Chapter 3
Vilfredo Pareto published his mammoth four-volume Treatise of on General Sociology in 1916. It was translated into English and published as The Mind and Society in 1935 by the same editor, Arthur Livingstone, who brought out Mosca’s The Ruling Class four years later. Given the sheer size of this text—which runs to over 2,000 pages and 2 million words—I have relied on the abridged version the Compendium of General Sociology, which Pareto approved. This version still runs to over 450 pages. It was published in Italian in 1920 and finally received an English version in 1980.1 However, for the sake of convenience and consistency, I have referenced the full version of The Mind and Society throughout because it is customary to refer to Pareto’s numbered paragraphs, and these differ in the Compendium. Unlike Mosca, who rooted his analysis in history, Pareto devised an entire system of sociology driven by his recognition of the limitations of economics. His goal was to ‘describe what society is like, and to discover some general laws in terms of which society operates’ without ‘expressing any ideal of what society and government ought to be.’2 This marks a second contrast to Mosca, whose analysis, as we saw in the last chapter, contained positive and morally normative elements such as the notion of juridical defence; Pareto’s analysis is wholly cast in the neutral and amoral mode of ‘scientific analysis’. For our purposes, we are interested in his famous concept of ‘The Circulation of Elites’, but in order to understand this, it is necessary at least to have some knowledge of his entire sociological system. I will first outline Pareto’s concepts of sentiments, residues, and derivations before turning to his notion of the circulation of the elites.
Pareto argued that most human action is ‘non-logical’, that is, not animated by conscious beliefs but rather by instincts which he called ‘sentiments’ manifested as ‘residues’. In his introduction to the Compendium, Joseph Lopreato provides a good summary of what this means:
[I]nstead of saying that belief B is the cause of action A, it may be more informative, more theoretically fundamental, to hypothesize that both A and B are rooted in the third factor, X. The theory of residues is the result of Pareto’s search for the human X.3
‘Sentiments’, then, are the ultimate determinant of human thought and action (X), they manifest in the real world as observable ‘residues’ (A), but since humans also feel a need for logic, they post-hoc rationalise these residues by generating arguments (B) which Pareto called ‘derivations’. Pareto’s thinking bears some resemblance to Adam Smith’s Theory of Sentiments and David Hume’s famous maxim that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’.4 This insight has since been underlined by studies in modern psychology such as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow or Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.5 Intuition comes first; reasoning follows as a justification for what one has already felt at a ‘gut level’. At a societal level these justifications manifest as ideologies, theologies, doctrines of all sorts, and these specific manifestations are ‘derivations’. However, the root of any given derivation will be a more general ‘residue’ which in turn has been generated by a ‘sentiment’. Humans seem to have a deeply felt need for a sense of purification, which is the sentiment, thus they have the have the general idea of purification, which is the residue, but any specific manifestation of this—such as the Christian ritual of baptism, for example—is a derivation.
Pareto lists over 40 residues which correspond to about 20 sentiments. He then groups these residues into six classes. This classification takes up the entirety of volume two of the full Treatise which is mostly cut out of the Compendium. Most accounts only consider the first two, but in the interests of providing a glimpse of the fuller picture, let us list all six of them:
Class I: Instinct for Combinations
Class II: Persistence of Aggregates
Class III: Need for Expressing Sentiments by External Acts
Class IV: Residues Connected with Sociality
Class V: Integrity of the Individual and His Appurtenances
Class VI: The Sex Residue.6
None of these classes are mutually exclusive and all people will possess the residues they comprise but in varying degrees of strength. Under each class, Pareto lists specific residues. Since Classes I and II are the only ones relevant to his analysis of the elites, a summary of them by Lopreato will suffice:
The combinations [Class I] are responsible for bringing about new ideas, new cognitive and moral systems, new technologies, new social and cultural forms, and so forth. They are, in short, the endogenous factors of sociocultural evolution. […] [T]he persistences [Class II] are the judges in the final instance of what shall be programmed into the social order. They may be viewed as the basic selective mechanisms in socio-cultural evolution […] [P]eople strong in persistences [Class II] tend to be patriotic, tradition-loving, religious, familistic, frugal in their economic habits, inclined toward the use of force and confrontation in political matters, adept at deferring gratification. Conversely, persons strong in combinations [Class I] are culture-relativists; they value change as an end itself; they are hedonistic, rationalistic, individualistic, dedicated to spending and entrepreneurship; they are also inclined toward ruse, deception, and diplomacy in political matters.7
These two forces, which we might easily recognise today as liberal and conservative, combine to create a ‘social equilibrium’. If Class II predominates, the rate of innovation and change slows; if Class I predominates it speeds up. However, I would exercise caution in using Class I and Class II as proxies for ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ or ‘left’ and ‘right’ because in any given society the Class II types could be maintaining the persistence of liberal values, or indeed, the Class I types could be agitating for a radical change towards conservative values. A man like Joseph Stalin—one of the most famous communists in history—identifiably had stronger Class II tendencies.
