Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
73
fuel fear, anger, even rage, when our identities are challenged by others whose 
identity work has taken them a different course.
Erikson’s notion of a heightened conscious experience of identity crisis is easily 
developed with reference to the idea that increasing exposure to multiple reality and 
its associated ‘shocks’, as brought on by rising levels of social complexity during the 
course of the twentieth century, are now inhibiting the gaining and maintaining of 
identity. This can be understood as follows. Firstly, our exposure to multiple reality 
may hinder the inscription within personality structure of consistent strategies for 
resolving childhood conflicts. Secondly, the shocks which we then experience as 
we pass between multiple realities during adulthood might reinforce or reawaken 
these conflicts. Thirdly, these shocks might also alert us to vulnerabilities within 
those identities which we precariously impose across multiple realities. These 
possibilities should perhaps be considered by future research which explores how 
our emotional appraisal systems, and surveillance systems in particular, interact 
with personality.
Ulrich Beck (1992) provides a good complementary interpretation of Zolo’s 
‘declining sense of reality’ which also deals with increased difficulties in gaining 
and maintaining identity. His argument focuses upon psychological fall-out from 
the breakdown of fixed role-structures. Beck points out that as economies become 
increasingly differentiated and as we are increasingly forced to switch jobs and 
retrain to perform very different tasks, we find it harder to develop and maintain 
life-long professional identities. This fuels what Beck terms the ‘individualisation 
of social risks’ whereby we come to bear the brunt of environmental risk directly 
because we feel progressively less able to link our individual interests in permanent 
ways to the interests of larger collectivities. Now more than ever, Beck says, it is 
possible to:
… cheerfully embrace seemingly contradictory causes, for example, to join forces with 
local residents in protests against noise pollution by air traffic, to belong to the Metalworkers 
Union, and yet – in the face of impending economic crisis – to vote conservative (Beck 
1992, 101).
An unfortunate consequence of this inability to make enduring and clear-cut 
identifications with collectivities, he says, is that we increasingly interpret our 
widening life experiences in individual terms. Beck shares the concerns of many 
sociologists when he says that:
… social problems are increasingly perceived in terms of psychological dispositions: as 
personal inadequacies, guilt feelings, anxieties, conflicts and neuroses. There emerges, 
paradoxically, a new immediacy of individual and society, a direct relationship between 
crisis and sickness. Social crises appear as individual crises, which are no longer (or are 
only very indirectly) perceived in terms of their rootedness in the social realm. This is 
one of the explanations for the current revival of interest in psychology (psychowelle). 
Individual achievement orientation similarly gains in importance. It can now be predicted 
that the full range of problems associated with the achievement society and its tendency 
towards (pseudo-) legitimations of social inequalities will emerge in the future (Beck 
1992, 100). 

---

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
74
Beck appears to be suggesting here that although recent generations have 
increasingly broken free from the constraints of those fixed life expectations which 
accompany permanent social roles, our life expectations have soared to unrealistic 
– and damaging – heights. ‘Individual achievement orientation’ is growing in 
importance because our inflated ideals increasingly drive us to see just how 
far we may ascend before we find our ceilings within social hierarchies.
9
 As we 
encounter obstacles, we feel personally accountable for shortfalls between our real 
life predicaments and our demands and expectations because we lack those close 
identifications with wider collectivities which allowed previous generations to 
comprehend their failures in sociological terms. Beck’s ‘individualisation of social 
risks’ may be understood as referring, then, to a creeping tendency for us to shift our 
perspectives so that our images of the world become less political in the sense that 
they grow less concerned with abstractly conceived, collective struggles. Instead, 
attention is diverted towards mapping out the immediate, interpersonal environment, 
as this helps us contend with personal hazards which arise within the contexts of 
increasingly unique life experiences. 
Taken together, then, these various pessimistic accounts of the human 
consequences of increasing complexity challenge Stewart and Cohen’s optimistic 
view of humanity keeping apace with, and improving itself through, rising levels of 
complexity. They suggest instead that we are becoming more likely to talk across 
one another from within a proliferating number of cultural spheres, each of which is 
becoming less able to provide identity and normative guidance. And they provide us 
with frameworks for understanding why we are becoming less likely to identify with 
political elites, and with the values, images of the world, and political visions for the 
future which political elites orchestrate. 
In order to further appreciate why these factors limit prospects for a political 
process which learns by trial and error, we might proceed in a number of directions, 
for example by considering their implications for political ‘leaders’ as well as for all 
gradations of elected and non-elected political ‘followers’. However, there seems 
to be a strong case for applying this thinking to political followers in particular, 
because unlike elected politicians who will typically have been socialised into taking 
on relatively secure professional identities, ordinary voters will tend, on the whole, 
to be more remote from sources of professional identity, both because they are more 
exposed to the insecurities of the labour market, and because their occupations 
will tend not to offer identities as clearly defined and as widely recognised (and 
hence as subject to constant social reinforcement) as those which immersion in the 
world of politics can provide. Furthermore, whereas politicians must nurse their 
local communities by cultivating links with many different organisations which 
9  Beck’s theory that feelings of low self worth are the inevitable consequence of unmet 
‘Faustian’ aspirations appears to be a very strong position in view of available evidence. 
Oliver James (1998) supplies a mass of evidence to suggest that a ‘winner-loser’ culture has 
indeed put down roots in the last few decades. Various psychological conditions, including 
aggressive and compulsive behaviours and depressive illnesses, James maintains, have all 
become far more prevalent because they flourish under conditions of reduced self-esteem 
brought about by inflated ego ideals.

---