Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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opinion. Aside from spurring him on to his greatest achievements in economics, this 
freedom enabled Pareto to follow his intuition that economics could not be studied 
in isolation. As Pareto’s writing opened out from economics into general sociology, 
he began to lose the support of former colleagues, eventually becoming known as 
the ‘lone thinker of Céligny’. He continued writing into his retirement, which was 
increasingly marred by heart disease, and died on 19 August 1923. 
Shortly before he died, however, events would deliver Pareto’s reputation a 
lasting blow. Mussolini, who claimed to have attended some of Pareto’s Lausanne 
lectures, offered him a senatorship in his fledgling fascist government, and invited 
him to represent Italy as a delegate at a Geneva disarmament conference. Although 
Pareto’s death occurred just ten months after Mussolini’s fascists seized power in 
the March on Rome, he witnessed enough of this regime to be impressed by its early 
leanings towards economic liberalism, before then being driven to protest its early 
clampdowns upon the press and academia. It seems likely that Pareto would have 
grown increasingly scornful of the regime as it steered towards economic corporatism 
and totalitarianism. However, commentators have disagreed over the extent to which 
Pareto’s sociology draws together proto-fascist themes (Meisel 1965, 34–36). 
This book does not place Pareto in the dock over this matter. It will, however, 
help develop the reader’s psychological knowledge in ways which better enable 
Pareto’s theory to be evaluated on this level. To pave the way, it is useful to comment 
briefly on Pareto’s appeal to the conservative mind. It has already begun to emerge 
within this chapter that there is much evidence of elitism in Pareto’s sociological 
thought. It will soon become apparent that there is cynicism and misanthropy too. 
We will discern from theory and evidence presented in chapter four that low self 
esteem may be a common personality denominator for these traits. Of course, self-
esteem is, rather like stress, a vague construct which has suffered from overuse 
by popular psychology. Nonetheless, it helps us form an important personality 
cluster with particular significance for political attitude formation. We will see that 
the configuration of elitism, cynicism, misanthropy and low self-esteem appears 
commonly within what might be termed the ‘conservative’ or ‘authoritarian’ attitude 
syndrome; and so, by drawing these themes together within his writings, Pareto had 
effectively set out a stall to attract conservatives and repulse liberals. 
It is also vital to realise that Pareto’s psychologistic mode of explanation is itself 
more appealing to the conservative mind. Skitka et al. (2002) cite evidence suggesting 
that when it comes to explaining phenomena as diverse as homelessness, crime, 
foreign aggression and obesity, conservatives tend to focus their explanations upon 
individual characteristics (i.e. upon the personal failings of those ‘responsible’ for 
the phenomenon) whereas liberals are more likely to draw attention to situational or 
structural causes. Hence Skitka et al. propose a ‘dispositional hypothesis’ according 
to which conservatives have ‘baseline propensities’ to view a person’s behaviour as 
rooted in ‘something about that person’, whereas liberals tend to look to that person’s 
situation. They observe that this hypothesis is consistent with the Freudian view of 
authoritarian personality as an ego defensive reaction to a strict and remote father, 
and with the literature which has distinguished between ‘authoritarian-paternalistic’ 
and ‘egalitarian-nurturing’ forms of upbringing as predictors of political orientation 
in later life. Once more, chapter four will explore these ideas in more detail. What 

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Pareto’s ‘Psychologistic’ Sociology
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matters here is that Pareto’s near obsession with the human capacity for error and 
irrationality, and, more importantly, his incorporation of this within his psychologistic 
approach to social dynamics, effectively created a theoretical framework giving 
free reign to the ‘blame game’ favoured by conservatives. As such it constitutes a 
powerful enticement to the conservative mind.  
It seems reasonable to conclude that an appreciation of the psychological roots of 
Pareto’s political appeal is likely to pay dividends in two ways. Firstly, we can use 
it to ethically evaluate efforts to articulate and operationalise Pareto’s sociological 
theory. Here, the critical consideration is the extent to which Pareto’s theory is being 
used as a vehicle for character assassination, scapegoating, and suchlike. Secondly, 
we can use this knowledge to ensure that Paretian analysis is conducted on a more 
sophisticated level, in keeping with Pareto’s more mature sociological approach 
which tried to move away from intensionalistic explanation towards a growing 
recognition of those situational and structural factors which weigh more heavily on 
the liberal mind. Of course, we will soon see that Pareto took a functionalist (which 
is to say deeply conservative) approach to even this. 
2.4  Pareto’s Italy: Clientelismo and Trasformismo
It is to the Italy of Pareto’s early professional career that we must now turn if we 
are to understand the roots of his sociological thought. Pareto’s prolific free-trade 
activism, following his exposure to British liberalism, came at just the right time to 
win him both fame and notoriety because it allowed him to become a mouthpiece for 
liberal opposition to the practice of ‘trasformismo’ which had emerged as a defining 
characteristic of the Italian polity following Italy’s movement away from a system of 
relatively free trade in 1876. This was the year when Italy’s ‘historical right’, which 
had become increasingly unpopular for the priority it gave to paying off the heavy 
debt burden which Italy had accrued following the Risorgimento, was defeated at 
election and replaced by a series of administrations which were to steer towards 
protectionism and higher public spending (Bellamy 1987, 13–14). 
Alan Zuckerman (1979) describes trasformismo as a ‘mode of cabinet turnover’. 
Italy, he says, saw 32 cabinet changes between 1876 and 1922. Cabinet turnover 
was, however, notably more rapid than Ministerial turnover. Parliamentary leaders 
(Zuckerman calls Depretis, who came to power in 1876, the ‘first master’ of this 
practice) would publicly propose to Ministers of outgoing cabinets that they 
may continue in their posts provided they abandon old loyalties, allegiances and 
principles, and substitute new ones (Zuckerman 1979, 45). Zuckerman credits Pareto 
with exposing the prevalence of the trasformismo ethic:
In the cabinet crises of 1891, [which saw] the formation of the Crispi government and its 
replacement after two months by di Rudini’s ministry, only 23 out of 508 deputies voted 
consistently for Crispi and against di Rudini, and all but one of Crispi’s cabinet voted for 
the new cabinet
2
 (Zuckerman 1979, 45).
2  Zuckerman lifts this information from Pareto’s ‘The Ruling Class in Italy’ (1950, 
31).

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