Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
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open to indirect scrutiny in view of the weight of empirical evidence they generate, 
may be valued if they appear to retain or gain explanatory power over time. 
A subsequent debate suggesting that single instances of nonconfirmation are 
typically insufficient to force the elimination of a theory led Lakatos and Musgrave 
(1970) to argue for the practical necessity of a ‘sophisticated falsificationism’ which 
values bodies of ideas according to whether they appear progressive or degenerating
over time. Crucially, this requires a blurring of scientific and nonscientific categories. 
The scientist’s decision of whether to accept or reject a theory now depends upon how 
they experience Kuhn’s ‘essential tension’ between paradigms which, as the previous 
section has revealed, must hinge to some extent upon personality variables.
It remains to be specified that the theories which Popper is thinking of are 
problem-oriented. They are geared towards limited efforts at economic and social 
planning which he terms ‘piecemeal social engineering’. Although Popper treats the 
evolution of knowledge through such ventures as ‘blind forays into the unknown’, 
he adds that they are never truly ‘random’ because they are always drawn forward by 
the contents of world 3. This happens, he argues, because deliberation assumes both 
that a particular problem is recognised and requires attention, and that knowledge 
always exists to suggest why past strategies, or indeed inactions, have failed to yield 
desirable results (Popper in Schilpp 1974, 1061).
The appeal of Popper’s argument might even increase if the following theory 
of political decision-making is accepted. Niklas Luhmann has pointed out that 
problem-oriented political deliberation by decision-making elites can be understood 
to involve the playing out of cathartic dramas of risk containment:
Politics works in episodes, in short stories each ending with a collectively binding decision, 
a symbolic gesture of conclusion. The political system is thus free to turn to new topics or 
to await feedback from old ones (Luhmann 1993, 165).
Although controversy exists over whether ‘policy cycle’ constructs provide an 
effective basis for modelling policy processes, they remain widely used (Howard 
2005). According to Luhmann’s usage of the policy cycle metaphor, then, political 
risks are transferred to the legal system by acts of legislation and regulation. When the 
legal system fails to quell them, they filter back to policy-makers and the curtain rises 
for a new act. Crucially, however, this risk transfer cycle must be viewed as operating 
within narrow confines. Where long enduring and clearly defined problems (involving 
for example health, education, and certain kinds of crime) demand recurring phases 
(or ‘dramas’) of political deliberation and legal enforcement, it may well be possible 
to speak of Popper’s ‘evolution of knowledge’. In such cases, successive phases of 
trial-and-error learning may well allow better practices to evolve. 
However, Popper’s theory places a heavy reliance upon the ceteris paribus clause. 
His trial-and-error learning processes can best be envisioned as occurring within 
relatively closed systems where decisive variables remain constant and new ones do 
not emerge to threaten system homeostasis. We might develop this line of criticism 
with reference to Otto Neurath and other philosopers of the scientistic ‘left wing’ of 
the Vienna circle, who argued that outcomes must remain indeterminate wherever 
insufficient knowledge exists concerning decisive variable interactions. For Neurath, 

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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prospects for achieving this knowledge are greatly reduced by epistemological 
complexity arising from the reflexive component in decision-making. Danilo Zolo 
summarises his argument as follows: 
... any possibility of certainty, or, following Popper, of ‘approximation’ to the truth, is 
excluded because agents themselves are included in the environment which they attempt 
to make the object of their own cognition. The agents may take critical  – i.e. reflexive 
– account of the situation of circularity in which they find themselves, but they cannot 
remove themselves from their own historical and social perspective, or free themselves 
from the biases of the scientific community, culture or civilisation to which they belong 
and which influence their own perception of themselves. They cannot know themselves 
objectively, but they cannot even know objectively their environments either, since they 
themselves alter the environment by projecting upon it their own biases when they interact 
with it in making it the object of their own cognition (Zolo 1992, 7).
Policy-makers are thus condemned to learn from trial-and-error experiment only 
through the distorted lens of a series of after-the-act rationalisations by which they 
try to interpret why decisions were made. Interestingly, this was very much Pareto’s 
view. Seeking to explain the ‘certainty of irrational experience’, Arnold Gehlen 
stressed that:
Vilfredo Pareto has compiled evidence from six languages and sources spanning 
centuries to present the convincing argument that human beings primarily behave in [non-
logical actions], that there is a “logic of feeling”, which means that we often believe 
something because we have acted accordingly, and then formulate certainties to cover any 
discrepancies … (Gehlen 1988, 297).
This view can readily be extended to cover collective as well as individual decision-
makers.
6
 In fact, it seems to apply particularly well to circumstances where 
governments and major political parties come under pressure to account for poor 
decisions which they have made in the past. Given the unrelenting hostile criticism 
which such institutions face, the acceptance of past failure is usually neither easy 
nor politically desirable, and so politicians may very easily settle upon contrived 
reasons for past decisions. Moreover, we might envision Elster’s ‘civilizing force of 
hypocrisy’ as often creating cognitive distortion by leading politicans to internalise 
distorted understandings of past motives, as well as distorted images of the world, 
in their efforts to deal with intense scrutiny and accountability pressures. Finding a 
large measure of uncertainty and doubt in the reflexive self-assessments of decision-
making institutions, Niklas Luhmann even goes so far as to suggest that:
Organizations … are constantly involved in interpreting (observing) their own operations 
and seek goals, even new goals, that make what happens or has happened understandable 
and determinable. Planning is for the most part a writing of the system’s memoirs 
(Luhmann 1998, 105). 
6  Zolo (1992, 7) points out that T.S. Kuhn, Ludwik Fleck and others have argued that 
the problem of epistemological complexity similarly confronts individuals, social groups, and 
scientific communities.

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