Social Personality
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and with the conviction demanded of political elites. By contrast, they will find
heuristic guidance ever less discernible within an increasingly heterogeneous,
volatile, unpredictable electorate. Moreover, leaders of political elites may at such
times find that it suits their interests to have recourse to elite social personality for
the purposes of policy formulation, because this will create the impression that their
decisions reflect the aggregated inputs of ordinary members and supporters, which
will help them shore up weakening social capital in these areas.
Followers within
political elites may respond with a keener focus upon elite social personality also.
The degree of fit between leadership decision and elite social personality may serve
for them as a barometer for the extent to which elite power is distributed downwards,
and for the extent to which leadership decisions either remain true to the ‘soul’ of the
organisation or serve other interests.
3.7 Conclusion
This chapter has argued that increased social and epistemological complexity
threatens political decision-makers by obscuring from them the likely consequences
of their decisions. It is worth stressing just how seriously some theorists take this
depiction of the modern political condition. Niklas Luhmann says that ‘contingency’,
or the unpredictability of future events, is ‘modern society’s defining attribute’
(Luhmann 1998, 44). Very similarly, Jon Elster argues
that political decision-
making is, generally speaking, characterised by a ‘radical cognitive indeterminacy’
where, as he puts it, ‘theory is impotent’ and ‘we cannot learn from experience and
experiments’ (Elster 1989a, 181). From this point, it is a very short step to reiterate
that political elites will have growing cause to turn to social personality to help
them deal with decision-making problems consistently and predictably, and to then
turn once more to the question of whether Pareto successfully
based his sociology
upon psychological qualities capable of generating heuristic guidance useful for this
purpose. This chapter has already provided a fair indication that he did, because it
has shown that Pareto’s psychological model included general orientations towards
change, risk and innovation, which we can think of as providing a backbone for the
conservative-liberal continuum. However, the following chapter will explore each of
these constructs in the theoretical depth they deserve, in
part so that we may better
gauge the richness of their implications for political decision-making, and also so
that we can then assess Pareto’s political sociology in the final chapter. This will
finally allow us to ascertain whether it is to Pareto’s psychological insight that we
should turn, if we are to rate him as a key figure within classical sociology.
Chapter 4
Pareto’s Psychology
4.1 Introduction
This chapter will examine what Pareto said concerning each of the individual
differences which align to form his psychological model. It will consider how well
these differences match up with constructs which
have subsequently developed
within psychological and sociological literatures, and it will call upon wide-ranging
evidence to assess the extent to which they align as Pareto envisioned. For this task
to remain manageable, it has been necessary to focus upon what seem to be the
model’s core individual differences.
The following six sections argue that the imposition of a six dimensional structure
gives good coverage. Hence, to test Pareto’s model upon a given population would
mean asking, firstly, whether the following six individual differences actually
exist as
real dimensions of personality, and, secondly, whether they lock together
along a general multi-trait person continuum as Pareto believed. The first of these
six sections, section 4.2, will begin by exploring the polarity between cultural
conservatism and liberal scepticism which Pareto set within his model. Section
4.3 will then look at how an individualism/collectivism continuum aligns beside
this, such that collectivism clusters with cultural conservatism, and individualism
clusters with liberal scepticism. Section 4.4 will then
consider those heightened
creative abilities which Pareto also linked to liberal individualism. Section 4.5 will
look at Pareto’s assumption that creative, liberal individualism also tends to cluster
with what we now term the general personality trait of ‘risk-taking’ or ‘sensation-
seeking’. Section 4.6 will thereafter consider how Pareto’s ‘force-fraud’ continuum
also slots into the model, such that liberals incline towards manipulativeness and
compromise in their dealings with political opponents, while conservatives incline
towards blunt, uncompromising and aggressive strategies. Finally, section 4.7 will
consider how comfortably an ideological conviction-relativism continuum fits
within this overall pattern, such that conservatives now become zealous ideologues
and liberals become detached relativists.
Before examining each of
these individual differences, this introductory section
will prepare the reader with some very general comments on the model. Firstly, it is
worth reiterating that Pareto treated the ‘conservative’ traits listed above as common
within the lower echelons of mainstream political elites. Yet he also regarded them as
underpinning the violent and extremist politics of both the far right
and the far left.
Aspiring politicians who possess these traits, Pareto believed, will gravitate towards
small, highly principled parties which may so esoteric as to be almost inaccessible,
and which split easily into factions due to squabbles over ideological purity. Such
parties will tend to recoil from opportunities to make deals
with dominant political