Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
51
to reduce dissonance through processes of belief modification which restore overall 
consistency, either by inventing or otherwise obtaining new cognitions, or by 
downplaying existing ones. One application of this theory to the study of political 
socialisation was that of Charles Osgood, who concluded in his (1978) ‘Conservative 
Words and Radical Sentences in the Semantics of International Politics’ that public 
figures ‘gradually and unconsciously change their values and beliefs towards 
consistency with what they feel they must say and do’. 
Jon Elster (1998, 1–18) reinforces Osgood’s view by explaining why such 
dissonant feelings should frequently arise to challenge private belief within the 
context of deliberative interaction between politicans and those affected by their 
decisions. Elster argues that there is a ‘civilizing force of hypocrisy’ whereby 
political decision-makers seek approval by explaining their preferences in terms 
acceptable to their audiences, even though they would choose different terms 
for the purposes of their own understanding. We might find this civilizing force 
operating in many situations, but there are grounds for regarding it as integral to 
leader-follower interaction in particular. This is because leaders who call upon the 
‘silent understandings’ or ‘central traditions’ of their insitutions stand to gain respect 
or even veneration from followers. Hence the motive to gain or maintain power 
and prestige will often impel leaders to reaffirm their institution’s social personality, 
perhaps by reinterpreting it in the light of current events, or by stressing certain 
memetic components which are likely to strike a chord with followers for a particular 
reason. The final chapter will provide exemplification. We will see that ‘conservative 
individualism’ can be viewed both as an attribute of individual personality and as as 
a theme embedded within the Conservative Party’s central tradition. Conservative 
leaders have amplified it at different points in that party’s history, in efforts to justify 
policy and win popularity. 
3.3 Cognitive 
Indeterminacy
The last section looked at why the social personalities of political elites should endure, 
despite ongoing erosion of their economic constituencies. We also considered the 
replicatory powers of memes, not in relation to the quality of heuristic guidance they 
provide, but rather in terms of how well they satisfy psychological utilities which 
may sometimes permit them to evolve in ways quite unrelated to the quality of their 
guidance. This section will now begin to explore the nature and quality of heuristic 
guidance provided by memes contained within social personality. We will look not 
so much at why social personalities replicate over time, but rather at why they are 
likely to exist at all. The argument will be that they have a vital function: to help 
political elites respond consistently and cohesively to decision-making scenarios 
characterised by cognitive indeterminacy. 
It is useful, in the first instance, to consider cognitive indeterminacy with specific 
reference to what Weber (1968) famously called the ‘zweckrational’ form of social 
action. Taking this approach, cognitive indeterminacy can refer to confusion over 
both ‘means’ and ‘ends’ in decision-making. In the former case, indeterminacy arises 
where insufficient knowledge exists to allow decision-makers to calculate which of 

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
52
a range of possible policies or procedures is most likely to succeed in securing a 
desired objective. Pareto had been particularly keen to reveal the prevalence of this 
kind of indeterminacy, labelling political behaviours under these conditions ‘non-
logical’.
1
 Secondly, cognitive indeterminacy can be said to exist where decision-
makers have no basis for determining which of various achievable outcomes is most 
desirable. For Elster this is the problem of establishing criteria to set up a ‘ranking of 
preferences’. Pareto, similarly, was fond of affirming that human reason is unable to 
tell policy-makers what ends they should seek.
2
 Of course, as Elster’s discussion of 
disanalogies between individual and group preference indicates, collective decisions 
may frequently reveal confused aims because they emerge from competition between 
diverse interests and views.
A question arising here is whether decisions made under either or both forms 
of indeterminacy should be considered ‘irrational’. Elster has pointed out that this 
question reflects the western world’s unique concern with the standard of instrumental 
rationality. It also fails to recognise that such theories have long been surpassed by 
‘practical’ conceptions of rationality. A distinguishing feature of theories of ‘practical 
rationality’ is that they refer to the use of heuristic guides to decision-making under 
conditions of indeterminacy involving either means or ends. Norms are perhaps most 
often mentioned as guides within this context. Yet aspects of individual personality 
also feature to varying degrees. For example, Elster (1989c: chapter 3) lists social 
norms, moral norms, legal norms, convention equilibria, private norms, habits and 
compulsive neuroses, and traditions as all constituting potential sources of ‘non-
rational motivation’ which cannot be reduced to self interest, and which may take 
hold in the absence of clear rational criteria for behaviour. 
Many writers use psychological theory to explain these non-rational motivations 
which guide us through uncertainty. George Marcus (2003) has established an 
important new direction for political psychology research by counting our emotions 
amongst these. To fully appreciate his argument, we must however challenge the 
conditioning influence of centuries of western thought which have represented the 
human condition as a timeless struggle between reason and passion. One prominent 
early illustration of this is Plato’s image of the reasoning soul as a charioteer struggling 
to command two winged horses, one (representing passion) brutish and resistant to 
the charioteer’s desire to steer towards human perfection, the other (representing 
spirit) noble and obedient. We similarly find reason opposed to passion within 
Freud’s tripartite theory of personality structure, where this time it is the reasoning 
ego which struggles, and Plato’s horses give way to the conflicting demands of id 
and superego. This conflict is easy to locate within Pareto too. Although we should 
bear in mind Pareto’s derision of both ‘the cult of reason’ and ‘the goddess science’, 
there is nonetheless a cold, detached, ‘view from Mars’ within his sociology. More 
specifically, his scientistic mapping out of sociologically significant aspects of 
our inner, emotional lives, simultaneously labelling these ‘non-logical’, seems to 
1  Pareto defined a ‘non-logical act’ as one where ‘means are logically conjoined to 
ends’, both subjectively and objectively (Pareto 1935, §150). 
2  Pareto returns repeatedly in his ‘Treatise’ to the inevitable ‘vagueness of the notion of 
utility’ (e.g. Pareto 1935, §2143).

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