Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
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Luhmann is suggesting that decision makers will often reproduce past strategies 
simply to seek reassurance that these have been and will continue to be successful. 
Equipped with evidence that their techniques actually work, and that their theoretical 
constructions provide a good grasp of reality, they may then feel more confident 
of their abilities and more deserving of continued trust. More fully, however, his 
argument seems to echo Carl Schmitt’s (1991) critique of political romanticism, which 
argued that political decision-makers are often more captivated by their subjective 
inner worlds than by the objective consequences of their decisions. For Schmitt, 
this was because our political thought processes are bound up with our ‘romantic 
productivity’; decision-makers cannot not fully engage with reality because their 
decisions provide ‘occasions for poetry’. This sets us thinking of the ego defences 
and fantasies of politicians – perhaps those with narcissistic qualities in particular. 
It reminds us, just as political lampooners and satirists so often do, that politicians 
may subliminally model their political careers on simple and very personal dramatic 
themes such as recognition, growth, revenge, rivalry, ordeal, justice, and the like, 
which can easily slant how they interpret and learn from past decisions. 
From these arguments we may conclude that policy processes might easily 
become retrospective and bound up with the psychic needs and biases of decision-
makers, which in turn will impede those processes of piecemeal social engineering 
by trial-and-error learning advocated by Popper. The following section will build 
upon this argument by showing that cultural pessimist treatments of increasing 
social complexity provide grounds for believing that the sphere of applicability for 
trial-and-error learning may be narrowing. More fully, increasing social complexity 
will be regarded as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it will be argued that it 
has probably aided the emergence of democratic character during the course of the 
twentieth century. On the other hand, it will be viewed as having reduced prospects 
for political prediction and intervention for reasons relating both to the complex 
and shifting natures of social environments themselves and, just as importantly, 
to the changing psychological constitutions of decision makers. This chapter will 
then conclude that as political decision-making becomes a more uncertain business 
under conditions of increasing social complexity, the potential role for the social 
personalities of political parties in contributing general strategies for the management 
of uncertainty can only grow.
3.6 Social 
Complexity
Stewart and Cohen (1997) have used Popper’s distinction between worlds 2 and 
3 to argue for a complicit co-evolution of mind and culture over the course of 
generations:
We see the accumulating knowledge of generations of intelligent beings as a thing or 
process with its own characteristic structure and behaviour: extelligence. As a result, 
extelligence has become greater, more permanent, and far more capable than any 
individual intelligence (Stewart and Cohen 1997: x).
The parallel between extelligence and world 3 continues as follows:

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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All the extelligence in the world is useless if you lack the intelligence to use it; on the other 
hand, without extelligence we humans would still be back in the caves, rather literally 
reinventing the wheel in each generation. We are what we are because of a remarkable 
complicity between intelligence and extelligence. Intelligence invents but cannot reliably 
and accessibly remember what it has invented; extelligence can remember but (on the 
whole) not invent. Extelligence deals in information; intelligence in understanding 
(Stewart and Cohen 1997, 244).  
Popper’s argument for an evolution of knowledge might strengthen in view of 
Stewart and Cohen’s claim that extelligence is likely to evolve at ever faster rates 
as its expansion becomes driven by an increasingly effective human capacity for 
rational scrutiny. This argument hinges upon the operation of a fortuitous cycle or 
‘feedback loop’ whereby levels of environmental complexity determine levels of 
mental stimulation which each successive generation benefits from during early 
childhood socialisation. Intelligence thus evolves in ways which boost the human 
capacity to create further environmental complexity.
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Stewart and Cohen further argue that extelligence co-evolves with intelligence 
along a historical continuum moving from ‘simplexity’ to ‘complexity’ and then on to 
‘multiplexity’ which has greatly picked up pace throughout the industrialised world. 
Hence they envision three corresponding minds which they contrast as follows:
The test for a simplex mind is to ask what is the most important thing in the universe. If 
it answers, then it is simplex. It is focused on a single, overriding goal. A complex mind 
can perceive the many intertwining strands of cause and effect that combine, within some 
consistent world view, to constrain and control the unfolding of a particular selection 
of events. Complexity is a state that is inaccessible to the vast proportion of the human 
race, but as the global village shrinks, more of us take a complex view. Rarer still is 
the multiplex mind, which can work simultaneously with several conflicting paradigms. 
It sees not just one interpretation of reality, but many, yet it sees them as a seamless 
whole. Such a mind is untroubled by mere inconsistency. It is comfortable with a mutable, 
adaptive, loosely coherent flux [which is better able to see] the world on its own terms 
(Stewart and Cohen 1997, 289).
This ‘multiplex mind’ is only able to function as such because it has been stimulated 
by early exposure to an increasingly complex multi-paradigmatic extelligence 
towards acceptance of inconsistent images of the world (Stewart and Cohen 1997, 
289–292). The multiplex mind is therefore a tolerant and democratic mind, able 
to delay Kruglanski’s epistemic sequence and explore competing theories for their 
respective kernels of truth. Stewart and Cohen’s argument implies, then, that by 
stimulating the evolution of the human mind towards a growing acceptance of 
difference and diversity, increasing epistemological complexity is to be thanked, in 
7  This theory of mental evolution seems quite consistent with results of a variety of 
studies which have shown substantial increases (of around one standard deviation) in IQ in 
developed nations over the past 50 years. Some of these studies are listed by Lynn (1990) 
who argues that although the precise reasons for these changes remain unclear, increases in 
nutritional intake may play a part. 

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