Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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Italy’s  clientelismo. Such organisational inefficiencies favour political reversals 
towards greater centralisation. The resulting drives to reconcentrate sovereignty 
produce greater reliance upon force as a control strategy and also create fertile ground 
for personality cultism. Governments which move in this direction do however 
become compelled to take on fewer tasks, eventually succumbing to ‘entropic 
asphyxiation’ whereby they fail to perform even key tasks well. Inefficiencies now 
arise in such areas as the delegation of authority and the rewarding of performance. 
This creates pressure for a further political reversal, this time in the direction of 
greater decentralisation. 
Notably, Pareto’s political cycle employs Machivelli’s lion and fox typology by 
treating these two positions as corresponding not just to alternative control strategies 
but also to changing elite psychologies which are considerable for their functional 
adaptation to these strategies, and indeed for their correspondence to changing 
principles of elite recruitment and leadership selection under changing conditions. 
Powers’ mention of the ‘cult of personality’ as a correlate of Machiavelli’s ‘force’ is 
particularly interesting; it represents a yearning for ‘strong leadership’ which chapter 
four will reveal to be an important feature of conservative-authoritarian personality. 
Next we may consider Powers’ explanation of interaction between the social 
sentiment and economic cycles (Powers 1987, 122). Once more Powers presents us 
with interlocking mechanisms, this time to show why these two cycles are likely to 
synchronise. The argument here is that economic prosperity will tend to correlate 
positively with relaxed social prescriptions, whilst economic austerity will tend to 
combine with more restrictive social prescriptions. Beginning with the upswing of 
both cycles, Powers’ argument is that increasing productivity favours increasing 
social complexity and opportunity in life, which increasingly brings traditional 
beliefs into conflict with actual experiences. As social prescriptions relax, consumer 
hedonism becomes more permissible, which allows productivity to develop further 
to satisfy escalating consumer demands. This however results in consumer debt, 
within the context of a more general scarcity of capital which might fund further 
economic productivity increases. This produces economic contraction, which 
means levels of socioeconomic attainment increasingly fall below socioeconomic 
aspirations. Calls for tougher social prescription then grow louder, as a means to 
close this gulf, with the result that consumption once more becomes unacceptable 
and consumer industries contract sharply. The consumer economy then gives way 
once more to a capital-producing economy which allows both private savings and 
capital which might be used for larger scale business investment to accumulate to the 
point where the cycle can begin afresh.
Importantly, this cycle alludes to much more than it mentions directly. The 
question of how personality structure is likely to vary with level of social complexity 
is a difficult one which the next chapter will explore in far more detail, in order to 
place Pareto’s theory on a more solid footing. Among the many aspects of social 
complexity which are potentially relevant here are increased social mobility and 
broadening cultural horizons, increased educational opportunity, technological 
innovation, and indeed increased flux within economic production itself. All of 
these factors and many more besides, can undermine traditional work-related 
sources of identity, thereby producing that confusion over social and moral norms 

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Pareto’s ‘Psychologistic’ Sociology
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which the above theory requires for consumer hedonism to emerge as a stimulus 
for unsustainable economic growth. We have heard this argument before, of course. 
The dilemma of whether a new kind of person might result from increased social 
complexity has already been mentioned in this chapter as having led renaissance 
literature to ponder the caricature of the Machiavellian confidence trickster. 
Next, Powers describes Pareto’s thoughts on interaction between social sentiment 
and political organisation (Powers 1987, 138). He begins with the observation that 
the inefficiencies and brutalities of centralised authority generate resistance and 
resentment. This promotes the political control strategy of co-optation, which stimulates 
hedonistic sentiment amongst the elites, who now pressurise government to extend 
even more ‘largesse and patronage’ towards them. Once this co-evolution of hedonism 
and patronage has generated crippling inefficiences and expenses, governments are 
compelled to backtrack towards greater centralisation of sovereignty and use of force. 
Focusing more closely upon this co-evolution of patronage and hedonism, 
Powers observes that extensions of patronage stimulate hedonism in part through 
their undermining of work ethic. This is because patronage encourages people to 
think of ‘success’ less in terms of personal accomplishment and more in terms of 
‘who one knows’. Furthermore, Powers comments that ‘the more people get, the 
more they think they deserve’; and, of course, ‘people would rather get things the 
easy way’. Thus, increasing numbers within the elites expect and demand special 
treatment. Hence taking stock of likely psychological correlates to the interaction 
between political and social sentiment cycles, two plausible themes emerge which 
will both be placed upon firmer ground later within this book. The first is the link 
between conservative personality and work ethic, which Powers relates to times of 
strict social prescription and political centralisation. We will see in the last chapter 
that scales to measure work ethic (founded upon Weber’s theory of protestant work 
ethic (Weber 2002)) and conservative personality correlate positively; furthermore, 
‘anti-hedonism, asceticism and disdain for leisure’ have all been identified as 
important dimensions of work ethic (just as Weber had earlier flagged these as 
motivational puritan virtues shared by Benjamin Franklin and other early capitalist 
entrepreneurs). The second is the link between liberal personality and what might be 
termed ‘entitlement thinking’, which Powers relates to political decentralisation and 
that loosening of social prescription which stimulates hedonism. Chapter four will 
link entitlement thinking to the intertwined psychological themes of psychopathy and 
narcissism. More fully, we will see that these combine further with Machiavellianism 
to form what is now termed a ‘dark triad’ of tightly interconnected, socially aversive 
personality traits, which taken together yield a plausible psychological foundation 
for Pareto’s Machiavellian-liberal ‘fox’. 
Finally, Powers’ account of interaction between Pareto’s economic and political 
cycles (Powers 1987, 140) begins at the bottom of both cycles. Political centralisation 
inhibits business, which stimulates drives towards political decentralisation and its 
attendant usages of co-optation for the purposes of political control. As more and 
more businesses are shielded from competition by patronage, however, they will 
be able to produce inferior products and sell these at higher prices. This eventually 
results in a widening gulf between quality and cost right across the consumer 
economy, which helps send processes of political decentralisation into reverse. 

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