Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
45
Following Pareto’s insistence that ‘non-logical’ conduct accounts for most human 
behaviour (Pareto 1935, §145–248) it will be argued that political elites frequently 
encounter circumstances which involve ‘cognitive indeterminacy’ in the sense that 
insufficient information exists to permit fully informed ‘rational’ decion-making. 
Under such circumstances, heuristic guidance is required. Social personality will be 
viewed in functional terms as both storing and supplying this guidance. Hence we 
might say that a social personality comes into being when elite decisions made under 
conditions of cognitive indeterminacy lead to the inscription of guiding heuristics 
within elite culture. This will occur on multiple cultural levels, including individual 
personality structure. Once embedded within social personality, these heuristics will 
then guide further decision-making under conditions of cognitive indeterminacy. 
On the basis of subsequent performance they will then be reinforced, modified or 
abandoned, perhaps attaining the status of elite tradition over time.
Section 3.4 will develop this functionalist approach to social personality by 
arguing that under such conditions, political elites will strain towards guidance 
which helps them behave in consistent and predictable ways. General personality 
traits will be regarded as good potential sources of such guidance by virtue of their 
stability over time and across diverse situations. More specifically, it will be argued 
that the psychological dimension of conservatism-liberalism (which will be theorised 
very broadly as comprising orientations towards the status quo, risk and innovation) 
typically contributes much of this stability, because the positions which we adopt 
along this continuum supply our object worlds with vital organising elements. 
Section 3.5 will provide a counterweight by arguing that political decision-making 
is unlikely to involve settled strategies along these or indeed any other psychological 
continua because, to some extent at least, trial-and-error learning yields information 
concerning what sorts of strategies are objectively best at tackling problems. 
Section 3.6 will reply with arguments to suggest that under conditions of increasing 
complexity, such as advanced industrialised societies are now experiencing, the 
scope for trial-and-error learning by political decision-makers is narrowing. This 
will permit section 3.7 to conclude that the Paretian approach to political sociology 
deserves a favourable reappraisal because it focuses squarely upon aspects of social 
personality which can guide policy-makers as they negotiate the contemporary 
world’s widening sphere of uncertainty.
3.2 Social 
Personality
The last chapter indicated that Pareto’s political sociology is concerned primarily 
with the distributions of class I and class II residues throughout political elites. We 
might also recall that these residues refer in part to patterned clusters of personality 
traits which derive their basic structures from wider societal dynamics, but which 
may fail to maintain their adaptive fitness as societal conditions change, becoming 
impediments to, not instruments of, these dynamics. Indeed, this possibility 
establishes the necessary theoretical context for understanding that enthusiasm 
for exposing elite maladaptation which Emory Bogardus termed Pareto’s ‘error 
complex’. Hence we can say that Pareto’s political sociology envisions political 

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
46
elites as bound by psychological commonalities which influence their decisions, for 
better or for worse. These commonalities will form the core of what are referred to 
below as ‘social personalities’.
Certain pitfalls await those who would employ social personality as a basic unit 
of analysis. For one thing, it is necessary to avoid the ‘individualistic fallacy’ which 
assumes that groups possess the properties of their individual members. Another trap 
is the ‘ecological fallacy’ which assumes that individual group members possess 
group properties. Jon Elster draws our attention to disanalogies between individual 
and group level explanation which show why we should not stray lazily between 
levels. Firstly, he says, ‘social preferences’ are harder to define than individual 
preferences because it is harder to ascribe singular motives and goals to collectivities. 
Secondly, ‘social beliefs’ may, unlike individual beliefs, rely upon socially dispersed 
knowledge. Lastly, ‘social action’ is, unlike individual action, vulnerable to the 
distorting, private interests of those agencies entrusted to carry it out. It is therefore 
only possible to speak of ‘rough similarities, at best’ between social and individual 
levels of explanation (Elster 1989a, 175).
At this juncture it is useful to conceptualise social personality from a 
methodological individualist standpoint as consisting of aggregated personality 
attributes; that is, of psychological commonalities between those who populate 
collective decision-making bodies. Typically, these attributes are unlikely to be 
shared universally, and may not even be shared modally. To the extent that they 
are shared, their salience is likely to vary considerably between individuals. Yet 
we may still measure and analyse social personality, because its existence and 
content are inferable from statistically significant patterns yielded by psychometric 
studies. Taking this approach, social personality is very much an empirical construct; 
moreover, it is one which by bridging individual and social levels, provides a basis 
for exploring the true extent of Elster’s ‘rough similarities’. 
To begin to understand why political elites should possess social personalities, 
we can consider these from a cultural materialist standpoint as vehicles for wider 
social and economic interests. As Margaret Hermann (1986, 182) mentions, several 
theorists have written about ‘coalignment processes’ whereby political leaders 
use persuasion and bargaining to secure support from ‘multiple constituencies’. 
Similarly, Anthony Downs’ (1957) ‘Economic Theory of Democracy’ viewed the 
‘rational’ political actor as motivated by the desire for political office and therefore 
beholden to the ‘median voter’. Taking a broader view of political conflict, Antonio 
Gramsci’s recentralisation of praxis within Marxism envisioned blocks of social 
forces shifting in and out of mutually beneficial coalitions as a ‘war of position’ 
rages between labour and capital. In short, all such arguments supply theoretical 
frameworks which set us thinking of political elites as managing cultural boundaries 
to maximise cultural harmonisation with wider economic interests which resource 
them with finances, recruits, votes, and grassroots helpers. 
These harmonisations will occur on multiple cultural levels, including that 
of social personality. It is worth defining terms more closely here. The word 
‘culture’ has been endlessly redefined to consist of norms, beliefs, values, manners, 
institutional arrangements, artefacts, language, symbols, meanings, human processes, 
relationships, patterns of interaction and the like. When we refer to a culture we 

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