Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
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which each of these spheres make separate, perhaps contradictory, demands upon 
our thoughts and behaviours. The more we find our attention drawn to incongruent 
features of cultural spheres, the more we engage in conscious comparisons which 
challenge those normative assumptions which guide us within each of these spheres. 
Placing these ‘shocks’ alongside the feelings of anxiety, insecurity and doubt which 
Gehlen and Zolo see emerging with social complexity, we might plausibly explain 
all of these states with reference to George Marcus’ more recent theory of affective 
intelligence, which views the harnessing of anxiety by the ‘surveillance system’ as 
serving the useful purpose of disengaging habits and forcing new thinking in the 
light of strange and potentially threatening circumstances. 
This understanding of what might be involved in Gehlen and Zolo’s ‘declining 
sense of reality’ lends itself to further development from various theoretical 
perspectives. For example, it might be interpreted from within Bourdieu’s sociology 
as a clash between multiple doxa. Or we might link it to those feelings of normlessness 
or ‘anomie’ which Durkheim, and by extension, Parsons, regarded as arising in 
the absence of those flexible and liberating norms and values which produce what 
Durkhem termed ‘organic solidarity’ and Parsons termed ‘pattern maintenance’ in 
modern, highly differentiated societies. One more specific line of development might 
then be Parsons’ sociology of democratic society which linked fascism in particular 
to the anomic breakdown of liberal social order. 
Taking our lead once more from classical sociology, it seems particularly 
important to also mention Georg Simmel’s (1903) ‘The Metropolis and Mental 
Life’, which presents these shocks as arising more within urban settings. Simmel 
had argued that the condition of ‘metropolitan individuality’ entails both the 
intensification and unsettling of emotional life, owing to the swifter succession 
and greater diversity of stimuli encountered within cities. This quicker rhythm of 
events overstimulates the mind. Habitual and emotional responses, which are more 
prominent within the thought patterns of rural dwellers, go increasingly challenged 
and have less chance to form. Simmel also argued that city living brings about a 
shift in the locus of mental activity from emotion to reason (which is conceived as 
existing at the ‘upper levels’ of the mind). This produces a more intellectualised 
thought process, which is distinguishable from emotional thinking not just by its 
properties of lucidity and conscious awareness, but also by its greater malleability 
under the weight of constantly changing stimuli. Crucially, this malleability renders 
the intellect more adaptive to city life. The mental shift from emotion towards reason 
also produces what Simmel calls a ‘matter of fact attitude in the treatment of persons 
and things’ which synergises with the very impersonal functioning of the money 
economy. Simmel also speaks more specifically of an ‘indifference to the distinctions 
between things’ which he famously terms ‘the blasé attitude’. This refers, crucially, 
not to a failure to perceive things, but rather to an inability to distinguish between 
their respective values. For Simmel, this devaluing of the world ‘ends inevitably in 
dragging the personality downward into a feeling of its own valuelessness’.
There are many further ways to theorise the psychological consequences of 
exposure to Berger and Luckman’s ‘multiple realities’. One intriguing possibility 
is that this might stimulate individuals to develop multiple personae. This can be 
interpreted positively. For example, we might theorise the emergence of Stewart 

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
72
and Cohen’s multiplex mind with reference to symmetries between extelligence 
paradigms, multiple realities and multiple personae, such that the multiplex mind 
is said to result from a process whereby extelligence paradigms channel separately 
through multiple realities to be absorbed, once more separately, by multiple personae. 
Our democratic tolerance of difference could then be theorised as stemming in part 
from our capacity to tolerate our multiple personae and their related contradictions. 
More pessimistically, however, the development of multiple personae might entail an 
amplification of pre-existing inclinations towards either mild dissociative experience 
or, more seriously, dissociative pathology. This possibility becomes particularly 
interesting in view of highly controversial estimates of dramatic increases over 
recent decades in levels of what has variously been termed dissociative identity 
disorder and multiple personality disorder.
8
In order to further interpret Gehlen and Zolo’s concept of a ‘declining sense of 
reality’ at the level of identity, we might consider Erik Erikson’s belief that ever 
since the middle decades of the twentieth century, we have faced growing difficulties 
in gaining and maintaining integrated identities. Erikson argues that since that time, 
successive generational cohorts have found the adolescent phase of self-definition 
troublesome:
The young person, in order to experience wholeness, must feel a progressive continuity 
between that which he has come to be during the long years of childhood and that which 
he promises to become in the anticipated future; between that which he conceives 
himself to be and that which he perceives others to see in him and to expect of him... 
The adolescent search for a new and yet reliable identity can perhaps best be seen in 
the persistent endeavour to define, to overdefine, and to define oneself and each other 
in often ruthless comparison; while the search for reliable alignments can be seen in the 
restless testing of the newest in possibilities and the oldest in values. Where the resulting 
self-definition, for personal or collective reasons, becomes too difficult, a sense of role 
confusion results: the youth counterpoints rather than synthesizes his sexual, ethnic, 
occupational, and typological alternatives and is often driven to decide definitely for one 
side or the other (Erikson 1964, 91–92) 
To make an important qualification here, Erikson argues that adolescence has always
involved the working out of identity conflicts which stem, as psychoanalytic theory 
holds, from early childhood. What has changed, he mentions in his (1968) ‘Identity: 
Youth and Crisis’, is that adolescents increasingly ‘wear these conflicts on their 
sleeves’. They ‘play at making them happen’ (they are acted out) whereas previously 
they were preserved as ‘inner secrets’ (they were repressed) (Erikson 1968, 26–28). 
Whereas in the past it was easier to achieve unconscious resolutions of identity 
conflicts within stable patterns of thought and behaviour across a wide range of 
situations, now our conscious manifestations of our conflicts bring confusing choices 
to light, and our efforts to bring consistency become unsettled and vulnerable. Even 
where consistency and settlement appear on the surface, inner doubts remain which 
8  Arguments for and against this are provided by Boor (1982) and Lilienfeld et al.
(1999).

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