Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
102
Pareto seems to have little more to say concerning the nature of creativity. Hence 
the remainder of this section will simply assume that he included individual variance 
in something like ‘general creativity’ within his psychological model, and it will 
dig deeper for theory and research which helps us evaluate whether he was right 
to incorporate it within his psychological model as he did. A pattern will emerge. 
High levels of general creativity will be linked to some combination of psychoticism, 
Machiavellianism, psychopathy and negativism; low levels of creativity will be linked 
to compulsive personality. Hence Pareto’s assumptions concerning how general 
creativity tends to correlate with other traits will be shown to be quite sound. 
A good way to begin is to run with Pareto’s view of creativity as a process of 
mental association and look at some of its implications. Arthur Koestler’s theory of 
the creative process of ‘bissociation’ is helpful here because it provides a useful tool 
for exploring the basic process which Pareto seems to have had in mind. It will soon 
emerge that this simple, traditional approach to understanding creativity lends itself 
to a particular understanding of individual variance in levels of creative ability.
Koestler describes the process of mental association (or ‘bissociation’ as he terms 
it) as follows. Each instance of bissociation involves a ‘sudden collision of two 
unrelated association trains at a given point’ (Koestler 1949, 36). These association 
trains are previously unrelated in the sense that they carry information which 
has originated from ‘habitually incompatible’, ‘self consistent’ and ‘structurally 
homogeneous’ contexts which he terms ‘operative fields’. What he means is that 
they have originated from clusters of mental associations enmeshed within different 
parts of the brain which have each developed to permit individuals to interact with 
separate aspects of their environments. Koestler adds that once ‘junctional concepts’ 
come into being as these association trains collide, there occurs a kind of ‘short 
circuiting’ effect whereby operative fields begin to coalesce into ‘continuous flows’ 
(a reference to William James’ ‘stream of consciousness’ metaphor). In short, then, 
Koestler’s image of the creative process can be understood to have taken a small but 
important step beyond Pareto. Whilst Pareto only implied as much when discussing 
the making of ‘new combinations’, Koestler explicitly viewed separate thought 
habits as constituting stocks of metaphors which may be called upon to allow the 
world to be modelled more effectively. This theory of creativity as a process hinging 
upon a clever use of metaphor has retained plausibility over the years. It is notably 
consistent with contemporary ‘modularity’ theories in evolutionary psychology which 
explain individual differences in creativity in terms of complexity of interconnection 
between relatively autonomous neural ‘modules’ or ‘subsystems’ which have each 
evolved to address separate adaptive problems.
5
 Indeed, this helps explain why the 
maintenance of a good range of hobbies and pastimes should very commonly be 
counted as an indicator of creative ability.
5  Gardner’s (1985) theory of ‘multiple intelligence’, for example, identifies modules 
which separately control linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, 
and interpersonal domains of information processing which may be so understood. Some 
research (e.g. Abelson 1997, 29–32) has strongly related poor communication between neural 
subsystems such as these to prejudice, thereby helping to add further detailed understanding 
to the common research finding that human intelligence and creativity are negatively related 
to prejudice, as indeed Pareto’s psychological model suggests.  

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Pareto’s Psychology
103
Affective thinking and emotional inhibition, to return to Koestler’s theory, are 
important in determining what stores of ‘operative fields’ are and are not available 
to consciousness at any given time (Koestler 1949, 47–48). Where inhibitions are 
weak, or during (day)dreams when they disengage, Koestler argues, consciousness 
flows more widely and freely between operative fields to allow fresh bissociative 
concepts to form (Koestler 1949, 49). This might be taken, in part at least, as a 
reference to Francis Galton’s earlier idea that when inhibiting influences are removed, 
individuals may retrieve ‘irrational’ ideas from the unconscious mind and use them 
to aid conscious thought. One common example of this is the chemist Kelkulé’s 
discovery of the ring structure of organic molecules following his dream of a snake 
swallowing its tail (e.g. Storr 1988, 67). 
One wonders, therefore, whether individual differences in levels of access to 
the contents of the unconscious might explain a fair amount of individual variance 
in creative ability. Some reputable opinion suggests that this is indeed a fair 
generalisation. Anthony Storr agrees with Donald MacKinnon that ‘the more creative 
a person is, the more he reveals an openness to his own feelings and emotions, a 
sensitive intellect and understanding self-awareness’ (Storr 1991, 241), and of course, 
it has already been stated that for Storr lack of creative ability will often relate to 
neuroses which prevent compulsives from accessing their inner worlds. Wilhelm 
Reich (e.g. 1969) would certainly agree. His description of compulsives stresses the 
peculiarly heavy reliance which they place upon the repression strategies of ‘affect-
block’ and ‘cathetic diversion’ by which they stave off the anxiety arousing contents 
of their unconscious minds. He claims that this limitation makes compulsives ‘ill-
suited to creative work or work which depends on new ideas’. Moreover, he explains 
that this is why ‘one will rarely find compulsive characters among great statesmen’ 
(Reich 1969, 194), a view which reflects Pareto’s belief that the class II residues are 
always uncommon amongst the higher echelons of governing elites.
It would doubtless be a productive exercise to examine all of the various defences 
which compulsives may employ in order to block out the contents of their unconscious 
minds, in order to show how each of these might simultaneously inhibit creative 
thinking. Generally speaking, this list would have to take account of a broad range 
of factors: the emotional numbness which may often prohibit a conscious integration 
of thoughts and feelings, the preference for fixed thought habits and delusional 
ideational systems, difficulties in accessing dreams, and also the compulsive fear of 
the unfamiliar which is to be explained more fully in section 4.5. Section 4.5 will 
also explain that compulsives tend to suffer from low self-esteem, which may inhibit 
creative productivity. 
Although this section cannot undertake this task of exploring the relationship 
between compulsivity and low creativity with any thoroughness, what it can usefully 
achieve is an examination of various general contrasts which have been drawn by 
psychologists concerning individuals who are either good or bad at ‘free-associating’, 
‘fantasising’ and ‘recalling their dreams’, which correspond surprisingly well with 
what Pareto’s model of personality assumes about the general correlates of creative 
ability. A brief exploration of these contrasts will lead us to a much more detailed 
understanding of what the heightened general creativity of Pareto’s ‘fox’ and 
‘speculator’ types means in precise psychological terms.

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