Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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To very briefly summarise Rebhorn’s argument, the co-expansion of educational 
opportunity and international trade with technological progress and very early 
capitalist development brought about dramatic increases in levels of social mobility 
during the Renaissance period. Furthermore, the collapse of the traditional medieval 
political order had led Western Europe’s centralising secular authorities to experience 
serious crises of legitimacy. A good indication of the depth of this crisis, Rebhorn 
mentions, is provided by the spate of political treatises which arose at the time 
dealing with questions of sovereignty (Rebhorn 1988, 30–31). 
It is within this context of social flux, the breakdown of fixed social roles, and 
increasing ideological uncertainty, then, that Renaissance literature developed its 
deep concern with issues surrounding, to use Stephen Greenblatt’s term, ‘self-
fashioning’:
Fundamentally free from any a priori definition of the self and utterly detached from the 
traditions, crafts and places by means of which medieval people normally acquired their 
identities, Renaissance individuals were conceived as creating themselves …  Writers of 
the period thus spun out for themselves a myth of man as Proteus or as Faustus, freed from 
old allegiances, rising and changing solely through the efforts of his will, intelligence and 
art. Human beings made themselves through their education, or they made and remade 
themselves continually as they played role upon role on the great stage of the world 
(Rebhorn 1988, 27).  
Rebhorn adds that serious doubts, fears and feelings of hostility arose in opposition 
to new ideologies of self-fashioning. One common source of anguish for those cut 
off from traditional sources of identity was the possibility that individuals who lack 
fixed social roles may discover that they have no authentic, underlying identities. 
Rebhorn mentions that these fears were spoken to directly by Shakepeare’s ‘Richard 
II’ and ‘King Lear’. Each provided a powerful illustration of how disorientation and 
madness can follow when individuals are stripped of their social roles (Rebhorn 
1988, 29). 
One common response to this crisis, again widely reflected in literature, was 
displacement: ‘arrivistes and slaves of fashion were increasingly mocked by satirists 
as people without inner selves whose identities go no deeper than the clothes they 
wear’ (Rebhorn 1988, 28). Fictional confidence tricksters were, of course, presented 
as ‘self-fashioners par excellence’. Much speculation was addressed to the nature of 
the inner selves which reside beneath the many ‘masks’ which they wear to conduct 
their deceptions. Such characters became, in other words, scapegoats to allow people 
to displace insecurities which they felt concerning their own identities.
If Renaissance literature’s fascination with the confidence trickster makes sense 
as a means by which, according to Rebhorn, ‘Renaissance writers could crystallise 
their culture’s profound ambivalence about the issue of self-fashioning’ (Rebhorn 
1988, 29), then it becomes interesting to speculate that the enduring fascination 
with Machiavelli’s writings might be attributed, in part at least, to enduring feelings 
of ambivalence towards self-fashioning, feelings which we might even regard as 
continuing to ebb and flow with the times. We might draw, moreover, a broad parallel 
between the writers of the Renaissance who used literary fiction as a means to explore 
the psychological correlates of the breakdown of long established certainties, and the 

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Pareto’s ‘Psychologistic’ Sociology
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early classical contributions to sociology made by Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Pareto 
and others who all tried to deal, in their various ways, with the psychological fallout 
produced by the upheavals of the industrial revolution. More specifically, we might 
consider the very similar psychologies of Machiavelli and Pareto as having focused 
upon the characteristics of the confidence trickster as a rather crude means to allow 
both thinkers to explore the difficult question of what kind of individual is produced 
by, or is best able to adapt to, conditions of rapid social transformation where fixed 
social roles, which may otherwise exert a powerful stabilising influence upon the 
individual’s search for identity, are increasingly unable to provide guidance. It will 
become increasingly apparent throughout this and subsequent chapters that although 
Pareto’s sociological theory fails to be explicitly concerned with this subject, it may 
well have drawn Machiavelli to its centre for this very reason. 
As we will now see, Pareto’s debt to Machiavelli is heavy indeed, as he was to 
have recourse to the finer detail of Machiavelli’s beliefs about the ways in which 
personalities are packaged together. Although Machiavelli originally followed 
a lead provided by Boccaccio and others by linking the image of the confidence 
trickster to the lower socioeconomic groupings and in particular to the artisan class, 
he eventually realised that his con-men possessed qualities appropriate for that ‘ideal 
Prince’ who, he hoped, would finally unify Italy and repulse the French expansion 
into its territory. However, although Machiavelli felt that the role-playing skills of 
the confidence trickster would prove essential, he also viewed this caricature as 
deficient in several key respects:
Chief among the characteristics that distinguish the Prince from the confidence men of the 
literary tradition is their moral seriousness. Renaissance confidence men… are basically 
carnivalesque characters. Their activities celebrate the life of the body, its pleasures and 
creativity, and they are motivated by powerful drives for food and sex as well as wealth 
and power. They are gay characters, at times almost practical jokers or clowns…. Finally, 
as they turn the world topsy-turvy with their tricks and pranks, confidence men derive 
a real joy, not unrelated to aesthetic pleasure, from the trickery they engage in, trickery 
often conceived as game or play (Rebhorn 1988, 136).
Jettisoning those characteristics which he viewed as incommensurable with the 
gravitas and ascetic devotion to duty required of the ideal Prince, Machiavelli turned 
to consider other popular caricatures and found that the epic hero
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 suited his purpose 
well:
The [epic] hero is a figure of energy and activity, a clever strategist and an eloquent leader 
of men, and above all, a warrior, whether one speaks of Odysseus wandering across the 
Mediterranean, Achilles slaying Hector at Troy, or Aeneas leading the Trojans into battle 
against the Latins. Machiavelli’s Prince is just such a character (Rebhorn 1988, 140).
This caricature appealed because it added virtues of courage, ferocity, leadership 
ability and strategic direction. Rebhorn also draws our attention to Machiavelli’s 
8  Rebhorn points out that the epic hero was very much a Renaissance  caricature. 
Having been revived by Dante, it became the preoccupation of many Renaissance poets such 
as Edmund Spenser and John Milton (Rebhorn 1988, 137).

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