Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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advanced at the expense of wider community interests were to be interpreted, along 
with this, as evidence that such individuals must surely place self interest before any 
nobler vision of the common good. And of course, the tension between private belief 
and behavioural requirement so prevalent within the patron-client tie (especially 
within trasformismo) could easily be interpreted as evidence of an amorality of 
character which is adept at maintaining double standards and abandoning personal 
loyalties when their usefulness ceases. As the following section will clarify, these 
features, taken together, seemed to constitute key features of a characterologically 
rooted ‘Machiavellianism’. 
Where this leads us then, is to the realisation that Pareto viewed the elites as a 
repository, not just of democratic character, but also of Machiavellianism. In fact, 
Pareto envisioned the two as combining within the same personality structure. They 
were easily blended. Machiavellianism could be regarded as a vital element of 
democratic personality by contributing its fortuitous lack of ideological zealotry, 
and also that quality of cunning which allows elites to subdue and exploit non-elites 
without resorting to undemocratic applications of force. 
The choice between ‘democratic’ and ‘anti-democratic’ character is therefore 
not an easy one for Pareto. He presents us with an impossible choice between the 
unscrupulous, self-aggrandising master criminal and the dim-witted, intransigent, 
ideological zealot who thirsts for political violence. As mentioned earlier, Raymond 
Aron made this point well by saying that Pareto asks us to accept that ‘every political 
man is either selfish or naive’ (Aron 1968, 171). The realisation that he could well 
be right, Aron suggests, takes us straight to the ‘living heart’ of Paretian thought. 
He adds that this may leave us with a sense of malaise or disgust at the nature of 
politics.
Before moving on to explore the central role played by ‘Machiavellian’ personality 
in Pareto’s sociology, it is worth adding that his psychologistic interpretation of 
trasformismo and clientelismo runs contrary to established opinion. Italian histories 
are inclined to stress that trasformismo should be understood primarily as a practice 
required by circumstances, given both the heavy reliance of central government 
upon the local commune system, and the delicate relationships which were forced 
upon Deputies and Ministers in order to ensure governmental stability (e.g. Clark 
1984, 57–67). Ernest Gellner indicates, furthermore, that clientelism is only likely to 
emerge under certain conditions: either when a situation of ‘incomplete centralisation’ 
occurs when a state lacks complete control over all its outlying territory – as may well 
be said of the Italian state which only gained access to Sicily in 1861 following the 
risorgimento – or when a state lacks technical resources to meet popular aspirations. 
In both cases, according to Gellner, local power holders may, like Italy’s ‘grand 
electors’, gain footholds in government and play important roles in determining how 
governments allocate resources. 
Given the clear role for historical context in shaping Pareto’s thoughts concerning 
his political types, it becomes tempting to suppose that these thoughts might not 
apply more widely. The following two sections will clarify, however, that Pareto 
had grounds for believing that they should. As we will now see, they squared to 
a large extent with Machiavelli’s much earlier beliefs about enduring human 
characteristics.

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Pareto’s ‘Psychologistic’ Sociology
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2.5  Pareto and Machiavelli: Similar Theories of Human Nature
Pareto admitted to basing his sociology upon ‘maxims of Machiavelli which hold as 
true today as they were in his time’ (Pareto 1935, §2410). He would certainly have 
agreed with Machiavelli’s core assumption that:
The primary subject-matter for political science is the struggle for social power in its 
diverse open and concealed forms (contrary views hold that political thought deals with 
the general welfare, the common good, and other such entities that are from time to time 
invented by the theorists) (Burnham 1943, 165).
Chief among Machiavelli’s ‘brutal facts’ of power was that which says affairs of state 
require a morality distinct from those demanded by Christianity and by everyday 
life. The morality in question was, in Machiavelli’s day, popularly associated with 
the caricature of the ‘renaissance confidence trickster’.
6
 This caricature had immense 
significance for Machiavelli. Although he is typically seen as an arch-realist who 
endeavoured to view the world as it is and not as idealistic delusion sometimes 
makes it appear, Machiavelli used both his politico-historical writings and, equally, 
his fictional works,
7
 not just to represent the world as he saw it, but also to explore 
certain theoretical problems, and indeed deep anxieties, which were widely sensed 
by the Renaissance mind. In fact, these were so widely sensed that they emerged as 
popular themes throughout the literature of the European Renaissance. 
Wayne Rebhorn explains in his (1988) ‘Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli’s 
Confidence Men’ that Machiavelli’s fascination with the popular Renaissance 
image of the ‘confidence trickster’, and with the common literary vision of ‘life as 
a confidence game’ helped him structure his understanding of politics and history, 
organise his own personal experiences, and generally ‘reflect upon basic issues of 
the age’ (Rebhorn 1988, 4–5, 37). Many of these basic issues may be understood as 
having arisen from the social upheavals of the Renaissance:
The confidence man’s major traits – his deep moral ambiguity and his recognition of the 
contingency and transformability of the social order – reflect important aspects of Italy and 
Europe in the age of the Renaissance. The Renaissance fascination with confidence men 
might be correlated, for example, with the increased number of rogues and vagabonds, 
charlatans and mountebanks, of the poor in general, which humanists and social reformers 
linked to the land enclosures precipitated by a developing capitalism, to the population 
shifts related to the spread of the plague and other diseases, and to the furious wars that 
raged during the period (Rebhorn 1988, 26).
6  Wayne Rebhorn (1988, 7) explains that the term ‘confidence man’ was originally 
used in an 1849 New York Herald editorial before becoming popular as a consequence of 
one of Herman Melville’s novels. The equivalent term used in the Italian Renaissance was 
‘beffatore’.
7  Machiavelli’s tendency to ‘view the world through the lens of literature’ and to explore 
the key themes of Renaissance literature throughout his writings is explored by Rebhorn 
(1988). Ascoli and Kahn (ed.) (1993) introduce a number of articles which also give detailed 
support to this view.

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