Nonetheless, given the dynamic of the relationship between Classes I and II, we might recognise over time a certain ratcheting effect whereby Class II continually institute the ideas of Class I, ‘programming them into the social order’, such that history would trend in a Class I direction. This may well have been what Curtis Yarvin had in mind when he said that ‘Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he always swims left’.8 However, again, I should caution against seeing Class I and II in terms of left and right since in a given set of circumstances Class I tendencies could pull in a right-wing direction; in any case, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are rendered somewhat meaningless by elite theory. Besides, Pareto rejected the idea that history had a direction or shape as such. He was ‘extremely critical of cyclical theories (e.g. Plato’s and Vico’s) and argued ‘that history does not repeat itself’ but rather ‘there are certain underlying forces (the residues[…]) that are constantly at work in wave-like fashion.’9 At the same time, he maintained that there were ‘no linear rules of social evolution; instead, one encounters ceaseless fluctuations, an eternal return of periodic oscillations.’10 He also rejected any theory of progress:
Once experience is admitted (it matters little how) within the theological edifice, the latter begins to crumble—such portion of it, of course, as stands within the experimental domain, for the other wings are safe from any attack by experience. […] So years, centuries, go by; peoples, governments, manners and systems of living, pass away; and all along new theologies, new systems of metaphysics, keep replacing the old, and each new one is reputed more ‘true’ or much ‘better’ than its predecessors. And in certain cases they may really be better, if by ‘better’ we mean more helpful to society; but more ‘true’, no, if by the term we mean accord with experimental reality. One faith cannot be more scientific than another, and experimental reality is equally overreached by polytheism, Islamism, and Christianity (whether Catholic, Protestant, Liberal, Modernist, or of any other variety); by the innumerable metaphysical sects, including the Kantian, the Hegelian, the Bergsonian, and not excluding the positivistic sects of Comte, Spencer, and other eminent writers too numerous to mention; by the faiths of solidaristes, humanitarians, anti-clericals, and worshippers of Progress; and by as many other faiths as have existed, exist, or can be imagined.11
Unlike Mosca, who admitted that historical change was driven by some combination of material changes, technological changes, and the influence of new ideas, Pareto’s system reduces such changes to second-order effects of the primary real cause of change: residues driven by underlying instinctual sentiments. Historical change has no direction or purpose, it does not repeat, it has no shape, it simply convulses in response to these deeply-felt ‘non-logical’ human needs.
Pareto then categorises derivations into four main classes:
Class I: Assertion, simply maxims constantly repeated to become accepted truths.
Class II: Authority, whether an individual, a group of individuals, a deity, or tradition.
Class III: Accords with Sentiment or Principles, sentiments converted into abstractions and declarations of universal laws, very similar to Mosca’s ‘political formulas’.
Class IV: Verbal Proofs, logical sophistry designed to affirm sentiments with which the speaker and listener already agree.12
His analysis of these four classes of derivations takes up most of volume three of The Mind and Society. Pareto takes his value-free analysis to a logical extreme point in this section and essentially concludes that all moral philosophies in human history have been a form of delusion designed to justify the more instinctual residues. We have already glimpsed in his rejection of theories of history, an almost nihilistic tendency in Pareto to dismiss all ideas as being meaningless second-order effects which have no other effect than to justify what humans already feel. This is a radically sceptical position that many people will instinctually seek to reject. But Pareto would predict this reaction because humans have a deeply-felt sentiment to believe in ‘certain theories that are experimentally false’ but which nonetheless have a ‘social utility’.
