Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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references – particularly those to be found in his ‘Arte della guerra’ – to the guiding 
influence of the more specific construct of the ‘farmer-warrior’. According to 
Rebhorn, Machiavelli referred to this image in order to convey the notion that the 
hero is also a ‘cultivator’ who upholds the values of ‘culture’ or ‘civilisation’ over 
the chaos of nature. The farmer-warrior’s martial qualities, that is, are devoted to 
the ‘domestication of nature’ by the upholding of the ‘cult of the state’ through the 
enforcement of social regulation (Rebhorn 1988, 164). Hence the essential moral 
ambiguity of Machiavelli’s ideal Prince. Forever present is the tension between, on 
the one hand, the commitment to be a rule-enforcer and culture-bearer and, on the 
other hand, that detachment from established social and moral norms which frees 
every confidence trickster to live life as theatre and play the con game.
It was, nonetheless, this unlikely amalgamation of epic hero, farmer-warrior and 
confidence trickster which Machiavelli was thinking of when he famously contended 
in chapter eighteen of ‘The Prince’ that a successful Prince should be both a lion 
adept in the use of force and a fox adept in the use of fraud. It is necessary to be a 
lion, he claimed, in order to ‘fright away the wolves’, and a fox in order to ‘avoid the 
snares’. Machiavelli remained acutely aware, however, that it was wholly unrealistic 
to expect the useful qualities of both ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’ to appear within any single 
individual. Even the most flexible and adaptable Prince must ‘inevitably fail at some 
moment or other, in order to suit his own ‘modo del procedere’ (Rebhorn 1988, 
100). 
Rebhorn further clarifies that even those historical figures who Machiavelli 
viewed as approximating most closely to the ideal Prince ‘failed uniformly and 
consistently to manifest the traits of both confidence man and epic hero’. However 
– and this explains why Machiavelli felt able to propose the amalgamation of such 
very different caricatures – he believed that where individuals fail in meeting his 
expectations, collectivities may succeed: 
Cesare Borgia, for example, more often behaves as a tricky deceiver than as a warrior, and 
Ferdinand of Aragon is more warrior than deceiver. Even more striking, in the Discorsi,
Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Carthage, is a model lion, almost never a fox; Fabius 
Maximus, who saved Rome through guile, is just the reverse. These failures explain why 
Machiavelli ultimately prefers republican government to the rule of one individual: not 
because he believes in some lofty democratic ideal but because the many people involved 
in running a republic allow it to shift swiftly from role to role, from deceiving trickster to 
forceful warrior, as circumstances dictate, whereas single individuals could never match 
such flexibility (Rebhorn 1988, 138).
This interpretation is notably consistent with that of Antonio Gramsci who claimed 
in his ‘The Modern Prince’ that Machiavelli’s appeals to his ideal Prince are best 
understood as a barely veiled appeal to Italy’s collective will towards national unity 
(Hoare and Nowell-Smith (ed.) 1971, §126).
Pareto, to conclude then, predicated his sociological thought upon Machiavelli’s 
realisation that that the qualities required by the ideal Prince are rarely found within 
any given individual. He was to use the terms lion  and  fox  to refer only to two 
mutually exclusive personality types (Finer in Pareto 1966, 57; Burnham 1943; 156 ), 
and as John Scott put it, to two corresponding ‘styles’ of political leadership (Scott 

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Pareto’s ‘Psychologistic’ Sociology
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1996, 144). Here, finally, we can begin to fill out the personality model introduced 
in the last section. Being careful to acknowledge that Pareto did not actually use 
the terms ‘democratic character’ or ‘anti-democratic character’, we can conclude 
that Pareto nonetheless worked with a conception of democratic character, which 
he identified with the clientelismo and trasformismo systems in Italy, and which 
owed much to Machiavelli’s Renaissance confidence trickster. He also worked 
with a conception of anti-democratic character, which he found in Italy’s political 
extremists of the communist left and the fascist right, and which drew heavily upon 
Machiavelli’s epic hero and farmer-warrior.
Another important influence upon Pareto’s sociology was Machiavelli’s image 
of the government of a republic as a collective activity. Pareto’s whole sociological 
enterprise was to deal with how the alternating balance of ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’ within 
entire elites determines whether they fall in or out of step with the times. He was, 
in other words, thinking in terms of the concept of ‘social character’ (which Erich 
Fromm usefully defined as ‘the essential nucleus of the character structure of most 
members of a group’ (Fromm 1941, 277)). The question of whether it is indeed 
legitimate to employ individual characteristics to describe the behaviours of whole 
political groups and institutions will provide chapter three with its subject matter.
2.6  Pareto’s Historical Cycle and the Circulation of Elites 
Machiavelli hinted at – without properly developing – a cyclical theory involving the 
rise and fall of civilisations in accordance with a natural law of ‘corso’ and ‘ricorso’. 
James Meisel cites the following ‘unforgettable words’ from Machiavelli’s ‘History 
of Florence’ which appear to owe much to Plato’s earlier plutocratic cycle: 
‘virtue begets peace, peace begets idleness; idleness, mutiny; and mutiny, destruction.’ 
But then: ‘ruin begets laws; those laws, virtue; and virtue begets honor and good success’ 
(Meisel 1962, 267).
As Meisel then points out, one of Pareto’s unique contributions to classical elite 
theory, missed by Mosca, was to develop this cyclical theory using his now mutually 
exclusive lion and fox types. A ‘historical cycle’ was to be described in terms of 
patterned change to personality along what we might call Pareto’s ‘lion-fox axis’. 
Pareto went about this with real ingenuity. His historical cycle became more 
complex than Machiavelli’s because it now comprised economic, political and social 
subcycles which were hypothesised to run both in accordance with their separate 
internal dynamics, and in synchronicity with one another owing to forces at work 
within each cycle which regulate the pace of change within the other two. Crucially, 
each cycle incorporated psychological change along Pareto’s lion-fox axis, which, as 
we will now see, helped supply synchronising force between all three cycles.
Charles Powers (1987) makes our task much easier because he has distilled 
Pareto’s scattered writings on these cyclical dynamics. First of all, he explains each of 
the three cycles by setting out a sequence of causal mechanisms which lock together 
to form a cyclical dynamic. Then he proposes three further sequences of mechanisms, 
this time interfacing social, economic and political cycles, which explain how these 

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