Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
69
part at least, for the emergence of democratic character throughout the industrialised 
world during the course of the twentieth century.
Danilo Zolo takes a rather more pessimistic view of the human implications of 
exposure to increasing complexity, not just epistemological complexity but social 
complexity more generally. He argues that current levels have risen so far as to 
threaten to outstrip the human capacity to maintain productive conceptual models 
of the world. His theory of increasing complexity, which he says is heavily indebted 
to Niklas Luhmann’s neo-functionalist account of an increasing proliferation of and 
differentiation between social spheres, may be summarised as follows. 
Firstly, Zolo describes the splintering of society into an increasing number of 
spheres which develop their own, to some extent hermeneutically sealed, systems 
of meaning:
In post-industrial societies, typified by a high level of division of labour and functional 
differentiation, social complexity manifests itself as the variety and semantic discontinuity 
of the languages, understandings, techniques and values which are practised within each 
sub-system and its further differentiations ... The meaning of an event experienced within 
one social environment – a religious experience for example – cannot be conveyed in the 
terms relevant to the experience of a different environment – a sports club, for instance, 
or an office, or a nuclear research laboratory. The different experiences are not at root 
commensurable. The variables of social behaviour increase in correlation, and there is a 
consequent growth in the difficulty of its understanding and prediction (Zolo 1992, 5).
Secondly, it is explained that as these spheres proliferate and separate out, it becomes 
exponentially harder to map their interrelationships. Social complexity is therefore 
likely to multiply beyond the human capacity to model the world and, hence, to trace 
the likely consequences of political intervention:
Alongside the tendency to autonomy of the functional codes, there exist phenomena 
of growing interdependence between the various sub-systems. These phenomena are a 
condition of their co-ordination within the wider social orbit ... Political campaigns, for 
example, are nowadays conditioned by the requirements of the medium of television, 
but this medium is subordinate to legislation governing political use of the media, and 
both of these agents, the politicians and the television companies, have to submit to the 
exigencies of the advertising market. This process is in turn conditioned not only by general 
economic legislation, but also the increasingly fierce competition between television and 
more traditional forms of publicity .... an increase in phenomena of interdependence is 
accompanied by an increased difficulty of prediction and social intervention (Zolo 1992, 
5).
Thirdly, Zolo explains that social complexity brings about a progressive reduction 
in what Arnold Gehlen had earlier termed ‘the invariant reservoir of cultural real 
estate’. As individuals find it harder to agree upon what political goals are desirable, 
the scope for effective political intervention is further compromised:
Differentiation of experience favours social mobility. In place of a society weighted by the 
ballast of universal and unchanging principles, there is a pluralism of social spaces regulated 
by contingent and flexible criteria. Removal of the constraints of tradition, stratification, 
and localisation leads to a marked acceleration of social change. Moral ‘polytheism’ 

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
70
and widespread agnosticism over the ‘final questions’ take the place of institutionalised 
collective beliefs brought into being by political coercion (Zolo 1992, 6).
And finally, the subjective experience of social complexity is explained in terms of 
epistemological overload and increasing anxiety:
... increased levels of differentiation lead to a greater ‘depersonalisation’ and ‘abstractness’ 
of social relations. Variety of experience increases, but the experiences are more directly 
moulded by functional needs or expectations ... The multiplicity of possible actions and 
the increase in the range of services produce a kind of ‘selective overload’ in a context of 
increasing insecurity and instability. The wider the spectrum of possible choices extends, 
the more hazardous becomes the need for each agent to choose between options and 
‘reduce the complexity’ (Zolo 1992, 6).
Zolo says even more, and implies more still, about what might be involved in the 
human experience of increasing social complexity. Whereas Stewart and Cohen 
welcome the development of a ‘tolerance of inconsistencies’ within the framework 
of an increasingly democratic, ‘multiplex’ culture, Zolo once more articulates the 
concerns of contemporary cultural pessimists: 
It is easy to observe, with Gehlen, that in societies of high technological development 
it is now extremely difficult to identify any sphere even of direct experience in which 
individuals operate with a secure sense of reality, confident that they are using autonomous 
criteria of judgement and staying at the height of their intellectual efficiency. The overload 
of communication and symbolised stimulation appears to have reserved its most powerful 
effect for the domain of private life, including sexual emotions. The explosive increase in 
North America of recourse to psychoanalysis and other, very disparate, forms of private 
counselling may be taken as an index of the general decline of the ‘sense of reality’ and of 
the growing insecurity in information based societies which have reached a high level of 
complexity. The phenomenon of teenage suicide, now constantly increasing in the United 
States and in many European countries, may well also deserve to be seen in the same light 
(Zolo 1992, 169).
In their (1971) ‘Treatise on Social Phenomenology’, Berger and Luckman help us 
understand this ‘declining sense of reality’. They appear well in agreement with Zolo 
when they suggest that increased social complexity has brought about a fracturing 
of human knowledge into ‘an increasing number and complexity of sub-universes’ 
which have become ‘esoteric enclaves, increasingly inaccessible to outsiders’ (Berger 
and Luckman 1971, 104). They describe our subjective experience of movement 
between these sub-universes as follows:
My consciousness… is capable of moving through different spheres of reality. Put 
differently, I am conscious of the world as consisting of multiple realities. As I move from 
one reality to another I experience the transition as a kind of shock. This shock is to be 
understood as caused by the shift in attentativeness that the transition entails (Berger and 
Luckman 1971, 35). 
As we move between cultural spheres, then, a kind of ‘shock’ arises from the 
experience of incongruity. This stimulates our thoughts, awakening us to ways in 

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