Social Personality
45
Following Pareto’s insistence that ‘non-logical’ conduct accounts for most human
behaviour (Pareto 1935, §145–248) it will be argued that political elites frequently
encounter circumstances which involve ‘cognitive indeterminacy’ in the sense that
insufficient information exists to permit fully informed ‘rational’ decion-making.
Under such circumstances, heuristic guidance is required. Social personality will be
viewed in functional terms as both storing and supplying this guidance. Hence we
might say that a social personality comes into being when elite decisions made under
conditions of cognitive indeterminacy lead to the inscription of guiding heuristics
within elite culture. This will occur on multiple cultural levels,
including individual
personality structure. Once embedded within social personality, these heuristics will
then guide further decision-making under conditions of cognitive indeterminacy.
On the basis of subsequent performance they will then be reinforced, modified or
abandoned, perhaps attaining the status of elite tradition over time.
Section 3.4 will develop this functionalist approach to social personality by
arguing that under such conditions, political elites will strain towards guidance
which helps them behave in consistent and predictable ways. General personality
traits will be regarded as good potential sources of such guidance by virtue of their
stability over time and across diverse situations. More specifically, it will be argued
that the psychological dimension of conservatism-liberalism (which will be theorised
very broadly as comprising orientations
towards the status quo, risk and innovation)
typically contributes much of this stability, because the positions which we adopt
along this continuum supply our object worlds with vital organising elements.
Section 3.5 will provide a counterweight by arguing that political decision-making
is unlikely to involve settled strategies along these or indeed any other psychological
continua because, to some extent at least, trial-and-error learning yields information
concerning what sorts of strategies are objectively best at tackling problems.
Section 3.6 will reply with arguments to suggest that under conditions of increasing
complexity, such as advanced industrialised societies are now experiencing, the
scope for trial-and-error learning by political decision-makers is narrowing. This
will permit section 3.7 to conclude that the Paretian approach to political sociology
deserves a favourable reappraisal because it focuses squarely
upon aspects of social
personality which can guide policy-makers as they negotiate the contemporary
world’s widening sphere of uncertainty.
3.2 Social
Personality
The last chapter indicated that Pareto’s political sociology is concerned primarily
with the distributions of class I and class II residues throughout political elites. We
might also recall that these residues refer in part to patterned clusters of personality
traits which derive their basic structures from wider societal dynamics, but which
may fail to maintain their adaptive fitness as societal conditions change, becoming
impediments to, not instruments of, these dynamics. Indeed, this possibility
establishes the necessary theoretical context for understanding
that enthusiasm
for exposing elite maladaptation which Emory Bogardus termed Pareto’s ‘error
complex’. Hence we can say that Pareto’s political sociology envisions political
Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
46
elites as bound by psychological commonalities which influence their decisions, for
better or for worse. These commonalities will form the core of what are referred to
below as ‘social personalities’.
Certain pitfalls await those who would employ social personality as a basic unit
of analysis. For one thing, it is necessary to avoid the ‘individualistic fallacy’ which
assumes that groups possess the properties of their individual members. Another trap
is the ‘ecological fallacy’ which assumes that individual group members possess
group properties. Jon Elster draws our attention to disanalogies between individual
and group level explanation which show why we should not stray lazily between
levels. Firstly, he says, ‘social preferences’ are harder to define
than individual
preferences because it is harder to ascribe singular motives and goals to collectivities.
Secondly, ‘social beliefs’ may, unlike individual beliefs, rely upon socially dispersed
knowledge. Lastly, ‘social action’ is, unlike individual action, vulnerable to the
distorting, private interests of those agencies entrusted to carry it out. It is therefore
only possible to speak of ‘rough similarities, at best’ between social and individual
levels of explanation (Elster 1989a, 175).
At this juncture it is useful to conceptualise social personality from a
methodological individualist standpoint as consisting of aggregated personality
attributes; that is, of psychological commonalities between those who populate
collective decision-making bodies. Typically, these attributes are unlikely to be
shared
universally, and may not even be shared modally. To the extent that they
are shared, their salience is likely to vary considerably between individuals. Yet
we may still measure and analyse social personality, because its existence and
content are inferable from statistically significant patterns yielded by psychometric
studies. Taking this approach, social personality is very much an empirical construct;
moreover, it is one which by bridging individual and social levels, provides a basis
for exploring the true extent of Elster’s ‘rough similarities’.
To begin to understand why political elites should possess social personalities,
we can consider these from a cultural materialist standpoint
as vehicles for wider
social and economic
interests. As Margaret Hermann (1986, 182) mentions, several
theorists have written about ‘coalignment processes’ whereby political leaders
use persuasion and bargaining to secure support from ‘multiple constituencies’.
Similarly, Anthony Downs’ (1957) ‘Economic Theory of Democracy’ viewed the
‘rational’ political actor as motivated by the desire for political office and therefore
beholden to the ‘median voter’. Taking a broader view of political conflict, Antonio
Gramsci’s recentralisation of praxis within Marxism envisioned blocks of social
forces shifting in and out of mutually beneficial coalitions as a ‘war of position’
rages between labour and capital. In short, all such arguments supply theoretical
frameworks which set us thinking of political elites as managing cultural boundaries
to maximise cultural harmonisation with wider economic
interests which resource
them with finances, recruits, votes, and grassroots helpers.
These harmonisations will occur on multiple cultural levels, including that
of social personality. It is worth defining terms more closely here. The word
‘culture’ has been endlessly redefined to consist of norms, beliefs, values, manners,
institutional arrangements, artefacts, language, symbols, meanings, human processes,
relationships, patterns of interaction and the like. When
we refer to a culture we