Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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characteristics of his foxes and speculators. Similarly, his ‘class II’ residues referred 
primarily to the characteristics of his lions and rentiers. In fact, Pareto’s ‘Treatise’ 
is littered with rather unfortunate, slapdash references to elites within which either 
class I or class II residues ‘predominate’, or within which the balance between the 
class I and class II residues appears to be shifting. This section will now explain 
what he meant, by taking a fresh approach. It will concern itself only obliquely 
with Pareto’s abstract theory of residues, which has already been covered more than 
adequately by previous commentators, and will focus instead upon the role played by 
the residues (so that this question can be explored further throughout chapter three) 
and the content of the residues (so that this can be explored throughout chapter four). 
We will see that Pareto’s residues permitted him to describe, in psychological terms, 
the synchronising forces of his grand historical cycle, which manifest themselves 
within the thoughts and behaviours of the elites.
Pareto’s abandonment of reductionism in favour of an assumption of complex 
variable interaction may appear, on the surface at least, well in tune with later 
advances in scientific methodology. Along with other members of the Vienna Circle, 
Otto Neurath was later to argue that sociological causalism should be rejected for its 
unacceptable reliance upon a ‘ceteris paribus’ clause which so often fails to apply 
in real life situations. As a preferred alternative, Neurath suggested that theorists 
dealing with the social world should attempt to show how social phenomena ‘emerge 
from’ or ‘grow out of’ ‘highly complex social aggregations’ (Zolo 1989, 127–128). 
Yet Pareto’s scientistic mind insisted that sociology must be based, as natural science 
is based, upon the regular recurrence of similar phenomena throughout history. 
Whether Pareto’s scientistic stance represents, as Alvarez and Gonzalo (2006) have 
argued, a ‘moment’ in the evolution of conservative thought when science replaced 
religion as a basis for critiquing modernity, is open to debate. We can at least say 
that this stance created real difficulties for Pareto’s theory of social system, because 
having rejected reductionism Pareto still had to seek boundaries for the interaction of 
decisive variables within that system. This problem obligates the scientistic mind to 
make highly tenuous assumptions. Perhaps most problematically, the social system 
must be regarded as a single entity amenable to observation over long historical 
periods, such that regularities which provide science with its subject matter can be 
extracted. This requires a longitudinal approach best applied to distinct entities, such 
as individuals, and best used to observe change, not regularity. Pareto understood he 
could only proceed tentatively in his identification of decisive variables:
An exhaustive study of social forms would have to consider at least the chief elements 
that determine them, disregarding those elements only which seem to be of secondary or 
incidental influence. But such a study is not at present possible (Pareto 1935, §2063).
His decision to proceed by distinguishing between categories of variable which 
are either endogenous or exogenous to the social system must therefore be seen as 
having been made with considerable reservation. Endogenous elements listed in the 
‘Treatise’ are ‘race, the sentiments manifested by residues, proclivities, interests, 
aptitudes for thought and observation, and the state of knowledge’. Exogenous 
ones listed are ‘soil, climate, fauna, flora, geological, mineralogical and other like 

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Pareto’s ‘Psychologistic’ Sociology
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conditions’ which he took to be largely invariant (Pareto 1935, §2060). A further 
assumption followed. Of these endogenous elements, those which he termed the 
‘sentiments manifested by residues’ were to command most of his attention as 
‘the main elements’ in human affairs (Pareto 1935, §2194). Pareto thus became 
vulnerable to the accusation that he had effectively back-tracked to a reductionist 
position so narrowly focused upon psychological phenomena as to merit the title of 
‘most outstanding representative of psychologism in sociology’ (Szacki 1979, 261).
It is necessary to look more closely at the nature and social role of Pareto’s 
‘residues’ in order to consider this accusation. It must firstly be established that 
Pareto’s lions, foxes, rentiers and speculators were terms which, although they 
endured throughout his sociological writings, had been used to a greater extent before 
he set out his more developed thoughts in the ‘Treatise’. In that work, Pareto began 
to write about the alternating balance in the elites, not of the proportion of foxes and 
speculators to lions and rentiers, but instead about the proportion of ‘class I residues’ 
to ‘class II residues’. Hence Pareto’s residues effectively became his ‘independent 
variables’ (Meisel in Meisel (ed.) 1965, 29). 
It is clear from Pareto’s discussions and usages of these residues that the 
psychological characteristics which he had dealt with earlier, although they were 
being elaborated to some extent, remained essentially the same. To indicate briefly 
that the psychological referents are similar, Pareto’s ‘class I’ residues are described 
as ‘instincts of combination’, a play on the Italian word ‘combinazione’ which 
refers simultaneously to the Machiavellian guile and creativity of the foxes and 
speculators. Pareto’s ‘class II residues’, on the other hand, are described as involving 
‘the persistence of aggregates’, a label which was clearly intended to convey that 
intransigence, preference for the status quo, and incapacity for innovation which he 
had earlier attributed to both the lions and the rentiers.
No consensus upon the exact nature of the ‘residues’ has emerged from Pareto’s 
commentators.
9
 Indeed, William McDougall was probably right to conclude that they 
stood for ‘a muddle in Pareto’s mind’ and are symptomatic of his ‘mid-Victorian’ 
approach to psychology (Meisel 1965, 28). Some confusion arises from the fact that 
although residues ‘manifest’ sentiments, they are not themselves directly observable. 
Nonetheless they somehow correspond to ‘driving forces for actions’ (Aspers 2001). 
Most commentators do at least agree that Pareto devised his ‘residues’ in order 
to side-step psychological analysis. Aron (1968, 122) argues that Pareto tried to 
achieve this in two ways: firstly by insisting that residues exist only as ‘analytical 
concepts’ and not as ‘concrete entities’, and secondly by indicating that they refer 
to behaviour only, and not to unseen influences upon behaviour which reside, or are 
at least channelled through, psychic terrain which Pareto then viewed as beyond the 
reach of experimental science. A parallel might therefore be drawn between Pareto’s 
approach and early ‘biosocial’ treatments of personality which, by focusing only 
9  Efforts to define the residues within the secondary literature do little to clarify matters. 
Powers (1987, 59) states that the residues ‘simply refer to behaviour’. Szacki (1979, 266) 
claims Pareto was interested not in ‘what the residues are’, but rather ‘how they manifest 
themselves’. Coser (1977, 390) says the residues ‘correspond to’ without being ‘equivalent to’ 
manifestations of sentiments. 

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