Pareto and Political Theory (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Pareto and Political Theory Although Pareto is considered a ‘founding father’ of both sociology and mathematical econo...

Author: Joseph V Femia

274 downloads 1474 Views 915KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Pareto and Political Theory

Although Pareto is considered a ‘founding father’ of both sociology and mathematical economics, his contribution to political theory has been largely neglected. This new book fills this gap by offering a critical examination of Pareto’s significance for political theory. Joseph V. Femia builds a case for Pareto’s importance as a thinker who reflected on the most fundamental issues of political discourse: individualism vs. holism; science vs. hermeneutics; laissez-faire vs. social engineering; and value relativism vs. moral absolutism. In all these debates, Pareto offered provocative insights. Perhaps the most original of these was his identification of ‘residues’, or basic instincts and sentiments, as the chief motive force in political life and as the source of all our ideas and ideologies. Armed with this theory, Pareto dismissed the Enlightenment faith in human reason. Femia, in his critical but sympathetic analysis, refutes the familiar charge that Pareto was a form of proto-fascist and instead locates him in the Machiavellian tradition of ‘sceptical liberalism’, which scorns metaphysical abstraction and assigns ontological primacy to the individual. The book concludes with a fascinating comparison between Pareto’s scepticism and that of recent postmodernist thought, which also debunks the ‘grand narratives’ of historical progress. This insightful text will be of great interest to students and scholars of Political Philosophy, Sociology and History. Joseph V. Femia is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of several books, including Machiavelli Revisited (2004) and Against the Masses: Varieties of Anti-Democratic Thought since the French Revolution (2001).

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought 1 Hayek and After Hayekian liberalism as a research programme Jeremy Shearmur

11 Classical Individualism The supreme importance of each human being Tibor R. Machan

2 Conflicts in Social Science Edited by Anton van Harskamp

12 The Age of Reasons Quixotism, sentimentalism and political economy in eighteenthcentury Britain Wendy Motooka

3 Political Thought of André Gorz Adrian Little 4 Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy John Girling 5 Freedom and Culture in Western Society Hans Blokland 6 Freedom in Economics New perspectives in normative analysis Edited by Jean-Francois Laslier, Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel and Alain Trannoy 7 Against Politics On government, anarchy and order Anthony de Jasay 8 Max Weber and Michel Foucault Parallel life works Arpad Szakolczai 9 The Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights G. B. Madison 10 On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life Edited by W. S. F. Pickering, W. Watts Miller and N. J. Allen

13 Individualism in Modern Thought From Adam Smith to Hayek Lorenzo Infantino 14 Property and Power in Social Theory A study in intellectual rivalry Dick Pels 15 Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory A critique of Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar Nigel Pleasants 16 Marxism and Human Nature Sean Sayers 17 Goffman and Social Organization Studies in a sociological legacy Edited by Greg Smith 18 Situating Hayek Phenomenology and the neo-liberal project Mark J. Smith 19 The Reading of Theoretical Texts Peter Ekegren

20 The Nature of Capital Marx after Foucault Richard Marsden 21 The Age of Chance Gambling in western culture Gerda Reith 22 Reflexive Historical Sociology Arpad Szakolczai 23 Durkheim and Representations Edited by W. S. F. Pickering

31 Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science A critique of Gadamer and Habermas Austin Harrington 32 Methodological Individualism Background, history and meaning Lars Udehn 33 John Stuart Mill and Freedom of Expression The genesis of a theory K. C. O’Rourke

24 The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky Alison Edgley

34 The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation From terror to trauma Michael Humphrey

25 Hayek’s Liberalism and Its Origins His idea of spontaneous order and the Scottish enlightenment Christina Petsoulas

35 Marx and Wittgenstein Knowledge, morality, politics Edited by Gavin Kitching and Nigel Pleasants

26 Metaphor and the Dynamics of Knowledge Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart 27 Living with Markets Jeremy Shearmur 28 Durkheim’s Suicide A century of research and debate Edited by W. S. F. Pickering and Geoffrey Walford 29 Post-Marxism An intellectual history Stuart Sim 30 The Intellectual as Stranger Studies in spokespersonship Dick Pels

36 The Genesis of Modernity Arpad Szakolczai 37 Ignorance and Liberty Lorenzo Infantino 38 Deleuze, Marx and Politics Nicholas Thoburn 39 The Structure of Social Theory Anthony King 40 Adorno, Habermas and the Search for a Rational Society Deborah Cook 41 Tocqueville’s Moral and Political Thought New liberalism M. R. R. Ossewaarde

42 Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy The invisible hand and spontaneous order Craig Smith 43 Social and Political Ideas of Mahatma Gandi Bidyut Chakrabarty 44 Counter-Enlightenments From the eighteenth century to the present Graeme Garrard 45 The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell A reassessment Stephen Ingle

46 Habermas Rescuing the public sphere Pauline Johnson 47 The Politics and Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott Stuart Isaacs 48 Pareto and Political Theory Joseph V. Femia 49 German Political Philosophy The metaphysics of law Chris Thornhill 50 The Sociology of Elites Michael Hartmann

Pareto and Political Theory

Joseph V. Femia

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Joseph V. Femia All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Femia, Joseph, V. Pareto and political theory / Joseph Femia. p. cm. – (Routledge studies in social and political thought ; 48) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Pareto, Vilfredo, 1938–1923. 2. Political science— Philosophy—History—29th century. I. Title. II. Series. JC236.F36 2006 320.092—dc22 2006002964 ISBN10: 0–415–28813–4 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–50862–9 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–28813–2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–50862–6 (ebk)

Contents

Preface and acknowledgements

ix

1

Introduction and preview

1

2

Metaphysics vs. the logico-experimental method

13

3

The science of politics

31

4

The deconstruction of political philosophy

77

5

The critique of ‘demagogic plutocracy’

100

6

The sceptical liberal

124

Notes References Index

142 158 163

Preface and acknowledgements

This book is not intended as an intellectual biography of Pareto. Its purpose is not to trace the permutations of his life and thought but to highlight his surprisingly neglected contribution to political theory. However, the book’s title does not mean that I have focused on a specific aspect of his thinking to the exclusion of all other aspects. Pareto was contemptuous of the idea that political theory could isolate itself from other disciplines. When he speculated about historical events or human motivation or social dynamics, he did so to illuminate political reality. For him, as for Machiavelli before him, reflecting on the experience of the ancient Romans, for example, was a form of political theory, not an activity separate from it. Although he ridiculed attempts to identify the ‘just’ or the ‘good’ society, we should resist the tendency to pigeon-hole Pareto as a ‘sociologist’, essentially uninterested in systematic political discourse. An underlying premise of this book is that his interdisciplinary approach should be emulated by modern political theorists, who increasingly proceed as if historical analysis, economic reality, and human psychology were somehow irrelevant to their enterprise. Nevertheless, my aim is to be critical as well as expository. I try to elucidate Pareto’s views and to say how they are related to cultural trends and intellectual traditions, but I also venture some comments on the validity and consistency of those views. It is hoped that, whatever its defects, the present work will give some idea of the range and quality of Pareto’s political thought, and that it will make readers want to explore Pareto for themselves. During a decade or so of writing and lecturing about Pareto, I have benefited from the comments and critical suggestions of numerous friends and colleagues. Of these, I would like to single out Jules Townshend for special thanks, since he read part of this book in draft form and always provided encouragement, despite his own lack of sympathy for Pareto’s perspective.

x Preface and acknowledgements Production of the work was greatly facilitated by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council), which enabled me to have research leave throughout the calendar year 2003. I am pleased to record my gratitude to that organisation, and to note the patience its officials demonstrated when completion of the project was delayed by illness. Some of the material in the book has appeared previously in three of my publications: ‘Pareto’s Concept of Demagogic Plutocracy’, Government and Opposition, vol. 30 (Summer 1995), reprinted by permission of Blackwell; ‘Pareto and the Critique of Justice’, in D. Boucher and P. Kelly (eds), Social Justice: From Hume to Walzer, London and New York: Routledge, 1998; and ‘The Futility Thesis’, in Against the Masses: Varieties of Anti-democratic Thought since the French Revolution, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, ch. 3, by permission of Oxford University Press. Acknowledgement is gratefully made to the publishers in question. Last but not least, my thanks are due to Jo Summerfield and Anne Greenwood for typing the manuscript with such speed and efficiency. J.V. Femia 2005

