective control 
of the votes of their economic dependants amongst the very few who were able 
to vote (around 2% in the 1870s) brought them considerable influence in deciding 
which local deputies were to be sent to Montecitorio. That provided good reason 
why parliamentary leaders and Ministers struggling to establish working majorities 
there could not afford to ignore their wishes. These wishes were, of course, that 
government would show its gratitude for their support by the favourable allocation of 

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Pareto’s ‘Psychologistic’ Sociology
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government contracts, subsidies, tax and other forms of legislation, by international 
trade agreements, and by the provision of cheap labour.
3
Some evidence suggests that patron-client ties were so pervasive throughout 
Italian society that influential individuals who voiced moral condemnation of 
clientelismo would risk personal ruin. Alan Zuckerman credits Pareto with the 
observation that this culture leaves ‘no room for anyone unwilling to play the game’. 
Such an individual, Pareto believed:
... is an outlaw, a man whom everyone can attack. If a lawyer, he has no clients; if an 
engineer, nobody employs him; if a merchant or tradesman, he is ruined; if a landowner, 
he is exposed to petty annoyances from prefects and syndics (Pareto 1950, 32, cited in 
Zuckerman 1979, 48–49).
This was a view based in part upon Pareto’s own business experience. As 
superintendent of the ‘Societá Ferriere Italiana’, Pareto claimed to have been left 
deeply disillusioned by ‘the distasteful necessity of making deals with influential 
deputies and government agents’ (see Coser 1977, 403). With his focus always 
more upon the political system, Gaetano Mosca also viewed ‘playing the game’ as 
increasingly necessary:
In many branches of government agencies, it is no longer possible to operate through 
honest and legal means, it is necessary to act as camorrista (Mafioso) if one is not to fall 
to an act of camorra (Mafia) (Mosca 1968, 255, cited in Zuckerman 1979, 49)
Anti-corruption sentiment was also to heighten the appeal of Italian communism. In 
his political autobiography, Ignazio Silone repeats what became a popular maxim in 
early twentieth century Italy:
The state always stands for swindling, intrigue, and privilege, and cannot stand for 
anything else (Silone 1950, 98).
Such sentiment was, more fully, to provide an ethical veneer for anti-democratic 
movements of both left and right. By helping to polarise political conflict, it would 
soon contribute to the overthrow of Italian democracy. 
With this thought, it is worth pausing to look in some more detail at the stark 
contrast which Pareto was to draw in his mature sociological works between the 
practitioners of trasformismo and clientelismo who make up the elites, and the 
non-elite masses who faced exploitation at their hands. Before the violent political 
upheavals which rocked Italy during the early twentieth century, Pareto had viewed 
democracy and popular participation in a positive light. Influenced strongly by J.S. 
Mill, he wrote enthusiastically on the subjects of proportional representation and the 
extension of the suffrage, believing along with Mill that an educated mass might one 
day be trusted to participate responsibly in the political process (see Bucolo 1980, 
3  Pareto (1991, 69–70) refers, for example, to the practice begun under the Depretis 
ministry whereby government would send soldiers to work the fields of large landowners, 
thus depressing the wage levels of the free-mowers which would otherwise be fixed by free 
competition.

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