Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
47
therefore establish a cavernous theoretical space wherein we may explore complex 
interplay between very diverse constituents. This interplay has been described as 
‘cultural resonance’ (e.g. Kubal 1998) which we might say binds social personality to 
these varied constituents in patterns of mutual influence characterised by complexity 
and reflexivity. Some may disagree, insisting that social personality consists of 
human properties whereas culture consists of human products. Yet this splitting of 
the two concepts might easily lead to the reification of social personality, such that 
we underappreciate how social personality and other cultural levels reconstitute 
themseleves through resonances spanning multiple levels. When we subsume social 
personality within culture, then, we begin to sense that when we refer to a personality 
trait, or to a broad family of traits such as conservatism or liberalism, we are actually 
dealing with entities which span multiple cultural levels. Such assumptions are often 
reasonably and productively made when we use psychometric instruments to tap 
social personality. Indeed, when we regard a psychometric tool as a blunt instrument 
capable of tapping multiple cultural levels simultaneously, what we lose in scientific 
precision we often make up for in terms of richer analysis and ad hoc theorising. 
This chapter assumes broad and deep links between social personality and other 
cultural levels. When we refer to harmonisation between cultures, as we do when 
we talk of political elites managing their cultural boundaries, we refer in part to 
harmonisation between social personalities, because we regard social personality as 
malleable under harmonisation pressures absorbed through cultural resonance.
As soon as we accept that a political elite’s social personality will partly reflect the 
cultural milieu of its economic constituencies, we must however acknowledge that 
these supports are creaking and splintering. As the last chapter mentioned, mutual 
interests become fleeting as economies grow complex and differentiated, and as they 
transform under the influence of advancing technologies and changing markets. One 
consequence is that economic elites lose cultural homogeneity. The UK’s financial 
and corporate elites exemplify this trend well. Cadbury (1998) observes that for 
decades city financiers and corporate heads dealt with each other through personal 
contact and informal rule-based agreement. During the 1980s, however, financial 
services expanded rapidly, particularly after the so-called ‘big bang’ event of October 
1986 when electronic trading began. The elites then filled with new recruits from 
a much broader range of class backgrounds, all eager to learn professions whose 
ground rules appeared incomprehensible, ambiguous or no longer inapplicable. The 
resulting cultural vacuum is commonly cited as a driver for the following decade’s 
corporate governance revolution, which sought to fill that vacuum with regulation. 
Prospects for culturally-fixed economic constituencies are further diminished by 
the growing complexity, chaos and fluidity of ‘globalisation’ (Urry 2002). This is 
partly because diverse processes linked to globalisation, such as the development 
of economic interdependence, the liberation of markets and capital flows, and new 
technology’s capacity to shrink time and distance, have opened economic elites 
towards greater cultural heterogeneity. This has interacted with the slow blurring of 
dividing lines between classes to undermine the traditional role of economic class in 
structuring the constituencies of political elites. Ulrich Beck (1992) helps us better 
understand this blurring of boundaries, being pre-eminent among commentators who 
argue that growing diversity of individual experience no longer permits us to view 

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
48
the world through the prism of economic class. Beck argues that whereas our class 
identifications once helped insulate us against harsh economic reality, we now absorb 
economic risks as individuals, for which we pay a heavy psychological toll. More 
recently, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) have set Beck’s concept of classless 
individualization more firmly beside that of globalisation, arguing that interaction 
between these processes should be our theoretical focus for understanding social 
and political change. As Bottero (2002) points out, class theorists have responded 
very differently to Beck’s theory of individualization. Some postmodernists carry it 
over into ‘death of class’ theory, whilst others use it to redefine class. Classes thus 
become ‘individualised hierarchies’ rather than distinct social groups. Interestingly, 
these emerging perspectives are inclined to factor culture into their re-definitions, 
by focusing on the embededness of culture within social and economic practices. 
Perhaps such cultural re-definitions will help us re-theorise the class sources of 
political elite culture. For the present, however, we can at least anticipate serious 
obstacles.
It would be remiss of any book on Pareto to move beyond this conclusion without 
reiterating that his sociology very conspicuously provides a theoretical framework 
which helps us grapple with this question. In fact, we might conveniently label this 
Pareto’s theory of ‘individualisation’ to invite comparisons between Beck and Pareto. 
The theory in question concerns the forces which Pareto envisioned (within his (1935) 
‘Treatise on General Sociology’ and (1984) ‘The Transformation of Democracy’) 
as propelling the grand historical cycle through its ‘individualised phase’. As the 
last chapter explained, this shift comprises movements through three synchronising 
cycles: the political cycle as it moves towards decentralisation, the economic cycle 
as it moves towards prosperity, and the social sentiment cycle as it moves towards 
scepticism. Working from Pareto’s ‘Treatise’ and ‘Trasformazioni’, from what 
Powers says about these cycles’ internal and synchronising dynamics, or from our 
own inventiveness within Pareto’s framework, we can theorise how these dynamics 
synergise to promote the class I residues within the political elites. Our starting 
point might be that economic prosperity promotes consumer hedonism which in turn 
promotes individualistic rights-based thinking, or that economic decentralisation 
favours Machiavellian politicians who are skilled in negotiating social networks, or 
that both economic prosperity and decentralisation entail the development of a richer 
civil society whose wider distribution of power should undermine authoritarian 
elements within political culture. It is no exaggeration to say that many further 
hypotheses are easily forthcoming. Rather than develop these arguments further, 
it will simply be concluded that Pareto opens a rich seam. Consequently, we must 
be careful to preserve the possibility that the social personalities of political elites 
may typically derive at least some of their content from wider social, political and 
economic cultural milieus.
Even where a political elite’s economic constituency has lost definition under 
globalisation and individualisation pressures, we may still call upon a broad range 
of arguments to appreciate why its social personality should endure. Indeed, these 
arguments will also provide some theoretical support for Pareto’s view that residues 
may persist within political elites, even when they become maladapted to the times. 
Here we must consider the principal psychological agencies which cause individual 

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