1


Along with Weber and Durkheim, Pareto is generally considered one of the three ‘great’ political sociologists who challenged the Marxist theory of society. His analysis of the cyclical fluctuation of elites is justly famous, as is his emphasis on the ‘non-rational’ in human behaviour and practice. And yet, compared with the other ‘greats’, he receives surprisingly little attention from the scholarly community. While he did have his hour of glory in America on the eve of the Second World War, when his writings were enthusiastically explored by sociologists like Homans and Parsons, he has effectively been ‘put in quarantine’, like a man suffering from a communicable disease.1 According to one commentator, who describes Pareto as an ‘undisturbed theoretical corpse’, the word ‘quarantine’ is too weak an image to convey the reality of the situation.2 Living as we do in an age when even obscure and minor figures in the intellectual landscape generate a vast scholarly literature, how can we explain this relative neglect? Why, in particular, are his ideas almost totally ignored by people who describe themselves as political theorists or political philosophers? Part of the answer lies in the demands Pareto makes on his readers. Before venturing into social and political analysis, he was a pioneering mathematical economist, who contributed to the study of general economic equilibrium and welfare-economic optimality. Because he saw economics as an integral part of his larger social theory, some may feel that they cannot do justice to his thought unless they can first master the complexities of neo-classical analysis, with its forbidding quantitative apparatus. This perceived obstacle is perhaps compounded by his refusal to be ‘user-friendly’ in any shape or form. An almost solipsistic disregard for his readers is especially evident in his main work, Trattato di sociologia generale, which induces exasperation in all but the most heroic of those who plough through it. Even Pareto’s admirers describe this work as ‘monstrous’ – disorganised, unnecessarily long, full of

2 Introduction and preview pedantic distinctions, and continually interrupted by digressions, and by digressions within digressions.3 The English translation (which excluded many repetitions) has a total of 2,033 pages and some 1,845 footnotes, many of them several thousand words in length. As if selfindulgence were a virtue, Pareto constantly allowed himself to be diverted into garrulous and irrelevant discussions, displays of arcane erudition, and diatribes against those who excited his animosity. But the narrative eccentricities of other thinkers – Hegel springs to mind – do not prevent them from acquiring an army of exegetes. A fuller explanation of Pareto’s ‘quarantine’ requires us to consider the social psychology of intellectuals. Few writers managed to antagonise their potential public quite as much as he. Optimistic moralising, of a kind favoured by idealistic intellectuals, was his principal target, and he was relentless in exposing the double standards and faulty logic of its purveyors. This has made Pareto ‘persona non grata among the right-thinking’.4 Socialism, peace, equality, social justice – every term in the lexicon of ‘Progress’ was subjected to his destructive sarcasm. In so far as he offered a vision of the future, it was one of competitive markets, class division, and inevitable elite rule – hardly the stuff of reveries. ‘In the eyes of those who dream about the future society’, writes Julian Freund, ‘Pareto cannot but look like a spoil-sport’.5 He was, in Parsons’s phrase, a ‘knocker’ rather than a ‘booster’.6 In haughty and aggressive tones, he heaped ridicule not only on popular ‘illusions’ but on those who subscribed to them as well. While he professed to disdain moral preaching, he had the unpleasant scoffing habit of the moralist (in the classical sense of the term) who dispassionately lays bare human weakness. To ‘worshippers of the Goddess Reason’,7 Pareto was a slanderer of mankind, a master of despair. His relaxed and even welcoming attitude towards Mussolini’s takeover confirmed (and confirms) to many that fascism was the ‘logical fulfilment’8 of his cynical way of thinking. Of course, slanderers of mankind whose ideas are embraced by fascists need not be disqualified from enjoying effusive academic interest. Witness the Nietzsche industry, but he was precociously ‘postmodern’ in his attack on science and technology; Pareto, by contrast, was a sort of positivist who wanted to apply to the study of society ‘the methods that have proved so useful in other sciences’9 – an ambition guaranteed to make him seem ‘old hat’ at a time when the arbiters of academic fashion are busy deconstructing every cognitive norm. It is a premise of this study that Pareto’s very unfashionableness is a compelling reason for taking a fresh look at his ideas, some of which have barely received any exegetical scrutiny. The key to grasping


3

the significance of his contribution, I submit, is to recognise his Machiavellian roots. Like his Florentine predecessor, he was a realist who saw force and conflict at the heart of politics. Both thinkers bemoaned the tendency of political philosophers to conceive men not as they are in reality but as one imagines them to be. Both thinkers wanted to consider human passions not as virtues or vices but as properties of human nature, in the same way as heat is considered to be a property of bodies. Both refused to order the world into exclusive moral categories. Both understood that man was a myth-maker, a deviously instrumental creature who mystifies his actions by spinning webs of self-justification – intricate complexes of laws, symbols, values, and concepts. And both insisted, against the tenor of the times, that humanitarianism and liberality could be positively damaging, since they undermine the confident, belligerent spirit that preserves social cohesion. All these Machiavellian traits may be taken to justify the picture of Pareto as a proto-fascist foe of all things enlightened. But one must bear in mind that Machiavelli’s subversion of conventional pieties was, from a historical perspective, essentially progressive and liberating. Pareto too embodies the Machiavellian paradox. On the one hand, his analysis gives licence to the darker forces in man’s psyche by debunking the political ideals that give men hope or at least soften the realities of power; on the other, the very process of demystification poses a threat to the status quo by depriving it of the myths or symbolic structures that help to preserve order. Like Marx, he viewed the scientific method as an instrument of mental purification, employed to expose the falsehoods and abstractions that keep us in thrall. As we shall see in Chapter 2, Pareto wanted political theory to free itself from metaphysics, from the tendency to ‘transform subjective facts [beliefs] into objective realities’.10 It will be my contention that his desire to apply the lessons of the physical–mathematical sciences to the analysis of social conduct was much sounder than his ‘hermeneutical’ or ‘postmodern’ critics would have us believe. Chapter 3 will explore his attempt to construct a science of politics and society on the basis of individual psychology. Two main propositions form the bedrock of his theory: (1) that both behaviour and belief stem from personal, psychological complexes; and (2) that social equilibrium is a function of the distribution and interplay of these psychic states (‘residues’, or ‘sentiments’, in his parlance). Whereas Marx and other progressives saw ‘man’ as rational and perfectible, Pareto viewed him as essentially a creature of emotions or instincts. Most of our actions, the argument runs, are ‘non-logical’ in that the objective results are not well related

4


to the subjective intent. The moral condition of mankind is to misperceive the nature of reality. Logical reason counts for little in the grand scheme of things. Although Pareto, as an advocate of scientific transparency, set out to destroy our illusions, he accepted that his endeavours would only reach an elite audience. This did not worry him. Indeed, he expressed anxiety that wide readership of his work might produce harm in the form of mass cynicism or even unrest.11 His purpose, as he described it, was ‘strictly scientific’ – devoid of ‘any intention of offering remedies and precepts, any ambition, even, to promote the happiness and welfare of mankind in general or of any part of mankind’.12 Certainly, the conclusions of his science of society were disturbingly radical. Not only did he expose our cherished beliefs as psychological rationalisations (‘derivations’) and wishful thinking, he also depicted society as an inherently manipulative and exploitative system, sustained by varying combinations of deception and violence. There are faint echoes of Marxism in this analysis, but Marx, needless to say, thought that human consciousness could be cleansed of its illusions, and that the historical conflict between rulers and ruled would eventually deliver progressive results. In contrast, Pareto was a pessimist who held that the human condition could never be cured of its ills and that history moved in perpetually recurring circles. Critics of Pareto tend to attack him on political grounds, or else to confront him with their own theoretical prejudices, which are invariably the opposite of his own. He categorically rejected the reified standpoint of contemporary social theory which purported to explain social/political institutions by assuming their organic function in a structural totality. To him, this was a metaphysical notion, an example of the ‘mystical’ thinking he had resolved to combat – though he never denied that psychological phenomena had some grounding in social ‘collectivities’. Pareto’s determination to excavate the psychological origins of political processes, to discover ‘the logic of non-logic’,13 was – I shall argue – a valuable contribution to political theory, whose chronic neglect of human psychology borders on the perverse. Those who systematically reflect on politics persist in the fiction that they can change social conditions by ‘proving’ or ‘disproving’ this or that idea, or by devising some rational scheme – as if what Pareto labelled ‘derivations’ functioned as the sole determinants of human behaviour. Pareto’s attempt to expose the fatuousness of conventional moral and political philosophy is the subject of Chapter 4. Philosphers, he said, were rather like art historians, always trying to objectify the subjective and the evaluational.14 Even those, like Bentham, who rejected


