Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
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evidence will be provided in the following chapter. We will see that our orientations 
towards institutional authority tend to be stable across a range of different types 
of institutional authority such as the armed forces and the police. Hence we can at 
least say that our orientations towards institutional authority tend to be ordered by 
mental templates, and it is perfectly reasonable to further suppose that childhood 
experience will strongly influence their basic characteristics. Indeed, psychologists or 
counsellors who have experienced ‘transference relationships’ with their patients or 
clients are well aware of the potential for early relationships with authority figures to 
form templates which can be displaced onto much later relationships with therapists, 
and indeed for these relationships to be deliberately cultivated within the context of 
therapeutic treatment, through extensions of empathic understanding to patients.   
For a complementary perspective on the psychological influences upon our 
negotiation of uncertainty we may consider Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of an 
unconsciously learned ‘habitus’. This concept refers to aspects of culture existing 
below the level of ideology which condition the daily habits, rituals, skills, 
preferences and bodily experiences of individuals. There are interesting parallels 
between Bourdieu and Pareto. Both undertook to bridge ‘the mind and society’ 
in sociological rather than psychological terms, using these terms with partly 
psychological referents to produce confusion and disagreement amongst secondary 
commentators. Much like Pareto’s residues, Bourdieu’s habitus consists of largely 
unsensed guidelines, or ‘durably installed generative principles’ as they have been 
termed. These originate from within culture to organise human agency and thereby 
regularise thought and behaviour. Just as Pareto insisted we should not confuse the 
residues which drive behaviour with those ideological ‘derivations’ which articulate 
the residues, Bourdieu distinguished the habitus from what are termed ‘doxa’. These 
doxa are pre-reflexive elements of subjective experience or ‘practical sense’ which 
extend by degrees from pre-verbal origins into ideological formulations which find 
wide acceptance as folk wisdoms. Doxic experience includes feelings which we 
attach to behaviours at odds with what the habitus would prescribe. Most obviously, 
we may perceive our behaviours to be unnatural or strange where they are required 
by novel situations. Under such circumstances, our mental focus upon divergence 
between how we actually behave and how we would normally behave is likely 
to serve the very useful purpose of aiding our learning and adaptation (as indeed 
Marcus’ theory of affective intelligence argues). Equipped with this subjective 
awareness, then, although we may not sense the habitus directly, we may nonetheless 
sketch its boundaries. Being pre-reflexive, doxa also tend to reflect existing social 
arrangements. For example, it is through these that we experience power relationships 
inscribed within the habitus. The more these feature within our lived experience, the 
more likely we are to acquiesce towards them. Doxa also count as conservative 
forces because they represent channels through which great ideological paradigms 
influence us. For example, Bourdieu regarded ‘neo-liberalism’ both as an ideology 
resulting from doxic experience, and as consisting of cultural agencies which shape 
habitus producing structures (Chopra 2003).  
In insisting that it is the habitus, more than belief and intentionality, that drives 
behaviour, Bourdieu does not downplay the influence of ideologies such as neo-
liberalism so much as alert us to the possibility that what we might in the first instance 

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
56
identify as a ‘belief’ might also refer to wider cultural agencies which mould us. His 
view that unconsciously held generative principles instil constant and predictable 
behaviour over time and across situations, and that these principles although hard 
to grasp may be partially captured in political ideological terms, certainly helps us 
theorise the anchoring of our behaviour under uncertain conditions. 
Many writers have also explored guidelines for the negotiation of uncertainty 
which exist on conscious ideational levels more open to intellectual scrutiny 
than Bourdieu’s habitus. One highly productive approach has been to establish 
psychological generalisations which alert us to our own biases under such 
conditions, so that by knowing our biases we can then compensate for them. 
Kahneman and Tversky (1973) mention, for example, the famous ‘anchoring’ 
heuristic which says that we tend to base our decisions upon familiar positions 
such as rough statistical estimates or common assumptions, because we find it 
easier to structure our thoughts in relative terms, based upon such anchors, than to 
think in absolute terms. Likewise, many stock market investors are painfully well 
aware of the heuristic which Arkes and Blumer (1985) term the ‘sunk cost effect’. 
This says we tend to be more reluctant to remove ourselves from loss-making 
positions than we should be, because having incurred losses we tend to overestimate 
probabilities of recovery, which means we underestimate probabilities for losses 
to widen. Many writers have tried to compile lists of heristics such as these, in 
order to help us correct our many decision biases. Indeed, Pareto’s own listing 
of the residues (Pareto 1935, §888) deserves to be read in precisely these terms. 
Pareto advises us that we sometimes make mental linkages between unusual things 
and exceptional occurrences (§§922–28), and that we sometimes place a logical 
veneer over our non-logical acts (§§972–75). Pareto linked these biases to the 
class I residues. Similarly, we are told that biases can arise from our social class 
perspectives (§§1043–51), and that our thoughts can often fall under the influence of 
a ‘personification’ bias where we attribute to a theory, or even to a place, properties 
such as ‘male and female principles’ which should properly refer to persons (§§ 
1070–85). For Pareto, these biases reflect the class II residues.
4
 A similar picture 
emerges when we consider Pareto’s listing of the various ideological ‘derivations’ 
which manifest and rationalise the residues (Pareto 1935, § 1419). For example, 
we are told that words or phrases may be ‘mere devices for evoking sentiments’ 
and that these can become motivational where they are have been ‘repeated over 
and over again’ (§ 1426). He also argues that when people obtain authoritative 
social positions due to certain competencies, we tend to then overestimate their 
competencies in areas where they have not proven themselves. We may think 
accordingly in terms of a ‘veneration’ bias extending from ‘simple admiration’ to 
‘outright deification’ (§ 1436–37). Taking stock of these and many similar biases 
listed under the many subcategories of residue and derivation appearing within the 
‘Treatise’, we should perhaps acknowledge that Pareto’s ‘error complex’ deserves 
4  Pareto’s linking of personification to the class II residues becomes more interesting in 
view of the following chapter’s argument that these residues can be understood with reference 
to the superego-dominated person who has strongly internalised the imago of the same sex 
parent.

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