Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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to bear. Hence compulsives will tend to experience certain forms of heightened 
anxiety. More fully, we can link compulsivity and low self-esteem to two of the 
three major forms of anxiety which Freud identified. Leaving aside the affective 
state of ‘reality anxiety’, which Freud described as a signal to the ego that it may 
be overwhelmed by an external environment which is beyond its control, we can 
say that compulsives will experience higher levels of ‘neurotic anxiety’ (which are 
provoked when the demands of the ego-ideal are not easily met) and ‘moral anxiety’ 
(which are provoked when the demands of conscience are not easily met). 
The affective state of neurotic anxiety appears in Freudian theory as something 
experienced as ‘free-floating’ and hard to associate with particular objects. Its function 
is to signal to the ego that repressed id impulses, which will often be experienced as 
alien to consciousness, threaten to over-rule the various reaction-formations which 
compose the ego-ideal and which lend the ego its structure and identity. Freud’s 
concept of ‘moral anxiety’, on the other hand, refers to guilt feelings which warn us 
that circumstances have arisen where the superego threatens to utilise the reservoirs 
of aggression which it has at its disposal for the purposes of self-punishment. 
These punishments may be experienced as intensified guilt feelings, as feelings of 
depression, or as ascetic or masochistic urges. It seems reasonable to suppose, then, 
that when compulsives experience low self-esteem and therefore come to place an 
especially high premium on preventing further lowerings of self-esteem, they will 
experience neurotic and moral anxieties both more acutely and across a wider range 
of situations. 
There are grounds for believing that these anxieties will, especially where self-
esteem is low, frequently trigger defensive strategies involving prejudice towards 
others. The argument that prejudice can help defend the ego ideal when it is threatened 
has been made by Vamik Volkan, who claims in his (1994) ‘The Need for Enemies 
and Allies’ that throughout their adult lives individuals require ‘suitable targets 
for externalisation’ (STEs). These allow the sense of self to be reaffirmed through 
contrasts made with unfavourable representations of others. What makes his theory 
particularly controversial is that he regards the ‘need for enemies’ as essential:
My work with severely regressed patients gradually brought home to me that the patient 
who has not as a child established suitable targets for externalisation lacks as an adult 
an important component in the arsenal he needs to protect and regulate his sense of self 
(Volkan 1994, 61, 63).  
It can also be argued that prejudice helps protect against guilt feelings and other 
punishments by conscience (such as depression and sleeplessness) because, as we 
will see in section 4.6.1 when the relationship between compulsivity and prejudice 
is investigated, compulsives often project onto others aspects of themselves which 
would otherwise invoke the wrath of conscience – aggressing outwardly where 
otherwise they would aggress inwardly.
Interestingly, Sniderman’s investigation of the syndrome of low self-esteem 
provides some original research evidence involving the use of a psychometric 
instrument called the ‘inflexibility index’ (consisting of separate measures of 
intolerance of ambiguity, obsessiveness and rigidity) which he used as a ‘rough 

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Pareto’s Psychology
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gauge’ of compulsive personality. He concluded that there does indeed appear to 
be a significant correlation between compulsivity and low self-esteem. He adds 
that although, generally speaking, low self-esteem will tend to prohibit political 
involvement, his own research evidence suggests that the low self-esteem driven 
compulsive will often enter the world of politics as a form of ‘compensatory striving’ 
to overcome low estimates of the self (Sniderman 1975: ch. 7). One wonders, 
therefore, just how often this might account for the involvement of Pareto’s ‘lion’ 
type in politics, and indeed just how often such types might display that curious 
combination of timidity and aggression associated with juxtaposed inferiority and 
superiority complexes. 
So far, then, psychoanalysis has helped us interpret risk aversion as part of a 
broader syndrome involving low self-esteem, neurotic/moral anxiety and prejudice. 
However, we have yet to consider how the ‘thrift’ which Pareto attributed to his 
rentiers lends itself to psychoanalytic explanation. Looking at Wilhelm Reich’s 
(1969, 193–200) account of the compulsive personality, we see that a key indicator 
of compulsivity is ‘thriftiness, if not avarice’ (Reich 1969, 194). Erich Fromm has 
very similarly described the compulsive as possessing a ‘hoarding orientation’. 
Millon  et al. (1996, 523) point out that this trait remains central to contemporary 
theories of compulsivity. They draw attention to the fact that one major variant of the 
compulsive personality is the ‘parsimonious compulsive’ whose ‘niggardly, tight-
fisted and penny-pinching’ disposition ‘reflects a wariness and a self-protective stance 
against exposures that would permit the possibility of loss’. Following Freud (1925), 
classical psychoanalytic theory understands the origins of parsimoniousness or thrift 
with reference to the experiences of the child during the anal phase: the desire to 
collect and accumulate money is considered, along with the trait of obstinacy, as ‘a 
sublimation of the desire to retain faeces’ (Kline 1984, 26). It is certainly interesting 
to speculate that this phenomenon may contribute to that emotive opposition 
to ‘profligate spending’ which perennially distinguishes conservative political 
campaigning. 
Of course, individual differences in levels of willingness to take risks can also 
be viewed sociologically. From this perspective, Pareto’s foxes and speculators are 
positively disposed towards risk because they possess material resources which 
allow them to absorb losses incurred through risky ventures. Similarly, we can view 
the hoarding orientation of the rentiers as resulting from the experience of scarcity. 
One of Bertrand Russell’s aphorisms articulates this view of the rentier capitalist 
especially well: 
I once befriended two little girls from Esthonia, who had narrowly escaped death from 
starvation in a famine. They lived in my family, and of course had plenty to eat. But 
they spent all their leisure visiting neighbouring farms and stealing potatoes, which they 
hoarded. Rockefeller, who had in his infancy experienced great poverty, spent his adult 
life in a similar manner (Russell 1985, 21).  
This possibility can be developed using contemporary ‘postmaterialist’ theory which 
argues that improvements to living standards throughout the industrialised world 
render us substantially less threatened by concerns relating to material scarcity. 

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