Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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interpretation provides us with an important sense in which Pareto’s sociology is 
fundamentally concerned with what chapter three will term ‘social personality’.
Pareto’s theory of social equilibrium also held direct implications for statecraft. 
Specifically, it provided a means to judge political leaderships according to how 
well they maintain equilibrial balance throughout constantly changing times, a 
chief determinant of which is whether they permit an open circulation of personnel 
throughout the elite strata. Crucially, the desirability of maintaining equilibrial 
balance, lest a ‘reaction’ be set in motion by the synchronising forces of the historical 
cycle, reveals a peculiarly conservative streak in Pareto’s thought. He could argue 
from this position that effort should not be squandered on political upheavals which 
run contrary to wider processes of societal change. Politicians should instead 
consider equilibrial balance as a criterion for judging the likely effectiveness of all 
significantly scaled interventions in politics, the economy or society.
This aspect of Pareto’s thought seems to explain why a ‘Pareto circle’ developed 
amongst conservative academics such as Robert Merton, Joseph Schumpeter, Crane 
Brinton and George Homans at Harvard University during the 1930s and 1940s. 
This circle first took shape under the central organising influence of Harvard 
physiologist Lawrence Henderson, a fierce debater who drew heavily upon both 
Pareto and Machiavelli in his vehement opposition to Marxism. Some members of 
Henderson’s circle later admitted they had warmed to the anti-radical implications 
of Pareto’s sociology, as expounded by Henderson, because they felt threatened by 
the intellectual interest in Marxism which had been kindled by the great depression. 
Harvard’s liberal and socialist academics, for their part, were quick to point out that 
in Pareto the bourgeoisie had found its Karl Marx (see Young 1971, 9–11).
A key figure within this circle was Talcott Parsons, whose early interest in Pareto 
stimulated his progress towards becoming the most influential US social systems 
thinker of the twentieth century. Parsons had only recently moved from Harvard 
University’s Economics Department to its new Sociology Department when he first 
joined Henderson’s circle. He soon became a regular contributor to its 1932–1934 
seminar discussions of the (1917) French translation of the ‘Treatise’. Parsons’ first 
major sociological project was to bring European sociology to the US, leaving behind 
its Marxist contributions. To that end he famously went on to discuss Pareto at great 
length alongside Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Alfred Marshall in his (1937) 
‘The Structure of Social Action’. Yet this work made few references to Pareto’s social 
system. This is possibly because Parsons had no desire to explain matters already 
covered in the separate writings of Henderson and Homans. More importantly, 
however, Parsons’ goal was to derive from these early European sociologists what 
he variously termed an ‘analytical theory of human action’ or an ‘action frame of 
reference’. Hence his focus was naturally directed towards Pareto’s theories of 
logical and non-logical conduct. What he found there allowed him to distinguish 
sociology as a discipline. Starting from his economist’s knowledge of Pareto as a 
thinker who treated homo economicus as a logical being, Parsons overplayed those 
elements of Pareto’s thought which distinguished the logical action assumptions of 
economic theory from the non-logical action assumptions of sociology. Following 
this distinction, Parsons could define sociology as a ‘residual science’ spanning non-
logical actions only (Parsons 1949, 766). Dalziel and Higgins (2006) clarify that 

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Pareto’s ‘Psychologistic’ Sociology
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Pareto did indeed view ‘pure economics’ as a field of study which assumes logical 
behaviour. Yet he did not view economic phenomena as wholly logical. Parsons 
therefore missed the vital point that Pareto’s social system spanned non-logical 
aspects of economic, social and political life. 
Judging from what has gone before in this present chapter, and given Powers’ 
(1987) distillation of Pareto’s links between the economy and other areas of life 
in particular, it is hard to see how such an impression could have been formed. 
Yet Dalziel and Higgins list several commentaries on Pareto from the early 1990s 
which follow Parsons in representing Pareto as drawing a strict boundary between 
economics and sociology upon the basis of what one commentator called ‘a division 
of labour between the rational and nonrational aspects of social life’. Dalziel and 
Higgins stress that such interpretations neglect clear references made throughout the 
‘Treatise’ to the idea that general sociology synthesises economics and many other 
disciplines to permit the study of ‘human society in general’. They side with more 
recent commentators like Aspers (2001) who argues that Parsons’ interpretation 
should be overturned so that Pareto is once more recognised as founding an economic 
sociology whose concern with non-logical economic conduct provides a valuable 
counterweight to economic theories which assume logical conduct. 
Parsons had also brought to Henderson’s circle a desire to help elevate the 
new discipline of sociology to the same status as economics, such that economics, 
political science and sociology would become distinct and equal fields of study 
(Turner in Barber and Gerhardt (ed.) 1999). His interpretation of Pareto thus 
supplied a theoretical boundary between economics and sociology, around which the 
case for sociology could be constructed. Parsons’ concern to raise sociology’s status 
would eventually lead him to create, in 1946, a new Harvard Department of ‘Social 
Relations’ which drew together specialisms in ‘sociology, anthropology, social 
psychology and clinical psychology’, but notably not political science or economics. 
Parsons now saw his new discipline’s integrity as a matter of national importance. 
His Social Relations Department had been set up specifically as an institutional 
vehicle to further his chief intellectual ambition which had taken shape over the 
course of the Second World War: to highlight the systemic basis for liberal social 
order and so help protect democracy from threats such as fascism (Vidich 2000). 
Parsons’ new social systems agenda appears to have led him to reappraise Pareto. 
Dalziel and Higgins (2006) quote from Parsons’ Marshall Lectures, delivered at 
Cambridge University in 1953, where he argued that Pareto’s distinction between 
social, political and economic ‘aspects’ of social action can only be upheld when it is 
recognised that they do not correspond to distinct sets of variables, but rather to ‘one
set of fundamental variables of the social system which are just as fundamental in its 
economic aspect as in any other’. By this stage in Parsons’ academic career, however, 
Pareto had long been sidelined. It was to Freud and Durkheim, predominantly, that 
Parsons had amassed his greatest debts, in his effort to progress Pareto’s ambition 
to link ‘the mind and society’. To understand Parsons’ early failure to connect with 
Pareto as a guiding spirit for the refinement of social systems theory, we must consider 
that he did not fully appreciate the significance of Pareto’s residues as fundamental 
variables within the social system. This underappraisal seems to have been based 
upon deficiencies arising within Pareto’s abstract residue theory (e.g. Parsons in 

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