Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Testing Pareto’s Theory
187
One way to theorise conservative individualism is as a gestalt within conservative 
personality. That a person who is likely to conform and submit to authority, to look 
both to religion and to the past for collective social and moral codes, and then apply 
an unusually harsh conscience to the policing of these codes, should be, in any sense, 
an ‘individualist’, does at the very least suggest tensions will appear between that 
person’s collectivist and individualist trains of thought. Hence we must understand 
the phenomenon taking account of all its attendant psychic tensions and attitudinal 
contradictions. Here it becomes important to remember the psychoanalytic argument 
that compulsives do not eradicate their conflicts, they merely repress them. The 
struggle between the collectivist and the individualist within the mind of the 
conservative may thus be regarded, to some extent at least, as one where the early 
anti-authority conflicts, which persist throughout adulthood in repressed form, will 
strain towards sublimated release and may often find expression within individualist 
ideology. To return to the findings of the MP study, we might therefore speculate 
that the phenomenon of conservative individualism will be difficult to capture 
within psychometric studies, because a good deal of ambivalence and dissonance 
will underlie its very malleable and diverse articulations. Moreover, at the time of 
the MP study, the Conservative Party was barely one year on from serious election 
defeat and had been thrown into confusion over the continuing role of Thatcherite 
individualism within the party. The Conservative MPs who responded to the survey 
would therefore have had considerable latitude to reduce dissonance by harmonising 
their minds along either collectivist or individualist lines.
If we are to regard the conservative individualism suggested by the MP study 
as partly reflecting conservatism’s transformation following the breakdown of the 
post-war economic consensus, then it helps to consider Shirley Letwin’s (1992) 
view of Thatcherism as a project of national renewal based upon an unleashing 
of the ‘vigorous virtues’ of independent-mindedness and energetic pursuit of self 
sufficiency. Letwin argued that although the aims of the Thatcher project were 
hard to discern as they were never clearly articulated, they did at least include the 
promotion of these qualities in a direct challenge to what Conservatives saw as the 
dependency culture. This new commitment to individualism represented an essential 
psychological corollary to the monetarist experiment of the early 1980s, because 
the Thatcher government hoped desperately whilst monetarism was teetering on the 
brink of fiscal failure that these virtues would re-awaken under low tax conditions to 
energise economic recovery. 
We may understand conservative individualism thus, and yet still argue that it 
represents much more than a passing ideological contortion of conservative thought. 
Industriousness, at least in so far as this is reflected in the level of importance which 
individuals attribute to their work, is now a well established psychometric construct, 
following the development of scales to measure the beliefs and values of the ‘protestant 
work ethic’ (PWE) (e.g. Mirels and Garrett 1971). Mudrack (1997, 217) describes this 
construct as fundamentally involving the extent ‘to which people place work at or 
near the centre of their lives’. It derives originally from Max Weber’s writings (Weber 
2002) on the role of the protestant ethic as a driver for early capitalist entrepreneurship. 
Jones (1997) points out that Weber’s writings on PWE suggest a psychological process 
which begins with a confluence of religious faith and personal asceticism, leading 

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
188
onwards to a particular set of values (or ‘virtues’) which those with protestant work 
ethic feel they must commit to, if they are to achieve material success. Importantly, 
this material success was not regarded by Weber as an end in itself, but rather as an 
indicator of God’s blessing. More specifically, Weber regarded a record of successful 
commitment to the specific values of hard work, use of time, thrift, innovation and 
honesty, as helping early capitalist entrepreneurs quell anxieties that they may not be 
counted among God’s elect. Weber also believed, however, that the protestant ethic 
may persist as a powerful motivator in secularised form. 
Jones argues that recent psychometric developments of Weber’s construct attest to 
its psychological insight. For example, Furnham (1990) investigated seven measures 
of PWE in order to explore its dimensional structure. He found five. These included 
a veneration for, and willingness to undertake, hard work; religion and morality; and 
independence from others. The two remaining dimensions were conspicuously anti-
hedonistic: asceticism and the disdain for leisure. 
A close relationship between PWE and conservatism has long been noted in both 
theory and empirical research. For example, Atieh et al. (1986) correlated the Mirels-
Garrett PWE Scale with Glenn Wilson’s C-Scale at .22 in a US student sample. More 
recently, Christopher and Mull (2006) reported a very high correlation of .56 between 
PWE and Robert Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) scale in two towns 
in the Midwestern United States. It should be acknowledged, however, that Jones’ 
(1997) consideration of the empirical literature on PWE for its correspondence with 
Weber’s original contruct presents us with mixed implications for whether we should 
stress links between PWE and conservatism-RWA. For one thing, Jones observes 
that links between PWE and creative innovation, which Weber emphasised, have 
not found support within the more recent empirical literature. Given the above links 
between PWE and conservatism-RWA, this should perhaps not surprise us. What 
is perhaps surprising, however, is that Jones cites a variety of studies linking PWE 
to internal locus of control, and indeed further studies linking PWE to beliefs in a 
just world. Such findings suggest a highly problematic relationship between PWE 
and the authoritarian worldview in particular. Nonethless, we may conclude that 
findings reveal PWE as a contruct which deserves to be linked to those ‘vigorous 
virtues’ which Letwin placed at the heart of Thatcherism. It also serves us well as 
a theoretical framework for understanding the conservative individualism glimpsed 
within the MP study. 
Yet even this does not exhaust the list of potential explanations. Little’s (1998) 
discussion of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘strong leadership’ style provides further insight into 
the psychological underpinning for the Thatcher brand of individualism. He quotes 
from a particular speech which Mrs Thatcher made in Chicago in 1975, which used 
the Atlantic convoys of the Second World to illustrate the importance of individual 
autonomy and responsibility as a basis for successful human interdependency:
During that period the convoy was a feature of our daily lives in Europe, and it seems to 
me to provide an excellent illustration of inter-dependence in practice. Each individual 
ship has a purpose – to get to its destination – which it can best achieve only in concerted 
action. Yet each ship can only play its part if it is in good working order and keeping a 
certain distance from its neighbour. This is the strength of the convoy (quoted from Little 
1988, 65).

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