Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
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and with the conviction demanded of political elites. By contrast, they will find 
heuristic guidance ever less discernible within an increasingly heterogeneous, 
volatile, unpredictable electorate. Moreover, leaders of political elites may at such 
times find that it suits their interests to have recourse to elite social personality for 
the purposes of policy formulation, because this will create the impression that their 
decisions reflect the aggregated inputs of ordinary members and supporters, which 
will help them shore up weakening social capital in these areas. Followers within 
political elites may respond with a keener focus upon elite social personality also. 
The degree of fit between leadership decision and elite social personality may serve 
for them as a barometer for the extent to which elite power is distributed downwards, 
and for the extent to which leadership decisions either remain true to the ‘soul’ of the 
organisation or serve other interests.
3.7 Conclusion
This chapter has argued that increased social and epistemological complexity 
threatens political decision-makers by obscuring from them the likely consequences 
of their decisions. It is worth stressing just how seriously some theorists take this 
depiction of the modern political condition. Niklas Luhmann says that ‘contingency’, 
or the unpredictability of future events, is ‘modern society’s defining attribute’ 
(Luhmann 1998, 44). Very similarly, Jon Elster argues that political decision-
making is, generally speaking, characterised by a ‘radical cognitive indeterminacy’ 
where, as he puts it, ‘theory is impotent’ and ‘we cannot learn from experience and 
experiments’ (Elster 1989a, 181). From this point, it is a very short step to reiterate 
that political elites will have growing cause to turn to social personality to help 
them deal with decision-making problems consistently and predictably, and to then 
turn once more to the question of whether Pareto successfully based his sociology 
upon psychological qualities capable of generating heuristic guidance useful for this 
purpose. This chapter has already provided a fair indication that he did, because it 
has shown that Pareto’s psychological model included general orientations towards 
change, risk and innovation, which we can think of as providing a backbone for the 
conservative-liberal continuum. However, the following chapter will explore each of 
these constructs in the theoretical depth they deserve, in part so that we may better 
gauge the richness of their implications for political decision-making, and also so 
that we can then assess Pareto’s political sociology in the final chapter. This will 
finally allow us to ascertain whether it is to Pareto’s psychological insight that we 
should turn, if we are to rate him as a key figure within classical sociology.

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Chapter 4
Pareto’s Psychology
4.1 Introduction
This chapter will examine what Pareto said concerning each of the individual 
differences which align to form his psychological model. It will consider how well 
these differences match up with constructs which have subsequently developed 
within psychological and sociological literatures, and it will call upon wide-ranging 
evidence to assess the extent to which they align as Pareto envisioned. For this task 
to remain manageable, it has been necessary to focus upon what seem to be the 
model’s core individual differences.
The following six sections argue that the imposition of a six dimensional structure 
gives good coverage. Hence, to test Pareto’s model upon a given population would 
mean asking, firstly, whether the following six individual differences actually 
exist as real dimensions of personality, and, secondly, whether they lock together 
along a general multi-trait person continuum as Pareto believed. The first of these 
six sections, section 4.2, will begin by exploring the polarity between cultural 
conservatism and liberal scepticism which Pareto set within his model. Section 
4.3 will then look at how an individualism/collectivism continuum aligns beside 
this, such that collectivism clusters with cultural conservatism, and individualism 
clusters with liberal scepticism. Section 4.4 will then consider those heightened 
creative abilities which Pareto also linked to liberal individualism. Section 4.5 will 
look at Pareto’s assumption that creative, liberal individualism also tends to cluster 
with what we now term the general personality trait of ‘risk-taking’ or ‘sensation-
seeking’. Section 4.6 will thereafter consider how Pareto’s ‘force-fraud’ continuum 
also slots into the model, such that liberals incline towards manipulativeness and 
compromise in their dealings with political opponents, while conservatives incline 
towards blunt, uncompromising and aggressive strategies. Finally, section 4.7 will 
consider how comfortably an ideological conviction-relativism continuum fits 
within this overall pattern, such that conservatives now become zealous ideologues 
and liberals become detached relativists. 
Before examining each of these individual differences, this introductory section 
will prepare the reader with some very general comments on the model. Firstly, it is 
worth reiterating that Pareto treated the ‘conservative’ traits listed above as common 
within the lower echelons of mainstream political elites. Yet he also regarded them as 
underpinning the violent and extremist politics of both the far right and the far left. 
Aspiring politicians who possess these traits, Pareto believed, will gravitate towards 
small, highly principled parties which may so esoteric as to be almost inaccessible, 
and which split easily into factions due to squabbles over ideological purity. Such 
parties will tend to recoil from opportunities to make deals with dominant political 

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