So great is the need of such things which human beings feel that if one structure happens to collapse, another is straightway reared of the same material. […] [S]ince society cannot do without the thing A, some of the defenders of the old faith P will merely replace it with a new faith Q, no less discordant with experience.13
‘Truth value and social utility do not necessarily coincide.’14 Since most of us have some positive believe in a faith, doctrine, or ‘political formula’ to use Mosca’s phrase, we will not wish to admit that what we believe are simply delusions or ‘beautiful lies’. One thing surely no one can deny, however, is that in the absence of an old faith, the void will be filled by new ones. Recent experience has shown us that Christianity gave way to rationalism which gave way to positivism and finally to scientism; feudalism gave way to liberalism which gave way to socialism and notions of ‘social justice’; Divine Right gave way to parliamentarism and democracy, and so on. ‘In Pareto’s eyes, there is no difference at all between belief in a classless society and the belief in angels and devils; the end purpose is different, but not the nature of the belief, nor the method of argumentation.’15 All that the various arguments and justifications—for what are always, in the final analysis, non-logical faiths—show is that human beings have ‘an inclination towards rationality, not the fact of being rational.’16 Pareto maintains that while this is objectively true, humans will never admit it of themselves. One might object that knowledge of this fact has no use in terms of making society better for us, but let us recall that Pareto—again, unlike Mosca—did not wish to give any positive prescriptions on what ought to be whatsoever; the true Machiavellian considers only what is. His project amounts to saying, ‘you may not like it, but this is what human beings are when stripped of all ideological baggage: do with that knowledge what you will.’
However, this opens the door to the most common criticism of Pareto by scholars of all stripes, namely, how can he escape his own system? H. Stuart Hughes accuses him of a ‘certain arbitrariness’.17 Tom Bottomore says he makes no attempt to show the residues, on which he places so much emphasis, ‘actually exist’.18 Geraint Parry argues that ‘Pareto offers no satisfactory reasons for accepting his view that “residues”, as the constants, are more significant historically than the ideologies they give rise to’.19 Richard Bellamy contends that ‘far from providing a “neutral” description of human behaviour, Pareto merely endowed his own ideological leanings with a spurious scientific status.’20 These criticisms cannot go unaddressed here. First, the methodological objections are valid, but as I have already noted, studies in modern psychology have provided much empirical evidence for Pareto’s claims; many behavioural and evolutionary scholars have accepted the view that ‘intuition comes first, and reasoning follows.’21 Second, the wider point that Pareto’s work is in some sense the product of his own ‘residues’ is often predicated on the fact that Pareto died having apparent sympathies for fascism and justified his preference for the use of force or violence.22 The extent of Pareto’s actual support for fascism is widely disputed,23 it seems to me partly a product of motivated Mosca scholars who sought to make a comparison which cast Pareto in an unfavourable light.24 Such debates are quite beyond my scope here, but the idea that Pareto’s justification of human violence was somehow morally normative and a preference rather than a simple statement of a constant fact of history relies itself on a morally normative view that peace is the norm and constant from which violence diverges, and must be justified. Surely, the fact that humans are prone to the use of force and violence is non-controversial? Third, there is the more penetrating critique that his argument is self-refuting: namely that his whole edifice is simply what he ‘already feels’. This would not refute the correctness or validity of Pareto’s project since if the theory of the sentiments and residues is true then the fruits of Pareto’s own instinctual feelings simply tell us profound truths about human nature itself, in the manner that one might expect of, say, a William Shakespeare.25 In other words, that the ideas may have their root in some non-logical aspect of Pareto’s thinking and feeling is not significant. Pareto does not say that all derivations based on residues and sentiments are delusional, he says it is delusional to believe that there might be derivations that are somehow not rooted in residues and sentiments. Since almost all other derivations (i.e. all those other than his) do not acknowledge this fact, they are therefore delusional. However, even with these caveats, I am not sure that Pareto can escape the charge that his absolute adherence to this view itself amounts to a faith position.
