Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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headed” thinking is begun, some “tough decisions” are made. The strong leader diagnoses 
a parlous state of affairs, and blames it on drift, a confusion of aims, irresoluteness in the 
incumbent leaders – or in self indulgence – leaders who “mortgage the future” or “buy 
popularity”. Strong leadership’s diagnosis may be correct or it may be a fabrication, a 
device, and the crisis a manufactured one. Strong leader’s warnings contain an implicit 
promise: unlike environmentalist or nuclear doomsters, strong leadership has a simple 
political answer – its own accession to power. It disturbs people, but it quickly settles them 
down in the simplest possible way. It promises that decisive leadership will transform the 
situation and avert the crisis; it offers a program of clear goals and a leader with gumption. 
Moreover, the enemy is named and therefore easier to resist. In thus focusing our fears, 
strong leadership calms them (Little 1988, 13).
Fundamentally, then, strong leadership diagnoses some kind of threat. It pleads to be 
allowed to stamp this out as quickly as possible and by whatever means necessary. 
All of the reasons advanced earlier for supposing the conservative-authoritarian 
person to be ‘risk-averse’ and to possess a ‘crisis orientation’ can be called upon to 
help explain this preoccupation with threat, including that heightened experience of 
neurotic and moral anxiety which the last section linked to compulsive personality. 
Hence strong leadership already begins to stand out as a distinctively conservative 
phenomenon. Yet it is important to add that, as the above description indicates, strong 
leadership is motivated not just by a fear response to actual threatening circumstances 
but also by an overestimation of threat, perhaps sometimes involving the imagining 
of threat where none really exists. This might often be explained as irrational fear 
of punishment stemming from neurotic anxiety. However, to strike out in a new 
direction, we might note that the overestimation of threat is also famously linked 
to the condition of paranoia. Might strong leadership therefore include paranoid 
leadership? A brief definition of paranoia is useful here: 
The critical and essential feature of the paranoid condition is the suspicion that other 
people are involved in some kind of plot, however simple or however intricate, against 
oneself – with the intention to do harm in some way. It is not sufficient, for example, that 
a person feels simply that they are hated or disliked. Also, being merely afraid, on its 
own, is not enough for anyone to be said to be paranoid. It is the inference of planning 
and intent in others that is the common thread to the thinking and feeling of all paranoid 
people (Chadwick 1995, 1). 
Any interpretation of strong leadership as paranoid leadership must therefore show 
that strong leaders and their followers often possess mistaken or highly exaggerated 
convictions that some groups or individuals – ‘enemies within’ for example – are 
conspiring with malign intent and must be stopped. Peter Chadwick argues in his 
(1995) discussion of paranoia that paranoid thoughts and feelings occur within 
a wide range of psychological conditions: paranoid schizophrenia, paranoid 
personality disorder, and manic paranoia, to name but a few. This makes it hard to 
generalise about ‘the paranoid person’. However, looking from the standpoint of 
the ‘compulsive person’, we can easily find generalisations concerning compulsive 
paranoia which help us understand why basically ‘normal’ individuals with 
compulsive inclinations might often delude themselves by attributing malign intent 
to others. 

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Pareto’s Psychology
119
Elizabeth Young-Bruehl echoes a lot of clinical opinion when she states that 
each of the three ‘normal’ character types mentioned within Freudian characterology 
(the id dominated erotic, the ego dominated narcissist and the superego dominated 
obsessional) is likely to fall prey to a separate kind of psychopathology, where 
normal patterns of thought and behaviour are exaggerated. The erotic is vulnerable 
to dissociative disorder (or what might very controversially be termed multiple 
personality disorder in the US); the narcissist is vulnerable to schizophrenic 
withdrawl; finally, the obsessional (or compulsive) is vulnerable to paranoia 
(Young-Bruehl 1998, 207). Young-Bruehl goes on to provide a lengthy discussion 
of ‘the paranoid style in politics’ which focuses exclusively on the dynamics of the 
compulsive personality. At the core of her argument is a simple, general explanation 
for why compulsives are likely to display the symptoms of paranoia to a mild, non-
pathological degree. We are told that:
… more or less normal people who are given to the paranoid style are of a particular 
characterological sort – they are obsessional. Paranoid expressions are the means by which 
obsessionals displace onto the outer world that battle they feel in themselves between their 
bad desires and their moral strictures, their wishes and their warning lights, their fantasies 
and their “thou shalt nots”, their ids and their superegos (Young-Bruehl 1998, 359).
This view of compulsive paranoia, as entailing displacement of that internal conflict 
between id and superego which the compulsive experiences most acutely, provides us 
with a good general theory which can be fleshed out in various ways. Perhaps most 
obviously, we might turn to the classic Freudian account of paranoia as a process 
involving a sequence of reaction formation followed by projection. According to this 
theory, unconscious homosexual impulses are experienced as feelings of hatred. In 
order to cope with these feelings – i.e. to prevent them from raising anxiety – they 
are projected onto others (e.g. Chadwick 1995, 21–22). Hence ‘I love you’ transforms 
through reaction-formation to become ‘I hate you’; then ‘I hate you’ transforms 
through projection to become ‘you hate me’. Young-Bruehl’s own thoughts appear 
less specific. She would agree that obsessional paranoia is fundamentally bound up 
with the needs which obsessionals have to find targets for the projection of their own 
aggressive impulses (e.g. Young-Bruehl 1998, 215). Once projected, she believes, 
these impulses become the ‘malign intentions’ which drive real and imaginary enemies 
to conspire. However, we might ask why these projections culminate in attributions 
of malign intent. After all, the attribution of hatred through projection does not by 
itself explain why projecting individuals should subsequently regard themselves as 
targets for their projected hatreds. One possible explanation is that the attribution of 
malign intent reflects strong mental associations between aggression and threat which 
are built up by obsessionals. More fully, obsessionals may regard their own aggressive 
impulses as threatening in the sense that they are a permanent source of moral anxiety. 
Projected aggression might therefore trigger the same mental template linking anxiety 
to a sense of threat, as is elicited by aggression prior to its projection. This theory also 
allows us to view the compulsive’s real and imaginary enemies as always threatening 
to ‘infiltrate’ just as aggression is always threatening to demand recognition by 
consciousness and seize control of behaviour. To supplement this argument, we might 

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