5

metaphysics nevertheless engaged in a fruitless quest for scientific ‘truths’ about how we should live. For Pareto, words like ‘justice’, ‘morality’, and ‘goodness’ could never be given a descriptive content, since they ‘designate nothing more than indistinct and incoherent sentiments’.15 While he had no time for cognitive relativism, Pareto was an ethical relativist, who thought that ‘ought’ statements lay beyond the reach of reason. His penetrating analysis of the fallacious reasoning and arbitrary assumptions that underpin widely accepted notions such as ‘natural rights’ or the ‘categorical imperative’ is an area of his thought that is almost wholly ignored in the secondary literature, despite its continuing relevance. One of the contributions of the present study, I hope, will be to give these arguments the attention they deserve. Chapter 5 will examine Pareto’s critique of liberal democracy, or – as he called it – ‘demagogic plutocracy’, a form of governance that he saw as fraudulent in its claim to represent the popular will, and self-destructive in its economic profligacy and effete liberalism. The critique represents a particular application of themes and concepts drawn from his general science of society: equilibrium and disequilibrium, the triumph of sentiment over reason, the circulation of elites. The critique is also informed by his economic theories: his opposition to restrictions on the free movement of capital, as well as to the proliferation of petty regulations and government subventions. The ferocity of his attack, combined with his deep pessimism about mankind’s capacity for self-determination, has caused some commentators to see him as an ideologist of fascism. Notwithstanding the reverence he inspired in Mussolini, who made him a Senator of the Kingdom of Italy, Chapter 5 will highlight the differences between Pareto and the Fascist dictator. The widespread assumption that Pareto was, at the very least, an apologist for fascism may explain why his brilliant dissection of the liberal state has attracted so little in the way of discussion.16 Again, it is my hope that the present study will raise awareness of his innovative ideas, including his division of society into ‘speculators’ and ‘rentiers’. In Chapter 6, my concluding chapter, I shall locate Pareto in a tradition I refer to as ‘sceptical liberalism’ – a tradition which shares the pessimism of the fascists but insists on the ethical primacy of the individual. His main objection to the liberal state was that it had lost sight of this primacy in its efforts to impose a ‘religion’ of Progress. Pareto’s attitude to all religions (secular or traditional) was one of doubt verging on disbelief. In the course of making some final judgements about his contribution to political theory, I shall favourably compare the type of scepticism defended by

6 Introduction and preview Pareto with the much more fashionable variant favoured by the postmodernists – a collection of thinkers whose nihilistic contempt for empirical and logical rules would have repelled him. While the foregoing discussion may suggest otherwise, my assessment of Pareto will balance praise with criticism. As is the case with all major thinkers, he often pushed insights to the point of exaggeration. Many commentators have also complained about his intellectual dishonesty or – to put it more charitably – inconsistency. He claimed to speak in the name of scientific neutrality, while simultaneously deriding everything and everyone that displeased him. Almost as infuriating was his refusal to integrate his work with that of previous, or contemporary, theorists. In spite of the prominent role he assigned to psychology, he had no notion of Freud at all. Of Max Weber, there is no trace in any of his writings. (We know he despised all things German.) Likewise Durkheim, another contemporary, is neither quoted nor discussed. As for Comte and Spencer, they are occasionally mentioned but only to be dismissed as mere metaphysicians. Only Marx – his apparent polar opposite, some of whose views are nevertheless eerily similar to his own – is honoured with extensive consideration and genuine respect. Such cavalier disregard for the normal canons of scholarship is bound to raise questions about Pareto’s intellectual seriousness. The naïveté of some of his ideas (e.g. his rigid understanding of scientific objectivity) may be attributed to a lack of appropriate reading. But this failing can perhaps be explained by the eccentricity of his career path when compared with that of most other social or political thinkers. Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was born in Paris in 1848, a year of popular uprisings throughout Europe. While his mother was French, his father was a Ligurian marchese (marquis) who had fled to France in 1835, following the example of Mazzini and other Italian nationalists. During the mid-1850s the Pareto family returned to Italy, where the marchese enjoyed a successful career in the Piedmontese civil service. Vilfredo, after leaving school, studied classics and then engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of Turin. It was here that he acquired his proficiency in mathematics – the foundation for his achievements as an economist. His graduation thesis, The Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium in Solid Bodies – an essay in mechanical equilibrium – provided him with the basic model he would later use in his study of economics and society. After graduating at the top of his class in 1870, he took his first job as a director of the Rome Railway Company. Four years later he became the managing director of an iron and steel concern, the Società Ferriere d’Italia, a firm which extracted and processed


7

iron and allied products, and which had its headquarters in Florence. There Pareto dabbled in radical politics, expressing extreme views in support of democracy,17 republicanism, free trade, and disarmament. After the Cavourist liberal government fell from power in 1876, a consorteria of ‘left-wing’ parties led Italy towards protectionism and state intervention at home and military adventurism abroad. While far from hostile to the demands of the workers, Pareto was quick to identify the vested political interests that lay behind the regulations, tariffs, and nationalisations imposed by the new regime. He denounced the Italian parliamentary system as a sham, a fig leaf for the naked power of the nobility and the wealthy. His sympathies were with the radical democratic movement and the liberals, who, he believed, would restore democracy, promote free trade, and challenge the system of legalised bribery masquerading as ‘responsive’ government. As a business executive forced to negotiate deals with influential deputies and government departments, Pareto came to see the Italian ruling class as a great nexus of influence and pressure, a conspiracy of public officials and plutocrats, concealing itself behind a facade of rigged elections and phoney democratic rhetoric. In 1882, he stood as an opposition candidate for a parliamentary constituency in Pistoia (near Florence) but without success. In 1889, after the death of his parents, and the acquisition of a substantial inheritance, he resigned his directorship, married a penniless Russian girl from Venice, Alessandrina Bakunin, and retreated to a villa in the Tuscan hills. With lots of time on his hands, he launched a personal crusade against the government, writing scores of polemical newspaper articles and delivering public lectures in a working man’s institute. Given his reputation as a troublemaker, he became a marked man, occasionally harassed by the police and even by hired thugs. Through his political activities, Pareto became acquainted with other free-trading publicists and economists, including Maffeo Pantaleoni, Italy’s leading neo-classical economist, who introduced Pareto to the new, mathematically expressed equilibrium system developed by Leon Walras, the Professor of Political Economy at Lausanne University. Walras was one of the pioneers of the ‘marginal’ revolution of the 1870s. Whereas classical analysis concentrated on questions of capital accumulation and growth, neo-classical analysis was concerned with the optimal allocation of given resources, and attempted to explain the determination of prices and quantities in terms of the rewards and costs of extending economic activity by small incremental amounts. Neo-classical economics reflected the belief that market forces, like the mechanical forces acting on a pendulum, would naturally lead to an

8


equilibrium of prices and quantities at which the ‘forces’ of supply just offset those of demand. Given the complexity of analysing an economy with a multiplicity of individual decision-makers and goods and services, a high level of abstraction was required. The mathematics of differential calculus proved to be a fruitful way of dealing with the problem, and appeared to provide economics with ‘scientific’ precision. Already equipped with considerable mathematical skills, Pareto developed an interest in pure economics and began to contribute learned articles to the Giornale degli economisti. In the meantime, Walras was looking for someone to take over his chair and further the cause of his doctrine. On the strength of Pantaleoni’s recommendation, Pareto was appointed in 1893, and his position at Lausanne was made permanent in 1894. From his safe academic haven in Switzerland, he continued his relentless assault on the Italian government, and lent assistance to many socialists and radicals who had been driven out of Italy. He also produced a two-volume edition of his lecture notes, Cours d’economie politique (published in 1896), which analysed the conditions of economic maximisation. It is here that Pareto introduces us to the subject of pure economic theory, homo economicus, an abstract molecule that responds only to economic stimuli. He also expresses doubts about the concept of ‘utility’. In common usage, utility referred to the well-being of the individual or society; but Pareto realised that when people make economic decisions, they are guided by what they think is desirable for them, whether or not that corresponds to their well-being in an objective sense. He therefore introduced the term ‘ophelimity’, to mean satisfaction of preferences, as a replacement for the more ambiguous ‘utility’. But his main economic contribution in the Cours was his exposition of ‘Pareto’s law’ of income distribution, which specifies that in all countries and times, the distribution of income and wealth follows a regular or constant pattern. As Finer points out, ‘the Cours was written in the full flood of Pareto’s liberalism’.18 Individual liberty and free trade were held in the highest esteem; state interference was decisively repudiated. Moreover, he was still hopeful about defeating the benighted socialists and protectionists and liberating human potential in a democratic setting. Yet the seeds of his later pessimism were already germinating. For example, when he elucidates his concept of ‘spoliation’, which denotes the struggle of various economic classes to despoil one another, he explicitly acknowledges his debt to Marx but fights shy of the German’s optimism about the future: ‘Spoliation has always existed in human societies. One may hope for it to be considerably reduced but it is by no means certain that it can be made entirely to disappear.’19 And