Now that we have some idea of the core of Pareto’s thinking, let us come back to the circulation of elites. Recall the Class I and II residues outlined above. Pareto maintained that changes in history were chiefly down to alternations within the proportions of Class I and Class II residues among the elites. In one of his most famous and most quoted phrases, ‘History is a graveyard of aristocracies.’26 Class I residues correspond to Machiavelli’s ‘foxes’, while Class II residues correspond to Machiavelli’s ‘lions’. Foxes are adept at manipulation and manufacturing consent, ‘specialists on persuasion’, while lions are adept at the use of force, ‘specialists on coercion’.27 Although he does not refer to them specifically, Pareto seems to take for granted Mosca’s arguments that the rulers, the ruled, and minority organisation always and everywhere overcome the disorganised masses. He also maintains the distinction between the higher and lower strata of the ruling class, which he calls ‘governing elite’ and ‘non-governing elite’.28 Still, however, it is the underlying residues that drive change, while arguments generated by elites are ephemera, post-hoc rationalisations, that do not affect the outcome of anything:
In politics all ruling classes have at all times identified their own interests with the ‘interests of the country.’ When politicians are afraid of a too rapid increase in the number of proletarians, they are for birth-control and show that Malthusianism is to the interests of public and country. If, instead, they are afraid a population may prove inadequate for their designs, they are against birth-control, and show just as conclusively that their interest is the interest of public and country. And all that is accepted as long as residues remain favourable. The situation changes as residues change never in view of arguments pro or contra.29
‘The character of society, Pareto holds, is above all the character of its elite; its accomplishments are the accomplishments of its elites; its history is properly understood as the history of its elite; successful predictions about the future are based upon evidence drawn from the study of the composition and structure of its elite.’30 At any given time, the composition of elites will shift more towards foxes or to lions. ‘The cunning foxes retain power for some time by their cleverness in forming and reforming coalitions, but “force is also essential in the exercise of government”. Eventually the more forceful counter-elite of lions, willing to use coercion and violence, capture power from the fainthearted foxes and impose order and discipline. In time, however, the intellectual incompetence and inflexibility of the lions lead to their gradual decline and infiltration by the more imaginative foxes.’31 While both Class I and Class II residues predominate among elites, the non-elite, which is to say the ruled, are always overwhelmingly of the Class II type.32 Thus if Class I dominates for too long, and especially if they have become enraptured with doctrines of universal humanitarianism, a counter-elite will form from the non-elite ‘one way or the other’ which includes violent revolution.33
Let us dwell briefly on this final point; Pareto returns to it himself later in The Mind and Society. In what follows, when Pareto says ‘the subject class’, he means the ruled majority:
As regards the subject class, we get the following relations […]: 1. When the subject class contains a number of individuals disposed to use force and with capable leaders to guide them, the governing class is, in many cases, overthrown and another takes its place. That is easily the case where governing classes are inspired by humanitarian sentiments primarily, and very easily if they do not find ways to assimilate the exceptional individuals who come to the front in the subject classes. A humanitarian aristocracy that is closed or stiffly exclusive represents the maximum of insecurity. 2. It is far more difficult to overthrow a governing class that is adept in the shrewd use of chicanery, fraud, corruption; and in the highest degree difficult to overthrow such a class when it successfully assimilates most of the individuals in the subject class who show those same talents, are adept in those same arts, and might therefore become the leaders of such plebeians as are disposed to use violence. Thus left without leadership, without talent, disorganized, the subject class is almost always powerless to set up any lasting regime. 3. So the combination-residues (Class I) become to some extent enfeebled in the subject class.34
Here, Pareto’s analysis bears many similarities with Mosca’s in terms of the fact that the elite are constantly replenished by exceptional individuals from the lower classes, and risk overthrow if they are too exclusive. However, if foxes manage to create a situation where the elite hoover up all the foxes in a society, the lions will find it difficult to organise. One might argue that this has been the case in the liberal democracies of the USA and Europe since 1945 in which foxes have overwhelmingly predominated in the elite and the non-governing elite has greatly expanded to encompass practically all of the Class 1 type individuals in society. Only recently have we seen the elites of Western nations starting to deliberately exclude exceptional Class 1 type individuals from its ranks in the name of its humanitarian doctrines. If Pareto is correct, this would suggest a shift back to a predominance of lions in the coming years once there is a critical mass of excluded Class 1 types to lead them. However, as in Mosca, this process is seen from afar in Pareto, and it would be up to Robert Michels, whom we will consider in the next chapter, to bring the analysis down to the level of the individual organisation.
