Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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apply Pareto today, and to look to classical sociology more generally as a source of 
inspiration for political psychology.
As we explore the theoretical framework set down by Pareto, we will discover 
that at its core rests a theory of personality which can be a little too convincing. 
We all rely upon what psychologists call ‘implicit personality theories’ to make 
unconscious judgements about how personality traits are bundled together in other 
people. These mental templates always remain vulnerable to change as we encounter 
new circumstances. Pareto’s ‘implicit personality theory’ is an ever-present feature 
of his sociology. As it appears again and again in subtly different guises, it can easily 
work subliminally upon us to transform our own assumptions about personality. 
The danger grows when we find ourselves productively applying Pareto’s theory to 
analyse all sorts of complex situations, becoming more impressed by its explanatory 
power on each occasion.
It is therefore worth stressing at the outset that Pareto’s sociology becomes 
dangerous where it succeeds most effectively. On the one hand, it gives us a very 
distinctive and elegant theory which we can operationalise in many ways; on the 
other hand, it provides exactly the kind of simplifying ideological system which is 
yearned for by those who would rather let their minds run in grooves, than tolerate the 
immense and growing complexity of the social phenomena which they would try to 
understand. Pareto was himself an aggressive critic of all ‘isms’, and it seems likely 
that he would have been the first to advocate that we regard his theoretical system as 
a valuable tool, which we may wish to put down once we are done with it.
Pareto remains well-known for his economic writings. Following his pioneering 
work in mathematical economics, we still hear of ‘Pareto curves’ and ‘Pareto 
optimality’. Pareto’s name has also travelled far beyond the boundaries of his own 
thought, thanks to his famous ‘80–20 rule’, which has been rearticulated within 
various professions towards very practical ends.
1
 Pareto’s own application of this 
rule is easily the most fascinating. His ‘law of income distribution’ claimed that in 
every society 20% of the population are likely to own 80% of the wealth. Pareto thus 
seemed to be providing empirical evidence for a natural distribution of talents. This 
invited the condemnation that his real agenda had been to contribute to the armoury 
of ideas used by the conservative right to assert its belief in natural inequality.
Although Pareto’s reputation as an economist endures, it is less widely known 
that later in life, he broadened his intellectual focus to become concerned less with 
economics and more with a grandiose sociological project which undertook to 
explain how economic processes knit together with social and political processes. 
Nobody could have undertaken such a mammoth task without becoming vulnerable 
to criticism from many angles. Each of the academic disciplines which Pareto 
straddled would later develop towards far higher levels of complexity than he could 
1  This 80–20 rule was later articulated as ‘the rule of the vital few and the trivial many’ 
when carried by Joseph Juran into the field of Quality Management. It was now argued that 
20% of product parts are likely to be responsible for 80% of product defects. Another common 
application was in the economics of building construction, where it was contended (largely 
without empirical verification) that just 20% of design time into a building project, 80% of the 
costs of the building are likely to have been committed.

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Introduction
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possibly have foreseen. When judged by the standards that would arise within these 
professionalised disciplines, Pareto could only appear as a dilettante. Psychologists 
have certainly tended to find Pareto’s sociological theory wanting. William McDougall 
claimed as a professional psychologist to feel ‘offended’ by Pareto’s decision to 
neglect the psychological literature almost entirely, and content himself with terms 
which conveyed only highly generalised and often vague psychological references 
throughout his sociological writings.
2
 This may seem a damning indictment indeed, 
particularly given Berger and Luckman’s (1971, 220) controversial estimation that 
Pareto stands out amongst early sociologists as having begun to develop ‘the most 
elaborate approach to the psychological pole within sociology’. 
Berger and Luckman’s view is contestable with reference to various classical 
sociological texts. For example, we might consider Robert Michels’ sharper focus 
upon the psychology of leader-follower interaction within his (1915) ‘Political 
Parties’, a text which continues to inform analyses of political bureaucracy. We might 
also note that Pareto’s writings on psychology display much less academic knowledge 
of the (then new) discipline of psychology than is found within the psychologically-
educated Georg Simmel’s even earlier work on psychological aspects of urban 
living and the money economy. Simmel’s greater usage of psychological literature 
is evident for example within his (1903) ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, a work 
which still remains a key sociological text on city life. Then there is Durkheim’s 
stronger focus upon the implications for social order of the cultural agon bound 
by a ‘conscience collective’ and threatened by feelings of anomie. This theory is 
associated primarily with Durkheim’s (1893) ‘The Division of Labour in Society’. 
Through Talcott Parsons it went on to exert a major influence upon the structural-
functionalist paradigm within US sociology. On top of that, it might well be argued 
that Pareto’s orientation towards psychology lacked the very personal, curative 
significance which it held for Max Weber, whose convalescences from depressive 
illness in Italy at the close of the nineteenth century inspired him to think deeply 
about how subjectively-held, cultural meanings motivate individuals. This thinking 
is set out primarily within Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ essay. It is also famously applied 
within his classic work on the religious origins of work ethic, ‘The Protestant Ethic 
and the Spirit of Capitalism’, which was written alongside the ‘Objectivity’ essay in 
1904–1905 (Whimster 2004, 7). Weber’s work on the protestant ethic still provokes 
debate concerning the extent to which capitalism has a psychological or religious 
dynamic. 
We will see within this book that our concern to appreciate Pareto will lead us 
to consider all of these issues, to varying extents; yet they all relate back to the 
sociological classics in their own unique ways, and on each occasion to a thinker 
with more to say than Pareto. We will have cause to consider each of these issues 
because the scope for Pareto’s conception of social system was so wide as to allow 
him to either attend to them directly, or make relevant observations, at least to the 
2  McDougall listed 24 major authors in the emerging field of psychology, including 
Freud, Jung and himself, who Pareto failed to mention at all throughout the four long and 
meandering volumes of his ‘Treatise on General Sociology’ (Meisel 1965, 26–27). 

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