9

unusually for someone who claimed to be a democrat, he already seemed to be taking it for granted that societies are, at least in general, ruled by minority groups irrespective of the form of their constitution: Many writers confound two questions which are absolutely different: the existence of a dominant class; and the way by which it is recruited. . . . What I want to establish is that form must not take precedence over substance, and that altering the names which bedeck spoliation in no way changes the amount of wealth it destroys.20 The idea that humanity was spiralling upwards towards some sort of rational denouement was common in the middle part of the nineteenth century. Towards the end of the century, however, theories of progress, democracy, and human perfectibility were all under attack by various forms of ‘irrationalism’. Pareto was not immune to the new mood. By 1900 he had abandoned any hope that democratic reform would achieve its goals. In an article that has since become famous, he advised his readers to be wary of new, popularly elected masters, who would deceive the ‘poor and humble’ and impose a ‘yoke . . . heavier than the preceding one’.21 The radical movements (with which he once identified) were really just seeking to replace one elite with another elite, the privileges and structures of power remaining intact. As for the ideals and theories the different elites purport to represent, they are invented a posteriori to justify forms of domination.22 Pareto expanded on these themes in his next major work, Les systèmes socialistes, published in 1902. It can only be described as a sustained attack on ‘socialist’ ideology, whether of the ‘bourgeois’ kind (protectionism, government subsidies to industry) or of the ‘popular’ kind. He also developed what became his central idea: the paramountcy of the non-rational in human affairs. Socialist beliefs, he maintained, were a new form of religious faith, appealing to sentiment rather than reason. Notwithstanding the intellectual pretensions of Marxist theorists, men will never be spurred to action by logical demonstrations. As Pareto had dealt with the protectionist form of ‘socialism’ in the Cours, the Systèmes focused on the ‘popular’ variety, a farrago of ‘hollow phraseology, empty, high-sounding emotional formulas, abstract and repetitious phrases, vague and airy expressions’ – all of which serve to hide the exploitative activities of a new elite.23 In 1906 Pareto released the Italian-language Manuale di economia politica, the first two chapters of which deal, respectively, with the nature of experimental science and of scientific ‘laws’, and with the

10


general principles of social science. In this work, he explicitly states his thesis that psychology is the basis of political economy and, indeed, of all the social sciences. Accordingly, the Manual (an English version appeared in 1971) systematises his concept of logical and non-logical behaviour, with the aim of putting ‘some order into the infinite variety of human activities’.24 However, the Manual is mainly noteworthy for its contributions to pure economics. For example, Pareto was at pains to eliminate the perception that in pure economic theory marginal utility is the cause of price. In so doing, he was departing from Walrasian value theory, which he described as ‘outmoded’ and contrary to reality.25 Pareto also demolished, once and for all, the ‘unholy alliance’ of economics and classical utilitarianism by specifying preferences as the primitive data and utility as a mere representation of preference-ordering. In place of cardinal measurement of utility, he introduced the idea of ‘Pareto-optimality’, which assumes that a society is enjoying maximum ophelimity (an optimum allocation of its resources) when no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off. By adopting the proposition that it is individuals’ own judgements of their welfare that should count in the formulation of a measure of social welfare, Pareto laid the foundations of modern welfare economics.26 Nevertheless, he was becoming disenchanted with the discipline of economics. Although he thought that economic behaviour was the only sphere of life where rational calculation counted for anything, even he began to question the validity or usefulness of the ‘rational economic man’ of pure economic theory. Those wedded to marginal analysis did tend to assume conditions that permitted marginal techniques to be employed, even though these conditions represented serious departures from the reality the analysis was supposed to illuminate. Hence the prominence given in neo-classical theory to perfect competition, perfect information, and so on. While Pareto defended the use of such abstractions, he realised that economic predictions based on them did not usually correspond to reality, and that economic phenomena such as inflation could not be explained in purely economic terms. In 1907, he retired from his chair in Lausanne, partly because of a heart condition and partly because of a growing conviction that economic models could never unlock the secrets of human behaviour. He moved to a villa near Lake Geneva with his lover, a Frenchwoman called Jane Régis, who remained his devoted companion for the rest of his life. (His wife had absconded in 1901.) He used his time to concentrate on politics, philosophy, and social dynamics. While his way of seeing the world never ceased to be informed by his economic theories, these now


11

formed little more than a backdrop for his bold attempt to penetrate the mysteries of human motivation and social interaction. The result was his flawed masterpiece, Trattato di sociologia generale, published in 1916 but written between 1907 and 1912. Translated into English in 1935 under the title The Mind and Society, it is by far Pareto’s best known work. In truth, its core themes (the inevitability of elites, the predominance of irrational factors in human behaviour, the glorification of science and the denigration of metaphysics, the relativity and psychological roots of ideologies) were all introduced and, to some degree, explored in his previous works. What distinguishes the Trattato, or Treatise, is the richness and depth of its analysis, along with its development of new terminology. Human actions are neatly reduced to ‘residues’ and ‘derivations’. Behaviour, we are told, is inspired by the former (non-logical sentiments, reflecting basic drives or instincts) and given spurious justification by the latter (ex post facto rationalisations). From these foundations, Pareto constructs a theory of society and history which deftly combines a variety of intellectual disciplines. Like Marx, he defies classification. Is the Pareto of the Treatise a historian? a sociologist? a political philosopher? a political scientist? an economist? a psychologist? He is indeed all these things – and his sheer versatility may help to explain why those who theorise about politics (increasingly inclined as they are to define their remit in narrow terms) tend to ignore his ideas. The immediate reception of the Treatise was hardly encouraging. Apart from its unfortunate length and mode of presentation, it was published during a global conflagration. Furthermore, it appeared in Italian and French, which meant that it found few readers in the USA, where the great advances in sociology and political science were being made. Pareto could also have done without the praise he received from Mussolini, who claimed to be an intellectual disciple. It seems that the Fascist leader had attended Pareto’s lectures at Lausanne in 1904 and found them inspirational. Endorsement from such a source no doubt diminished Pareto’s pool of readers. Neither did the publication of the Treatise herald a happy period in Pareto’s private life. The Great War had a deleterious effect on his investment portfolio, and his health gradually deteriorated. Still, he continued to write, though his final work, Trasformazione della democrazia (1921), merely illustrated and adapted themes advanced in the Treatise, including the decadent and shambolic nature of liberal ‘democracy’. One can see why the Italian Fascists wanted to shower him with honours, but he tried to keep his distance and warned them to avoid censorship and despotism. He died in 1923, a mere ten months into Mussolini’s reign, and before

12


the uglier aspects of fascism became obvious. Alas for Pareto, the Fascists persisted in using his name to give their movement intellectual credibility. The widespread belief that his intellectual demolition of ‘democracy’ and ‘progress’ was influential in paving the way for totalitarian rule is ironic, since his theory assumes that rational argument can have little or no practical effect. If moral and political systems are manifestations of psychic states, then they will endure as long as those psychic states endure, irrespective of any logical refutation. The apparent futility of rational thought, however, did not deter Pareto from undertaking an elaborate exercise in intellectual hygiene, applying the rigorous tests of verifiability and logical consistency to all our political and moral concepts, and finding them devoid of any truth value. The starting point of his analysis is the division of human thought into two categories: the ‘logico-experimental’ and the ‘metaphysical’.

2


The radical empiricist Pareto wrote at a time when the worship of science, which had been gathering pace ever since Newton’s physics triumphed over Descartes’s apriorism, was being challenged by various forms of idealism. Whereas the champions of scientific method saw fit to treat even man himself as part of nature, a machine, governed by ‘social physics’, the neoidealists favoured the interpretation of human behaviour in terms of a Geist. For this new methodological dogma, generalisation could only mean a grasp of cultural totalities in all their uniqueness, and this grasp took the form of ‘intuition’ rather than empirical analysis. History done on Hegelian lines was posited as the model for human studies – and the apriorism integral to this understanding of the historical method came to be known as hermeneutics. It was an axiom of this method that the self-conscious, meaning-generating, and reflexive nature of human activities undermined the search for invariant laws of social behaviour. Since human institutions, practices, and beliefs are conditioned by the understandings that participants (or believers) have of them, they defy all attempts at measurement and quantification. The natural and human sciences are therefore ontologically, and logically, discrepant. The point of the latter is to make human behaviour intelligible by interpreting it in relation to subjective intentions, and this is where ‘intuition’ comes in. Pareto was prepared to concede very little to the value of intuition: The facts among which we live have their influence upon us, and as a result our minds acquire certain attitudes which must not be too violently in conflict with those facts. Such attitudes go on to give form and manner to language . . . That influence – nothing very definite to tell the truth – of the facts upon our minds makes

14

Metaphysics vs. the logico-experimental method up such truth . . . as there is in theories ascribing a scientific status to intuition. Intuition serves about as much towards knowledge of reality as a poor, sometimes a very poor, photograph of a place serves towards knowledge of that place. Sometimes intuition supplies just a fanciful illusion, and not even a poor photograph, of reality.1

