Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
80
and economic elites. Yet shouting from the sidelines they may strike populist chords
by resorting to their favourite battlecry: that those who rule are weak, corrupt, self-
seeking, short-termist and lacking in commitment to any grand political vision.
By contrast, Pareto used the ‘liberal’ traits listed above to characterise moderate
politicians who hold the centre ground. Unhindered by rigid ideology and motivated
largely by material gain, they will gravitate towards mainstream political parties
which may be of
any sociopolitical complexion provided they can serve as stepping
stones to the centres of power. Pareto’s liberal-moderate
types will thrive close
to these centres because their superior manipulative and people-oriented skills
allow them to succeed within diverse and constantly shifting networks of highly
competitive individuals and interest groups.
Building upon Machiavelli’s notion that the ‘religious’ personality tends to be
distributed more amongst the populace than amongst its rulers, Pareto also regarded
the above listed conservative traits as having been distributed more amongst masses
than amongst elites throughout western history. This is an enormous claim, but it does
find some empirical confirmation in studies of the phenomenon of ‘working class
authoritarianism’ which now stretch back over fifty years. These personality types
make their deepest inroads
within the political elites, Pareto believed, as societies
go through their ‘crystallised’ phases which are characterised by economic austerity,
cultural insularity, low levels of artistic and intellectual achievement, strict social
and moral codes, and highly centralised political authority. They thrive under these
conditions because of their superior functional adaptation to the heavily centralised
religious or military governments which these conditions promote.
As we will soon see, some psychological studies place Pareto’s
theory relating
conservative personality to the ‘crystallised’ societal condition on a firmer footing,
by showing that conservative personality can be regarded as a ‘crisis orientation’
.
These studies encourage us to view psychological conservatism as manifesting a
biologically rooted imperative for the human species to close ranks under threatening
circumstances, simultaneously becoming more altruistic towards in-groups, more
hostile and distrustful towards out-groups, and more inclined to think rigidly and
categorically. Pareto viewed his liberal moderate types, on the other hand, as
filling the elites (and squeezing the conservatives out) as societies go through their
‘individualised’ phases which are characterised by growing material prosperity,
loosening attachments
to social and moral norms, artistic and intellectual rebirth,
and political decentralisation. We will see that Pareto’s theory relating psychological
liberalism to improving societal conditions squares rather well with controversial
evidence suggesting that a culture shift in the direction of
‘postmaterialist value
orientation’ has been taking place throughout the industrialised world for at least
several decades now. Pareto’s theory is also strikingly consistent with evidence,
also discussed below, which suggests that levels of ‘Machiavellianism’ and even
‘psychopathy’ have risen throughout the industrialised world over the same period.
Pareto also took from Machiavelli the idea of conservative personality as a
rural
phenomenon (e.g. Pareto 1935, §1723, §2465, §2533). Machiavelli’s ‘lion’ was,
to reiterate, a ‘farmer-warrior’ and a ‘cultivator’, and it
was to the rural peasantry
that Machiavelli looked for infusions of ‘religious’ (i.e. pagan) sentiment which he
hoped would re-glue and reinvigorate Italian society. However, Pareto believed that
Pareto’s Psychology
81
Machiavelli’s references to ‘religious’ individuals and peoples were unfortunate
because by using this word he ‘mistook the part for the whole’. Pareto felt that
his own conservative ‘class II residues’ better encompassed the broad range of
meanings which Machiavelli was trying to convey (Pareto 1935, §2465). Despite
this reaffirmation of Machiavelli’s link between conservative personality and rural
living, Pareto however displayed no desire to remain close to Machiavelli by then
linking his liberal type to such value-laden constructs as urban ‘sophistication’,
‘decadence’, ‘artificiality’ or ‘rootlessness’. In fact,
he accused Machiavelli of
‘lapsing’ into the moralistic view of city life as ‘corrupt’ (Pareto 1935, §2533).
In another section of his ‘Treatise’, it is highly likely that Pareto had Machiavelli
in mind when he observed that several authors have written histories of Rome
simply in order to vent ‘ethical prejudices against wealth and luxury’ (Pareto 1935,
§2589). This disagreement with Machiavelli might seem strange given that Pareto’s
experience of trasformismo and clientelismo created within him a near obsession
with what he viewed as the corruption of Italy’s political and economic elites. It is
therefore likely that he would have felt at least some temptation to expand beyond
Machiavelli by more fully applying his model of personality to make it descriptive
of psychological aspects of urban/rural division. However, Pareto was well known
for his aristocratic and epicurean opposition to petty moralising (Aron 1967, 161).
It could easily be this, combined with his strong desire to be read as a scientist
and not as a moralist, which made Pareto step back from
attaching his sociological
theory to that long tradition of religious and social thought which has heaped moral
condemnation onto city living.
Before moving on, it is important to say a little about the major theoretical
perspectives which will be called upon to evaluate Pareto’s psychological model.
Psychoanalysis will serve as a framework theory which contributes not just to the
explanations of all six individuals within the model, but also to our understanding of
the model’s overall psychological coherence. Psychoanalysis has of course become
marginalised within psychological theory over the course of several decades now.
This book does not address arguments which have arisen concerning whether it
is best understood as a hermeneutic enterprise which sometimes provides useful
metaphors, or whether it has ‘scientific’ status by either
consisting of theories which
are directly testable, or of theories which are subject to sophisticated falsification
by virtue of their capacity to generate testable hypotheses. A good summary of this
debate is provided by Drew Westen (in Pervin (ed.) 1990, 34–38). It is appropriate,
however, to heed Eysenck’s (1985) warning that many studies have been too hasty in
their claims of finding empirical support for Freudian theories. Much of the problem
stems from the fact that psychoanalytic theory often provides just one of several
ways to interpret correlational data (as this chapter will demonstrate). Given the
ambiguous status of psychoanalytic theory, then, it is important to stress that this
chapter does not set Pareto’s model within a psychoanalytic
framework in order to
prove that it accurately describes different kinds of personality structure. Instead, it
merely argues that psychoanalytic theory works well as an integrative framework,
and that Pareto’s psychological intuitions contain surprising insight given that he
formed his ideas before Freud.