Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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more about Pareto’s elite theory, and then by showing that Pareto’s experience of 
Italian political and economic life had a profound influence on him, by colouring 
his ideas concerning the natures of elites and non-elites and the ways in which they 
interact.  
2.2 Pareto’s 
Elite 
Theory
Pareto’s name is commonly linked with ‘classical elite theory’, a school of thought 
whose enduring contribution to sociology has been to assert, very simply, that 
minorities always wield control in large societies and associations (Wrong 1977, 177). 
James Meisel points out that this was actually the ‘idée maîtresse’ of another classical 
elitist, Gaetano Mosca. Pareto appropriated it without due acknowledgement (Meisel 
1965, 14–15). Classical elite theory, Marvin Olsen (1970, 106–104) mentions, had 
established itself in bitter opposition to the Marxist belief that a democratisation and 
communalisation of political life would come about through the establishment of a 
popular proletarian regime. The three principal theorists of classical elitism, Vilfredo 
Pareto, Gaetano Mosca and Robert Michels, Olsen says, all reacted against this idea 
by finding ways to argue that ‘in all societies past the bare subsistence level there has 
been – and hence, presumably will be in the future – one or a few sets of dominant 
ruling elites’.
As we will see, Pareto viewed the capacity to exploit others as having been 
distributed disproportionately amongst elites throughout western history. He also 
believed that the slow movement towards democracy and meritocracy which had 
taken place during the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 
had done little to change this. Democratic political systems (or ‘plutodemocracies’ 
as he called them) were failing to reflect the will of the people because democratic 
elections merely provided mechanisms for the co-optation of new, more capable 
personnel into the political and economic elite strata. As elites are revitalised from 
below, Pareto believed, their potential to exploit (or to use his preferred term, to 
‘spoliate’) the masses increases. Perversely, then, Pareto considered imbalances of 
wealth likely to increase along with the extension of the suffrage in the emerging 
European democracies (Hirschmann 1992, 55–58). 
The following account of Italian political and economic life, as Pareto and many 
others experienced it, will explain why he reached this pessimistic conclusion. It will 
also permit a much clearer picture to emerge, both of the psychological characteristics 
which Pareto attibuted to the ‘exploiters’ or ‘spoliators’ who fill the ranks of the 
elites, and of the psychological characteristics which he attibuted to the ‘exploited’ 
or ‘spoliated’ who comprise the non-elites.  
2.3  A Brief Biography
The following biographical details are based largely upon Powers’ (1987, 14–18) 
account. Pareto’s family rose to political and commercial prominence within the 
trading hub of Genoa during the eighteenth century. His great-great-great grandfather, 
Giovanni Lorenzo Bartolomeo Pareto, had won the hereditary title of Marquis for 

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Pareto’s ‘Psychologistic’ Sociology
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the family in 1729. During the Napoleonic period, Pareto’s grandfather and grand 
uncles were to hold important administrative positions, by virtue of their republican 
credentials. The family’s attachment to republicanism persisted into the nineteenth 
century, when, for his republican activism, the Marquis Raffaele Pareto was forced 
to flee Italy for France. It was there that he married a French Calvinist called Marie 
Mattenier, which led to Vilfredo being born on 15 July 1848, in Paris. 
Whilst in exile, the Marquis Raffaele Pareto supported himself as a hydrological 
engineer, and he even managed to publish influential articles on hydraulics. This 
ensured that Vilfredo’s very early life and education benefited from some affluence. 
In the 1850s, however, the family was able to return to Italy. They settled in Turin, 
where Raffaele had secured a civil engineering position. 
In 1869, Vilfredo gained a degree in engineering from the Polytechnic Institute 
of Turin. Apparently he graduated at the top of his class, ahead of fellow student 
Galileo Ferraris, who went on to become famous for his discovery of the rotary 
magnetic field. Following Italian unification in 1871, Vilfredo’s father was 
transferred to Rome. Vilfredo was to move there too, where he became a civil 
engineer within the government’s railway department. This was to be the first of 
several engineering jobs, which allowed Pareto to progress into management. In 
1874, he became superintendent of an iron foundry in the valley of the Arno. This 
job allowed him to travel to England and Scotland on business, where he encountered 
the liberal legislation which had been systematically introduced there from 1846. 
This new legislation was underpinned by the laissez faire ideology and activism of 
Richard Cobden, John Bright, Walter Bagehot and others who fronted the free trade 
movement. The ideas of this movement, which Disraeli famously christened ‘the 
Manchester School’, were to have a profound influence on Pareto.
His interest in political economy kindled, Pareto joined the Adam Smith Society 
in Florence. In 1881, he even stood as a radical free trade candidate for Parliament 
in the district of Peruzzi. Between 1889 and 1892, he turned his attentions toward 
political commentary and public speaking, perhaps motivated by a wish to acquire a 
university teaching post. Between these years he published over 160 articles which 
consisted largely of appeals for the introduction of free trade. Powers mentions that 
during this period Pareto’s inflammatory, polemical style led to some of his speaking 
engagements being cancelled due to police concerns about public order.
1
In 1891, Pareto began to publish papers which pioneered the use of scientific 
and mathematical techniques to assess economic theories. Just two years later, this 
work had impressed economists to the extent that he was appointed Professor of 
Political Economy at Lausanne University. Pareto soon became known as the ‘father 
of mathematical economics’ for the contributions to economics which he made 
during this period. However, it was only after he inherited a fortune from an uncle in 
1898, and then moved to a country villa which he had built in the idyllic village of 
Céligny, close to Switzerland’s border with France, that Pareto could finally develop 
the economic ideas for which he is chiefly remembered. Pareto’s financial freedom 
had, it seems, brought with it intellectual freedom from established academic 
1  For further details see Coser (1977, 403), Bellamy (1987, 14) and Pareto (1935, 
§2255–2256).

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