True some small amount of information concerning external facts can be derived from knowledge of mental processes and from language. But ‘that small amount is small indeed’.2 In reality, intuitive judgements serve the function of ‘exhorting rather than proving’. By definition, they can appeal to no intersubjective standard of truth; they can achieve the spontaneous assent of other minds only by appealing to passion or sentiment.3 For Pareto, intuitive judgements are part of the broader category of metaphysical propositions, which he contrasts with propositions of a ‘logico-experimental’ kind. The subject matter of the latter are experimental, or observable, facts, and the connections between these facts are determined by logical inference. The standard of truth is logical consistency with the data of experience.4 By way of contrast, the standard of truth for metaphysical propositions lies outside direct experience – in some divine revelation, in introspection, in the ‘universal consensus’ of mankind, and so on.5 ‘Metaphysicists’, says Pareto, ‘generally give the name of “science” to knowledge of the “essences” of things, to knowledge of “principles”.’ The aim is to demonstrate particular facts by means of general principles, instead of deriving the general principles from the facts.6 Hegel, who declares that the facts of nature must of necessity accord with the inferences deducible from the ‘Absolute’, is for Pareto the archetypal metaphysical thinker and an object of scorn. The Hegelian notion that logic can supply necessary inferences, beyond those that are mere tautologies, ‘oversteps the limits of comic absurdity’.7 Pareto finds all talk about ‘the innermost reason of things’ incomprehensible, if not meaningless.8 Placing himself squarely in the ‘logico-experimental’ camp, he professes to ‘seek the relationships obtaining between things within the limits of the space and time known to us, and we ask experience and observation to reveal them to us’.9 Or – as he puts it in another passage – his intention is to expound a science of society ‘that is purely experimental, after the fashion of chemistry, physics, and other such sciences’, all of which ‘take only experience [esperienza] and observation’ as their guides.10 On this account, ‘logico-experimental’ means inductive (‘principles are nothing but abstract propositions summarising the traits common to

Metaphysics vs. the logico-experimental method 11

15

many different facts’ ) and strictly empirical (‘We have no knowledge whatever of what must or ought to be. We are looking strictly for what is.’).12 In all his works, Pareto stresses that he is not interested in improving or changing the world – in providing theoretical prescriptions for public affairs. ‘The great enemy of all social sciences’, he tells us, is ‘the mania for achieving some practical result.’13 Rather – and in common with all scientists – he has one single and exclusive aim in view: to be guided by the facts, and to discover the uniformities or ‘laws’ they present. Unlike Max Weber, Pareto saw no formal distinction between the physical and social sciences. For the German, the physical sciences looked for universally valid laws, which were important to those sciences as ends-in-themselves. The social sciences, on the other hand, were primarily concerned with the elucidation of historical uniqueness and concrete individuality. The formulation of universal generalisations, if relevant at all, could be nothing more than a preliminary means to the understanding of what distinguished events and phenomena from one another. Pareto, while not disputing the singularity of particular historical events, was interested in the ‘uniformities’ linking superficially different historical events – and history was important to him only in so far as it furnished the data, in the form of many historical incidents, from which to derive general ‘laws’ of society. These ‘laws’ are analytical generalisations related to the totality of concrete entities included in a class and formulated according to common traits or statistical averages, as in the natural sciences. Physical and social scientists are therefore seeking the same thing: ‘experimental uniformities’ which may be called ‘laws’. In this (functional) sense, ‘there is not the slightest difference between the laws of political economy or sociology and the laws of other sciences’.14 Nevertheless, Pareto admits that social scientists find it more difficult to identify uniformities, mainly because the effects of the various social laws are intertwined in a web of complexity that has few parallels in the natural sciences (the possible exceptions being biology and meteorology). Social laws ‘interfere’ with one another in complicated ways, making it hard to unravel the ‘normal effects’ of any particular law. Another factor distinguishing the different sciences is the possibility or impossibility of isolating the effects of laws by means of experiment. Pareto notes that he uses the word ‘experimental’ in an elliptical manner to describe the method which makes use either of experiment or of observation. What he means – though he refrains from spelling it out – is that controlled experiment is simply a particular type of observation, not a superior alternative to it. Certain sciences – physics, chemistry,

16 Metaphysics vs. the logico-experimental method mechanics, biology – can conduct laboratory experiments, while others can do so sparingly or not at all. Since they fall into the latter camp, the social sciences must rest content with (uncontrolled) observation. As a rule, the natural scientist can physically separate the phenomena which correspond to the uniformity or law he wants to study; the social scientist can separate them only mentally, theoretically. But in both cases, it is always the concrete phenomenon which determines whether a theory should be accepted or rejected. The only criterion of the validity of a scientific theory is its more or less complete agreement with the empirical world. The procedure is: observation, theory, verification/ falsification. In this sense, too, all sciences are identical.15

Pareto and positivism Because of his insistence on the methodological unity of empirical science, Pareto is routinely considered to be one of the pioneers of the ‘positivist’ approach to the study of social life. Indeed, his descriptions and explanations frequently relied on examples drawn from the physical sciences, though – as he always pointed out – these examples were merely analogies, not identities. Still, the label ‘positivist’ is not one he chose to apply to himself, and it is in some ways misleading, as a deeper probing of his methodological principles should indicate. Alessandro Pizzorno rightly reminds us that Pareto’s commitment to science was of a new kind, grounded in awareness of the limitations of scientific knowledge, in a sort of ‘rational skepticism’, which sets it apart from the positivistic scientism of the nineteenth century.16 That said, positivism is not an easy term to define. Often used indiscriminately as an abusive epithet, it has assumed a multiplicity of meanings so that there are nearly as many definitions of positivism as there are critics of it. In its broadest philosophical sense, positivism refers to the theory of knowledge proposed by Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton which asserts the primacy of observation and the pursuit of causal explanation by way of inductive generalisation. In the social sciences, it has become associated with three related principles: (1) the thesis of phenomenalism, according to which knowledge can be founded on experience alone, on ‘facts’ immediately available to senseperception; (2) the unity of scientific method, which proclaims that the procedures of natural science are directly applicable to the social world, the goal being the establishment of invariant laws or law-like generalisations about social phenomena; and (3) the axiological tenet of neutrality, which refuses to grant normative statements the status of knowledge and maintains a rigid separation of facts and values.


17

If this series of connected principles is taken as a definition of positivism, then it must be conceded that Pareto adopted all of them. However, the term ‘positivism’ is also understood in a more restrictive sense to apply to the writings of those who have actually called themselves positivists or at least have been prepared to accept the appellation. In this connection, two broad traditions can be distinguished. The first was dominated by the thinker who coined the term ‘positive philosophy’, Auguste Comte. Influenced by British empiricism and its supposed destruction of transcendental illusions, he was driven by a grand ambition: to found a naturalistic science of society capable of explaining the past of humankind and of predicting its future by applying to it the same methods of enquiry as had proved so successful in the study of nature, namely observation, experimentation, and comparison. Comte’s ‘scientific’ understanding of human history as a progressive, evolutionary process was famously taken up by Herbert Spencer, who related the progression of humanity to the ‘essential law’ of progress in organic nature: the development of the heterogeneous out of the homogeneous, the evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations. The other tradition, logical positivism, was more concerned with epistemology than social theory. During the 1920s, a group of analytical philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists came together to form the ‘Vienna Circle’, which was dedicated to the propagation of a new ‘enlightenment’. It was their aim to effect a synthesis of Humean empiricism and logical analysis that would forever rid philosophy of the vacuous speculations of metaphysics by grounding all knowledge in experience. Aside from the analytic propositions of logic, the only meaningful statements are those that can be subjected to the ‘verification principle’, that is, tested by observation. All other statements/ theories can be dismissed as metaphysical and empty. This, at any rate, is the claim of logical positivism in its most radical sense. Strictly applied, the verification principle has the unfortunate consequence of reducing all kinds of moral prescriptions or aesthetic judgements to meaningless expressions of taste or emotion, in the same category as the mindless chants of overexcited spectators at a football match. Rudolf Carnap, in particular, put forward a ‘softer’ version of the verification principle, claiming that it only applied to factual statements (about, for example, the existence of God), not to judgements or commands, which could have emotive as opposed to cognitive meaning.17 Predating the Vienna Circle, Pareto identified positivism with the writings of Comte and Spencer; and his attitude towards it was – if