Pareto’s The Mind and Society, even taken in an abridged form, remains a formidable challenge for any reader today—‘monstrous’ remains an apt description.35 We do not have to accept his entire sociology to see the value in his insights. For example, it strikes me that in his zeal to strip his own worldview of any metaphysical content, Pareto too readily dismissed ideologies as second-order effects and seems to overlook their tremendous animating spirit. On this score, Mosca—less wedded to the totality of a system—was a much shrewder observer of history. Myths are not simply ‘beautiful lies’ used to hoodwink the masses, but also extremely powerful motivators of human action, which Pareto reduces ‘to be minor and for the most part indirect’.36 Even in the most charitable interpretation, where the power of myth to motivate is admitted but then attributed to the strength of an underlying sentiment, Pareto must still explain away wars fought over clashes of belief to some other cause. Still, he has the insight that humans have a deep need for such myths, that there will never be a time when they are not generated, that they are justified because humans also have a need for rationalisation, and at the same time because these are simply ‘needs’, what is generated and justified is seldom, if ever, rational. This we can accept without denying myths as a major causal factor in historical change. Likewise, while we may quibble about primary causal factors, the fundamental notion of the circulation of the elites, the categories of foxes and lions, and idea of elite composition—including the exclusivity or inclusivity of that elite—remains of great value to the student of politics and history.
1 Vilfredo Pareto, Compendium of General Sociology, ed. Elisabeth Abbott (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980).
2 James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (London: Putnam, 1943), p. 124.
3 Joseph Lopreato, ‘Introduction’, in Burnham, The Machiavellians, p. xxviii.
4 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Ryan Patrick Henley (1759; New York and London: Penguin, 2010); David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739; New York: Dover Publications, 2003), p. 295.
5 See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York and London: Penguin, 2011) and Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics (New York: Random House, 2012). I considered these works at length in Neema Parvini, Shakespeare and Cognition: Thinking Fast and Slow through Character (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Shakespeare’s Moral Compass (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and, in a more distilled form in The Defenders of Liberty: Human Nature, Individualism, and Property Rights (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 9–14.
6 Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society, ed. Arthur Livingstone, trans. Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingstone, 4 vols (1916; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), vol 2, §888, pp. 516–19.
7 Lopreato, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxii–xxxiii.
8 Mencius Moldbug, ‘A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations’ (Unqualified Reservations: 2015): https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/.
9 Lopreato, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiv.
10 Alain de Benoist, The View from the Right, 3 vols (1977; London: Arktos, 2018), vol 2, p. 143.
11 Pareto, The Mind and Society, vol 1, §616, pp. 371–2.
12 Pareto, The Mind and Society, vol 3, §1419, p. 899.
13 Pareto, The Mind and Society, vol 1, §616, pp. 371–2.
14 Joseph V. Femia, Against the Masses: Varieties of Anti-Democratic Thought since the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 70.
15 Julien Freund, quoted in de Benoist, The View from the Right, vol 2, p. 146.
16 Benoist, The View from the Right, vol 2, p. 146.
17 H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1979), p. 264.
18 Tom Bottomore, Elites and Society, 2nd edn (1964; New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 38.
19 Geraint Parry, Political Elites (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), p. 49.
20 Richard Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 27.
21 Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow; Haidt, The Righteous Mind.
22 This is the thrust of the account in Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory.
23 See Lopreato, ‘Introduction’, pp. xviii–xx.
24 See, for example, James H. Meisel, The Myth of the Ruling Class: Gaetano Mosca and the Elite (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 9.
25 For a book-length project treating Shakespeare in exactly this manner see Neema Parvini, Shakespeare’s Moral Compass (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
26 Pareto, The Mind and Society, vol 3, §2053, p. 1430.
27 Harold D. Lasswell and C. Easton Rothwell, The Comparative Study of Elites (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1952), p. 16.
28 Pareto, The Mind and Society, vol 3, §2032, p. 1423.
29 Pareto, The Mind and Society, vol 4, §1499, p. 949.
30 Burnham, The Machiavellians, p. 154.
31 Robert D. Putnam, The Comparative Study of Political Elites (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), p. 167.
32 Pareto, The Mind and Society, vol 3, §1811, p. 1260.
33 Burnham, The Machiavellians, p. 159.
34 Pareto, The Mind and Society, vol 4, §2179, pp. 1516–17.
35 Vilfredo Pareto, quoted in Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory, p. 25.
36 Burnham, The Machiavellians, p. 152.