Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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and Bester’s (1986) observation that individuals who gain GAIA scores indicating 
consistently negative attitudes towards institutional authority are inclined to feel 
anxious and alienated, and perceive the world as hostile. They credit McClosky and 
Schaar (1965) with noticing that such individuals tend to suffer from an impaired 
cognitive functioning which leads them to distort social reality by projecting 
anxieties, fears and uncertainties outwith themselves. In each case, negativistic 
personality might easily be involved. Negativists are well known to possess high 
levels of anxiety and to blame others for their misfortunes.
Hence it seems fair to conclude that just as the infant who experiences negativistic 
ambivalence is critical and suspicious of the intentions of parents or caretakers and 
therefore tends to ‘disidentify’ with them, the adult who continues to experience these 
same feelings will often remain on guard against all manner of cultural and ideological 
phenomena whose legitimacy they perceive to derive from the stamp of institutional 
authority. Section 4.7 will shortly develop this idea one small but important stage 
further when Nathan Leites’ theory of ‘projective distrust’ is explained. Fundamental 
to Leites’ theory is the notion that negativistic ambivalence is especially likely to 
influence adult orientations towards political authority under circumstances where 
political decision-making problems are too complex to be handled competently. 
Rather than acknowledge their own incapacities and distrust themselves, negativists 
become inclined to ‘project’ feelings of distrust onto politicians and governments. ‘I 
do not trust myself to make competent decisions’ becomes ‘they are not to be trusted 
to make competent decisions’. 
Leites’ argument will be called upon to help explain why Pareto’s ‘foxes’ should 
incline towards ideological relativism. Section 4.4 will, even before that, argue 
that these same feelings of rebellious dissatisfaction will often contribute to those 
heightened creative abilities which Pareto also attributed to his foxes. The argument 
will be that negativistic ambivalence may very frequently supply what Anthony 
Storr (1991: ch. 13) has called that ‘divine discontent’ which has driven so many 
creative challenges to orthodox ways of thinking. In short then, it will become very 
tempting to suppose that sceptical orientations towards norms, ideological relativism 
and heightened creativity do indeed cluster just as Pareto’s model proposes, because
these traits frequently co-originate from negativistic ambivalence.
Now that this section has introduced the idea, to be developed throughout 
subsequent sections, that Pareto’s ‘lion’ appears rather like the compulsive who 
possesses high superego strength, and that his ‘fox’ appears rather like the negativist 
who possesses low superego strength, it only remains to be added that this core 
distinction between the lion and the fox in terms of superego strength corresponds 
to one of the most important individual differences which personality psychologists 
have so far been able to settle upon. The treatment of superego strength as a major 
individual difference has long been attested to by the inclusion, as one of Raymond 
Cattell’s 16 primary personality factors, of a ‘factor G’ which distinguishes between 
those with high superego strength who are ‘conscientious, persevering, staid and 
moralistic’, and those with low superego strength who ‘think expediently, disregard 
rules and feel few obligations’ (Saville and Blinkhorn 1976, 22). More recently, 
the individual difference tapped by Cattell’s factor G has become established as 
‘conscientiousness’ which is now widely recognised as the third largest of the ‘big

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Pareto’s Psychology
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five’ dimensions of personality. Oliver John mentions that various researchers have 
tapped into Big Five Conscientiousness independently, each giving it different 
names. His examples include Cattell’s ‘superego strength’, Block’s ‘high ego 
control’, Buss and Plomin’s ‘impulsivity’ (a negative relationship, of course), Noller 
et al.’s ‘orderlinesss and social conformity’ and Gough’s ‘norm-favouring vs. norm-
doubting’ (see John in Pervin (ed.) 1990, 89). 
4.3  Individualism and Collectivism
It is clear from Pareto’s references in his ‘Treatise’ to the class IV and class V residues 
that some kind of individual difference involving individualism and collectivism 
also integrates within his psychological model. The (conservative) class II residues, 
he said, tend to combine with the class IV residues of ‘sociality’; the (liberal) class 
I residues, on the other hand, tend to combine with the class V residues of ‘the 
integrity of the individual and his appurtenances’ (e.g. Aron 1968, 134). This section 
will now look more closely at what traits stand in opposition here. A broad range of 
psychological constructs and theoretical perspectives will be brought forward for 
this purpose, but the basic traits at issue will prove sufficiently clear to allow items 
to be designed to tap this individual difference in the following chapter.
Pareto’s listing of the various sub-categories of the ‘residues of sociality’ 
immediately asks us to accept that altruistic behaviour (and it is important not to 
jump to any hasty definitions of this term here) relates more closely to conservative 
than to liberal personality. This is suggested by the fact that the sub-categories of the 
residues of sociality include what Pareto terms ‘the extension of self pity to others’, 
‘instinctive repugnance to suffering’ and ‘reasoned repugnance to useless suffering’ 
(Pareto 1935, §§ 1138–1144). He adds to this list ‘risking one’s life for others’ 
(§1148) and ‘sharing one’s property with others’ (§§ 1149–1152). It might seem odd 
that Pareto should then add ‘neophobia’ to this list. This seems to refer to feelings of 
hostility towards the unfamiliar, or as he puts it, ‘of resistance to innovations which 
are likely to disturb uniformities’ (Pareto 1935, §1130). 
This assertion of a link between altruism and neophobia does however suggest 
that it might be possible to place Pareto’s class IV residues of sociality on a firmer 
footing by explaining them from the perspective of evolutionary social psychology 
with reference to W.D. Hamilton’s (1964) concept of ‘inclusive fitness’. Homo 
sapiens, Hamilton’s seminal argument ran, have evolved design features which 
advantage the survival and reproductive fitness of human collectivities at the expense 
of each individual member of these collectivities. These evolved features include, for 
example, propensities for individuals to make sacrifices to the common good within 
narrow circumstances, most obviously where the collectivity is directly threatened 
in some way. The key consequence is that even though individuals may perish, those 
who survive will tend, as was presumably much more likely to be the case during 
our evolutionary history, to be of similar genetic stock. Hamilton’s point, then, was 
that genotypes have been able to replicate more successfully by preprogramming 
sacrificial and other qualities into each human carrier. However, to expand upon 
this theory by drawing upon what is now termed ‘genetic similarity theory’, it has 

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