18


the reader will pardon the pun – generally negative. For him, both men had constructed metaphysical ‘religions’ that masqueraded as logico-experimental knowledge. Both selected facts ‘for a definite purpose’, which was none other than ‘to justify a theory preconceived’. Both reified ‘progress’, treating the natural human impetus to selfbetterment as if it were a general cause of the evolution of society. And both thought that science could unlock the mysteries of the statics and dynamics of society and guide the formation of an ideal polity or an ideal morality.18 Spencer, for example, constantly referred to something called ‘absolute reality’, a concept unknown to those who confine themselves to the scientific method.19 He was also given to presenting normative statements as if they were statements of fact. According to Spencer, for example, ‘one who exerts himself obtaining pleasure for others feels his pleasure much more deeply than one who cares only for himself’. Pareto points out that this statement exhibits circular reasoning, since what must be proved is assumed as a premise. What about the man who does not find altruism so pleasurable? ‘It is a strange pretension for Spencer to want to demonstrate to us logically that we feel what we do not feel!’ He is describing not what is but what ought to be. While finding fault with a priori morality, such as Christian morality, his own morality is just as deductive as those he rejects. Having started out as a critic of apriorism, Spencer eventually abandoned the path of scientific reasoning and – ‘impelled by the powerful force which makes men attribute an objective value to subjective facts’ – moved on to the terrain of faith.20 Comte, says Pareto, was equally guilty of confusing metaphysics with science. For all his scientific posturing, he was nothing but a ‘prophet’, ‘proclaiming dogma, pronouncing ex cathedra’ and generally ‘hoping to make converts of people’. Positivism, in his hands, abandons empiricism and becomes a ‘new religion’ – ‘just another illustration of the harm done to science by the mania for practical applications’.21 The positivist assumption that, through the application of science, we are progressively approximating ‘truth’ is flatly rejected by Pareto: 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.22


19

To Pareto, a ‘faith’ is a set of beliefs that goes beyond ‘experimental reality’. On this definition, Christianity and Islam are no less scientific than the metaphysical beliefs of the Kantians, the Hegelians, or – indeed – the positivists. Worshipping intangible entities such as the ‘Absolute’ or ‘Progress’ is, for all intents and purposes, no different from worshipping God. While experience may be able to pass judgement on which form of worship is most beneficial to humanity, it cannot tell us that theology is less ‘true’ than the various forms of rationalist metaphysics.23

The limits of science In his critique of Comte and Spencer, Pareto suggests certain limitations of the ‘logico-experimental’ method. First of all, it cannot deliver value judgement or tell us which Gods to worship: The experimental and non-experimental worlds have nothing in common and nothing touching the one can be inferred from the other. For a long time people tried to derive scientific propositions from the bible, those, for instance, relating to the movements of the Earth and the stars. Nowadays the reverse reasoning is fashionable: from the fact, that is, that such scientific propositions are false, people try to infer that biblical theology is false. Of those two methods of reasoning neither can be accepted by anyone who insists on remaining within the experimental field.24 ‘Ought’ propositions, whether secular or theologically derived, do not ‘correspond to any concrete reality’ and are therefore not objects of knowledge strictly speaking.25 The logico-experimental method cannot deal with the intrinsic ‘truth’ of any religion or faith, or of any ethical or metaphysical beliefs. Belief systems that lie beyond the limits of scientific investigation may be considered from the outside as social facts, and altogether apart from their inherent merits. We do, for example, want to know why a particular belief arose and developed and in what relation it stands to other social facts. The results of such analyses may predispose us to accept or reject the belief in question, but they cannot decide whether the belief is true or false.26 This being the case, the social scientist should ‘eliminate anything that sounds like counsel, admonition, or preaching, or is designed to encourage this or that practical conduct’, as activities of this kind are ‘foreign to science’.27 Pareto therefore decries the modern tendency to turn science itself into an ideological principle, a ‘metaphysical entity’, representing

20


the forces of ‘goodness’ and ‘progress’ against those of ‘evil’ and ‘darkness’. Conventional religion, since it eludes scientific verification, is denounced as backward and absurd. In this way science becomes a dogma, a form of superstition, rather than a tool of analysis – a dogma that reduces the entire universe to matter in motion and pretends that this groundless supposition is somehow more verifiable than the existence of God.28 The scientific method can reach no verdict in the cosmic dispute between atheists, on the one hand, and believers in the Gospel or the Koran, on the other. It cannot, for example, ‘disprove’ the immortality of the soul. Pareto makes it clear that he has no intention of denigrating propositions or affirmations that transcend the domain of science. We can infer, then, that he would not have agreed with either the ‘strong’ or the ‘weaker’ version of the verification principle put forward by the logical positivists. He would not wish to dismiss theological or metaphysical statements as ‘meaningless’, nor would he presume to deny the possibility of their being ‘true’ in some sense. He categorically rejects the arrogant ‘scientism’ that considers valid only those propositions which are empirically verifiable: ‘it is absurd to imagine that what is possible in the universe is limited by the capacity of the human mind’.29 Pareto, unlike the later logical positivists, actually had a favourable view of organised religion. Echoing Machiavelli, he recognised that ‘religion is the indispensable cement of every known human society’. The content of the religion, however, is neither here nor there: ‘the social effects of a religion are virtually unrelated to its theology or theoretical principles but depend primarily on the sentiments they develop or strengthen in men’.30 This is why he was willing to concede that secular ‘religions’ – social creeds such as ‘scientism’ or Marxism – could eventually serve the same social function as, say, Catholicism. All such religions float around in the metaphysical clouds, but that is hardly the point. Essential to Pareto’s theory – as we shall see more clearly in the next chapter – is the conviction that people are not, by and large, motivated by factual and logical argument. Only ideas that appeal to their prejudices or sentiments will spur them into action. Dismissal of religion originates in the a priori principle that the social utility of an idea correlates with its experimental truth. This article of the progressive faith is, according to Pareto, demonstrably false, in the sense of not squaring with the facts of experience.31 If I understand him correctly, Pareto recognises that human society needs metaphysical propositions of one sort or another, and that they cannot normally be refuted (or confirmed) by logico-experimental techniques. Nevertheless, such techniques can explore the empirical consequences as well as the internal logic of these propositions; and


21

this exploration may lead us to conclude that some of them are more harmful or beneficial than others. We may even be able to demonstrate that some are logically consistent while others are not. In the case of the Christian God, we can examine how faith in ‘his’ message and existence affects human action, for good or ill. We can also test the logic of theological arguments designed to prove this or that element of the doctrine. What we cannot do is to ‘disprove’ the existence of God or the validity of any of his precepts. This is where Pareto parts company with other disciples of science – Marxists, logical positivists, etc. Still, a caveat is in order here. Without necessarily condemning metaphysical ideas – whether secular or openly religious – he implies that social or political theories should refrain from creating new ones and instead remain within the realm of logico-experimental truth. Certainly, a number of theories that, in his view, depart from this realm are mercilessly attacked for doing so. He was especially scornful of metaphysical theories that purported to be scientific, such as those of the ancient philosophers which tried to explain natural phenomena in terms of their ‘origins’ or ‘essential natures’ – a procedure designed to promote ignorance rather than knowledge, since hypothetical deductions based on a priori principles can tell us nothing about the facts.32 To his mind, Marx’s equation of exchange value with the crystallised labour contained in the product was equally metaphysical (and pointless) since – however much it may be in agreement with ‘the nature of things’ – it discloses nothing about price, about economic facts.33 While insisting that the logico-experimental method is merely an analytical tool, he sometimes succumbs to the temptation to use it as the sole standard of truth – as when he informs us that ‘reasonings which have as their objective not describing what is, but what ought to be . . . have no logical value’.34 The second limitation of scientific analysis, according to Pareto, relates to its ability to capture reality. For one thing, scientific theories can only reflect what can be observed. The aim is to discover uniformities presented by facts, and these uniformities may even be called laws. But the facts are not subject to the laws: the laws are subject to the facts. ‘Laws imply no necessity. They are hypotheses serving to epitomise a more or less extensive number of facts.’ The uniformities we observe, moreover, are valid only within the limits of the time and space known to us.35 Even scientists are prone to forget this qualification: Scientists who came after Newton, forgetting that he had wisely halted at the dictum that celestial bodies moved as if by mutual attraction according to a certain law, saw in that law an absolute

