Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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the common psychoanalytic notion that compulsives suffer disproportionately from 
neuroses which deny them access to their inner worlds.
A good place to begin is with one influential view of creativity proposed by 
Anthony Storr in his (1991) ‘The Dynamics of Creation’. Storr observes that:
Man is a creative creature because he is spurred by doubt, by confusion, and by 
dissatisfaction with what is, both within and without. This compels him to use his 
imagination and to look for new ways of understanding himself and the world in which 
he lives (Storr 1997, 176). 
Storr does not specifically equate these doubts and dissatisfactions with the 
unrepressed conflicts acted out by the negativist, but we will see that he repeatedly 
comes close, because some of his further general comments concerning creative 
individuals are notably consistent with this equation. For example, Storr attributes 
higher levels of creativity to those who develop strong egos, as will typically 
occur where pressures brought to bear by the superego have proven sufficiently 
tolerable as to reduce requirements for damaging ego defences which cause neurotic 
suffering. According to Storr, the strong ego individual’s ability to manage tensions 
and anxieties arising from the superego explains why creative individuals should 
typically feel confident about and in satisfactory control over their inner and outer 
worlds. This helps them free-associate, and has two further important implications. 
Firstly, as such individuals have greater conscious access to their conflicts, they will 
be better able to utilise these as sources of creative inspiration. Secondly, a strong 
ego entails self confidence and expressivity. Such qualities are likely to energise 
processes whereby creative ideas are communicated and turned into creative 
productivity. 
Of course, this argument hinges upon the idea that creative individuals tend to enjoy 
a relative freedom from neuroses which disproportionately afflict compulsives:
Neurotics … do most emphatically not have dominion over their inner worlds. It is this 
which makes them suffer and have symptoms [clearly evident within the compulsive, 
conservative personality] which, by definition, are felt as alien to the conscious ego. To 
repeat Fenichel’s definition: all neurotic phenomena are based upon insufficiencies of the 
normal control apparatus. What is unusual about the creative person is that he has easy 
access to his inner world, and does not repress it as much as most people. When he is able 
to create, he certainly is not overwhelmed by it, but has dominion over it … (Storr 1991, 
259).
Storr also specifies that the strong ego allows creative individuals to remain aware of 
and tolerate an ‘exceptional degree of division between opposites’. This, he claims, is 
one of their vital distinguishing features (Storr 1991, 244). These people may ‘suffer 
and be unhappy’ as a consequence of their internal divisions, but they are not driven 
to ‘displacement, denial, repression and other mechanisms of defence’ (Storr 1991, 
283). This notion that creativity relates to the high degree of access which the strong 
ego individual has to his or her inner world will be developed later in this section. 
For the moment we can summarise by saying that Storr’s argument provides three 
grounds for relating creativity to negativistic conflict: firstly, creativity will often 

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Pareto’s Psychology
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be driven by dissatisfaction; secondly, it will be more prevalent amongst those who 
have not introjected strong superegos and who therefore enjoy a relative freedom 
from neurosis; thirdly, it will frequently stem from constructive tensions created 
by ‘opposites’ (it is tempting to substitute the term ‘ambivalences’) to which the 
individual has conscious access. Clearly, all three conditions for creative thinking 
are easily met by individuals who experience negativistic ambivalence; on the other 
hand, it is equally notable that all three conditions go unmet by compulsives. This 
thinking cannot, of course, wholly explain the distinction between creative and 
uncreative individuals. Storr’s study of creativity is clear that a broad range of very 
different psychological constellations may spur creative thought and productivity. He 
even lists the compulsive preoccupation with ritual and symbol as an important case 
which disconfirms what is generally true for creative individuals (as might cruelly be 
said of Wagnerian opera, for example). It remains a real possibility, however, that the 
argument set out above relating negativism to high creativity, and compulsivity to 
low creativity, still holds true to an extent which might be reflected in psychometric 
studies of creativity in general populations. Its only real weakness seems to be that 
negativists will often lack the self confidence which is often necessary for creative 
thinking to carry forward into creative productivity.
4
 Yet it might still explain a 
significant amount of individual variance.
One further point which must be mentioned concerning Pareto’s view of creativity 
is that it very conspicuously had what might be termed a Machiavellian edge. Pareto 
used the Italian term ‘combinazione’ quite deliberately, within the context of his class I 
‘instinct for combinations’ residues, in order to convey suggestions of Machiavellian 
guile (Finer in Pareto 1966, 224, footnote). When he referred to his ‘foxes’ and his 
‘speculators’ as possessing this instinct in abundance, therefore, it seems that he 
was referring not just to heightened general creativity but also to various never fully 
defined social skills which allow the Machiavellian to manipulate. A wide range 
of contemporary psychological constructs such as ‘people-oriented skill’, ‘social 
cognition’, ‘cultural sophistication’ or even ‘Machiavellian intelligence’, all come 
to mind here as possible contributors to that adaptive fitness which allows Pareto’s 
‘foxes’ and ‘speculators’ to thrive as he envisioned within the complex and fast 
moving social environments which exist near the centres of political and economic 
power. This fits well with contemporary theories of ‘Machiavellian intelligence’ 
which explain this capacity with reference to neocortical development in both 
humans and in non-human primate species. Machiavellian intelligence is usually 
explained as having arisen so that humans and other primates can strike delicate 
balances between competition and cooperation within complex social hierarchies 
(e.g. Byrne 1995). 
4  As Erikson (e.g. 1968, 96–107) points out, the experience of distrust during the first 
year of life (which forms the basis of negativistic ambivalence) must be understood to involve 
a lack of self confidence. This is because the child’s universe then consists only of self objects. 
Where instinctual needs are not comfortably met, distrust can therefore only be directed 
towards the self. These earliest feelings of low self confidence, Erikson claims, can thereafter 
inhibit the infant’s active exploration of the world, sometimes even persisting throughout 
adulthood.

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