22 Metaphysics vs. the logico-experimental method principle, divined by human intelligence, verified by experience, and presumably governing all creation eternally.36 Take another example. The statement ‘Water solidifies at 0˚C’ is only a summary of experiments, indicating that that fact has so far been observed and that very probably therefore it will be observed in the future. There is no principle of necessity here, since experimental science does not deal in absolute propositions or absolute certitude.37 With Marxism in mind, Pareto insists that science has ‘no dogmas, and so cannot and must not accept determinism a priori’. In many cases, he concedes, social situations really do seem to be determined by economic ‘conditions’ and change only with changes in these conditions. But given the temporal and spatial limits of any empirical observation, we are not entitled to generalise such determinism to other social or historical contexts, let alone the whole of human history.38 Apart from being qualified and probabilistic, scientific theories are also provisional: they endure only so long as they accord with the facts and ‘vanish from the scene as new investigations destroy that accord’. They are then superseded by new theories, which almost inevitably suffer a similar fate at some point in the future.39 ‘Science is in perpetual development’ – the theories it produces have value as tools for discovering things, not as actual demonstrations of truth.40 The final implication of scientific laws not having ‘an objective existence’ is that our theories about phenomena will always be partial. Imperfect human minds cannot consider phenomena in their entirety. Any given theory can represent only an aspect of reality. Consequently, ‘instead of general uniformities, which are and will always remain unknown, we are forced to consider an infinite number of partial uniformities, which overlap, are superimposed upon, and contradict one another in a thousand ways’.41 What is more, the different theories are necessarily based on ‘abstractions of certain characteristics of facts, in order to study these characteristics separately from others’.42 There is nothing objective about these abstractions. Within certain limits,43 they are ‘arbitrary’, reflecting the subjective purposes of the scientists who use them. Rational mechanics, when it reduces bodies to simple physical points; physics, when it assumes the existence of a vacuum in which bodies fall; and pure economics, when it reduces real men to the homo economicus, are all deploying abstractions, which facilitate the development of a particular perspective on reality. Hence it is a gross mistake to accuse a person who studies only economic actions – or homo economicus – of neglecting or even scorning moral actions – that is, the homo ethicus. For Pareto, such criticism is the equivalent of


23

saying that geometry neglects and scorns the physical properties of substances.44 So what. Since we cannot know any concrete phenomenon completely, our theories about such phenomena are merely approximations: ‘We only know ideal phenomena, which more or less approximate the concrete phenomena.’ The scientist is therefore analogous to the person who knows an object only by means of photographs. However perfect they may be, they will never reproduce the object in all its different dimensions and properties. Yet they will undoubtedly capture something ‘real’ or truthful about the object in question. In like manner, Pareto maintains, we should never judge the value of a theory ‘by investigating whether it deviates in some way from reality because no theory withstands or will ever withstand that test’.45 Still, if we see a sufficient number of photographs of a particular object, all taken from different angles, we will eventually acquire a more or less comprehensive knowledge of its external physical characteristics. Similarly, a scientific appreciation of a concrete phenomenon in its totality requires a synthetic union of the various perspectives provided by different theories.46 Despite his ‘relativisation’ of scientific laws, Pareto clearly believed in the possibility of scientific progress: ‘Each day new studies bring us closer to reality.’ Every theory, he suggests, builds on previous theories and therefore tends to be more complex and specific. This way of approaching reality is what Pareto calls ‘the method of successive approximations’, which – he claims – is used, implicitly or explicitly, in all the sciences.47 Notwithstanding Pareto’s insistence on the distinction between fact and theory, describing scientific enquiry as ‘contingent, relative, yielding results that are just more or less probable’ is not entirely compatible with positivism as we know it.48 Dino Fiorot is surely right to characterise Pareto’s methodology as ‘an expression of relative scientism of the neo-positivist type’.49 Science is fallible but not futile. It really does discover facts about the world; and its discoveries, though subject to revision, are generally cumulative: they build on one another.

The critics Criticisms of Pareto’s ‘logico-experimental’ method fall under two headings. First, it is argued that all scientific data are theoretically informed, and that the fact/theory distinction is analytic rather than natural. The idea of an objective, extra-theoretical reality is therefore rejected. Existing theories do not mirror the world; rather, the world is the reflection of theory. The observations we make, the way we classify them, and even what counts as a relevant observation, will be

24


governed by the theory we hold. When a theoretical position is confronted with what might appear to be contradictory evidence, the normal response is to develop ad hoc hypotheses and residual categories which allow these anomalous phenomena to be explained in a manner that does not surrender the theory’s more general formulations. The second type of criticism, heavily influenced by the hermeneutic tradition, denies that the methods of the natural sciences are appropriate to the social sciences. It is pointed out that the social world is constituted by the meanings and purposes of rational agents. The function of a social science, it follows, is to interpret and render intelligible, not to invoke causes or make formal comparisons. People are different from physical objects and must be understood differently, by such methods as empathy and intuitive self-evidence. A prime example of the first category of criticism is provided by Max Millikan in his 1936 review of the English language translation of the Trattato. He reminds us that the use of induction to develop theory rests on assumptions about how to classify the observed facts. Pareto is guilty of ‘naive empiricism’50 when he claims to approach the data with ‘no preconceptions, no a priori notions’.51 Induction cannot be divorced from deduction. Like Francis Bacon before him, Pareto believes that uniformities are in some sense ‘inherent’ in phenomena. But, to Millikan, the very search for uniformity involves the presence in the mind of the investigator of a concept in terms of which the facts are to be judged uniform. When we say that a set of facts exhibits a uniformity, we mean that there is a certain idealised attribute which each of them possesses in approximation. The process of classification consists in first choosing a range of such attributes and then sorting the facts according to whether they do or do not possess these attributes. Clearly, the choice is initially somewhat arbitrary. In a sense, the investigation does not discover the unique set of uniformities immanent in the facts but rather imposes uniformity on the facts by the adoption of certain ideal rules of selection.52 Although Millikan’s review article struck a responsive chord in a ‘post-positivist’ environment,53 one wonders how closely he read the book he was reviewing. Pareto was not a pure inductionist, despite the ill-considered passage where he professes to ‘have no preconceptions, no a priori notions’. Elsewhere in the Trattato, as we have seen, he makes it plain that pure empiricism is inadequate when dealing with situations that involve many factors. Abstraction is necessary – assumptions must be made in order to classify and describe the facts, though these assumptions are then tested by experience. Erroneous assumptions will be progressively revealed and deleted as scientific


25

knowledge increases. When Pareto says that he has no a priori principles, he means that he has no principles that he would accept as true regardless of the facts. It was no part of his case to deny that science was ‘relative’ and ‘in part conventional’ – i.e. limited by the preconceptions of the particular scientific community or by the state of factual knowledge at any given time.54 The ‘prudent scepticism’ of the experimental sciences, he maintains, should shield us from all dogma, including the dogma that science simply reproduces an objective reality, uncontaminated by human prejudice or sentiment.55 Pareto is happy to acknowledge that ‘scientists too live in society and are more or less swayed by the opinions, beliefs, and prejudices prevailing in it’.56 On his conception of it, science does not proceed in a straight line from truth to unassailable truth. But none of this means that the world is merely a reflection of theory or that ‘reality’ is nothing more than a theoretical concept – a position that apparently underlies Millikan’s critique. To accept, as Pareto did, that scientific theories change our conceptions of reality is not the same thing as saying that these theories actually change reality. The relativity of science does not require us to deny that we can sensibly talk of a reality which is independent of our conceptions of it. Pareto was trying to recognise the flaws of pure empiricism without falling into the kind of relativism which characterises the modern philosophy of science. He would have had no time for Kuhn and his argument that scientific theories reflect ‘paradigms’ whose criteria of evidence are incommensurable;57 or for Feyerabend, who notoriously described scientific practice as ‘a tightly woven net of historical traditions’, each generating its own standards of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘true’.58 Never having reflected on Kantian epistemology, Pareto may indeed have been naive in his uncritical acceptance of the Cartesian subject/object dichotomy, in his separation of ‘concept’ and ‘experience’, and in his faith in the ultimate triumph of theory-neutral observation.59 But thinkers like Kuhn and Feyerabend face a more vexing problem. If scientists cannot appeal to an objective world, if the ‘world’ is only intelligible through different (and incompatible) conceptual frameworks, why then do scientific theories change? It cannot be because of an appeal to experience, since that, we are told, is governed by the theoretical framework or ‘paradigm’. Some critics of Pareto’s ‘inductionism’ are committed to the dubious notion that science is not a path to truth, let alone the only one, since there is no such thing as truth. As Roger Trigg points out, the incoherence of such critics is revealed when ‘we realize that they are asserting as true the proposition that there is no such thing as truth’.60 Other critics of Pareto’s methodology argue that the model supplied

26


by the natural sciences cannot be extended to the social sciences. According to C.B. Macpherson, this is because social researchers have their own subjective biases and cannot bring a strict objectivity to the study of social phenomena. The observer of society is part of the situation he is observing; he cannot detach himself from it, and therefore his social prejudices – usually derived from his background or class position – will intrude upon his findings. Macpherson sees Pareto as a case in point. Pretending as he does to be free of such prejudices is to give them free rein, since those who are unaware of their ‘unconscious purposes’ will not struggle to minimise them. His subjective biases, evident in his choice of hypotheses and formulation of concepts, exert a powerful influence not in spite of but because of his adherence to the methods of the natural sciences.61 Macpherson, like Millikan, does not appear to appreciate Pareto’s explicit acknowledgement that subjectivity will seep into any scientific enquiry. Indeed, Pareto is explicit that social science has a particular vulnerability in this respect: The man entirely unaffected by sentiments and free from all bias, all faith, does not exist; and to regard that freedom as an essential prerequisite to profitable study of the social sciences would amount to saying that such study is impossible. But experience shows that a person can as it were divide himself in two and, to an extent at least, lay aside his sentiments, preconceptions, and beliefs when engaged in a scientific pursuit, resuming them afterwards . . . Such self-detachment is more readily achieved in the natural sciences than in the social sciences. It is an easy matter to look at an ant with the sceptical disinterestedness of experimental science. It is much more difficult to look at human beings that way. But even if complete success in such an effort is impossible, we can at least try to succeed in part, and reduce the power and influence of sentiments, preconceptions, beliefs, to a minimum.62 Macpherson, it seems, does not agree that we can ‘lay aside’ our biases, but it remains unclear whether he wants us to minimise them or else make them the explicit inspiration of our study. If the former, then it is hard to see why he is attacking Pareto; if the latter, then he is denying the possibility of an objective social science. Such denial is common among critics of Pareto’s methodological assumptions. Benedetto Croce, the great idealist philosopher, set the tone when he complained that Pareto – supposedly an enemy of metaphysics – actually harboured a hidden metaphysical postulate:


27

that the facts of man’s activity are of the same nature as physical facts; that in the one case as in the other we can only observe regularity and deduce consequences therefrom, without ever penetrating into the inner nature of the facts.63 The idea that social facts have an ‘inner nature’, a meaning or purpose that distinguishes them from physical facts, is a common theme among those who denigrate Pareto from a ‘hermeneutic’ or idealist perspective. For them, the value-laden nature of social scientific discourse is bound up with the value-laden character of the social reality being explained or described. Luigi Amoroso, writing in 1938, spoke for many when he poured scorn on Pareto’s attempt to study human behaviour in the same way as a naturalist studies the life of insects. Social facts (actions, events) are ‘mental formations’, products of thought, whose interpretation will always reflect – consciously or unconsciously – subjective ethical or political preferences.64 Perhaps the most famous critique of Pareto from this hermeneutic viewpoint was provided by Peter Winch, who insisted that any reflective understanding of a society or of a form of social life depended on an understanding of how participants understood what was occurring. Influenced by Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, he wished to distinguish this understanding of human activity from the natural scientist’s understanding of his data. For human action or belief cannot be observed in a detached, scientific way. To understand its significance, we need to see the situation from the standpoint of a participant: a historian or sociologist of religion must himself have some religious feeling if he is to make sense of the religious movement he is studying and understand the considerations which govern the lives of its participants. A historian of art must have some aesthetic sense if he is to understand the problems confronting the artists of his period; and without this he will have left out of his account precisely what would have made it a history of art, as opposed to a rather puzzling external account of certain motions which certain people have been perceived to go through.65 Knowledge of society is nothing like knowledge of physical regularities because the latter need not concern itself with the meaning agents give to their own activities. Social practices and belief systems, moreover, embody their own ‘internal’ criteria of intelligibility and validity that are inaccessible to ‘external’ scientific accounts. To treat such

28


phenomena as ‘experimental facts’ is ‘absurd’, since what the observer has presented to his senses is nothing but movements and sounds. A man sprinkling water on a baby’s head becomes a meaningful act only when it is contextualised within the framework of Christian ideas – what they are and how they are interpreted within a particular mode of life. Ideational systems, however, cannot be ‘observed’ in the way that projectiles moving through the air can be ‘observed’. They must be ‘lived’ through a sort of cultural ‘immersion’ which turns the ‘observer’ into a participant.66 It is clear that Winch, as a post-Wittgensteinian idealist, wants to stress the uniqueness of social and historical actions, whereas Pareto, of course, searches for uniformities. While Winch is right to say that ‘two things may be called “the same” or “different” only with reference to a set of criteria which lay down what is to be regarded as a relevant difference’, he fails to see that he, like Pareto, is obliged to work with just such ‘a set of criteria’.67 If it is arbitrary to focus on similarities, it is equally arbitrary to focus on differences. Whether two objects or modes of behaviour are ‘the same’ or ‘different’ will depend on one’s perspective. It may be true that Pareto’s scientific methodology exaggerates the degree of uniformity to be found in human activities, but Winch’s hermeneutic methodology suffers from the opposite shortcoming. And what a shortcoming it is. One premise of social explanation and criticism is that the conceptions people have about their own activities may mask, repress, mystify, or rationalise the nature of those activities. For Winch, this premise is a fatal misconception, which allows us to ridicule rather than understand or ‘explain’ the beliefs and practices of others. There is no Olympian vantagepoint from which we can make comparisons and pass judgements. All human activities must be understood in their own terms and only in their own terms. Our approach to ‘different and competing ways of life’ should be ‘philosophical’ (not scientific) and therefore ‘uncommitted’. It is not the job of the social analyst ‘to award prizes’ or ‘to advocate any Weltanschauung’ (in the way that Pareto champions a ‘pseudoscientific Weltanschauung’). Winch approvingly quotes Wittgenstein’s memorable aphorism: ‘Philosophy leaves everything as it was.’68 The fundamental problem with this kind of cognitive or conceptual relativism – apart from the obvious one that its claim to be ‘true’ falls foul of its own cultural determinism – is that it removes the point of studying other societies or cultures. The rationale for such studies is usually to learn more about the human condition or perhaps to develop points of comparison which help us to judge or improve our own societies. Winch’s assumption that we are all confined within our


29

own little cultural ‘ghettos’ renders such motivation otiose. But how true is this assumption? Most of the ‘alien’ activities or belief systems we study will be perfectly intelligible to us because of their similarity to our own activities or belief systems. They will obey conceptual rules and logical criteria whose familiarity is the result of cultural or geographic proximity. When Winch tells us that ‘intelligibility takes many and varied forms’ or that ‘criteria of logic . . . arise out of, and are only intelligible in the context of, ways of living or modes of social life’, he grotesquely exaggerates the degree of human ‘difference’.69 Do Muslim societies, for example, really exhibit different criteria of logic from Christian societies? Even in extreme cases of cultural and historical remoteness, it is misleading to posit the existence of an ‘other’ whose thought patterns are separated from our own by a hermetically sealed wall of incomprehension. It is hard to see how, say, the cannibalistic tribes of New Guinea could communicate with one another if they did not possess ‘Western’ conceptions of causal and logical relations, though they might apply these in ways we find strange. According to the logic of Winch’s argument, we are not even entitled to inform them that eating human flesh is decidedly dangerous to their health, since they do not share our ‘scientific’ approach to health. In reality, supposedly alien modes of life and thought often borrow from one another across space and time. A.J. Baker cites the example of Christianity, which gave new garb to pagan prejudices it could not demolish – festivals, superstitious rites, veneration of relics and icons. If we take as our starting point the assumption that social practices and belief systems are discontinuous, we will not notice such continuities. Winch simply assumes that there can be no point of contact between diverse cultures, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.70 It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Winch rejects Pareto’s methodology a priori. Why should the conceptuality of social being rule out its scientific comprehension? What exactly is the relevant difference between regularities among the facts of physics and those of human activity? Why should we refuse to ask critical questions about beliefs and outlooks? Questions, for example, pertaining to their influence and their origins? Why must we refrain from inquiring whether they have special roles different from, or additional to, those their believers take them to have? Why can we not assess their internal coherence, or their relationship to the facts? Rain dances do not promote rain as far as meteorology knows; so whatever function these dances serve, it is not the one in the minds of the participants. What is wrong with pointing this out? Winch offers nothing resembling a satisfactory answer to any of these questions.

30 Metaphysics vs. the logico-experimental method From Pareto’s point of view, however, Winch was half right. It is unfair to say that Pareto holds up scientific rationality as a comprehensive philosophy of human life and the universe. His official position, at least, was to deny that metaphysical and non-experimental beliefs could be proved or disproved by scientific analysis. The combination of observation and logic could explore the empirical consequences or internal consistency of ‘non-experimental’ propositions or practices but not pass judgement on their reality. In this sense, he agreed with Winch’s unwillingness to don the mantle of the ‘enlightened’ rationalist and ‘award prizes’. Religious creeds, what a society holds sacred, these are ultimately beyond the reach of rational evaluation. To a degree, then, Pareto was prepared to leave ‘everything as it was’. His science of society could not, strictly speaking, tell us how we ought to live.

3


Logical and non-logical actions By the 1890s it had become fashionable to express pessimism and doubts about historical ‘progress’. The fin de siècle witnessed a revolt against the heritage of the Enlightenment, with its optimistic worship of reason as the key to human liberation. Above all, the rationalist belief in the infinite perfectibility of man gave way to the conviction that civilisation could never be more than a highly precarious achievement, and that its supposedly guiding principle, ‘reason’, often served as no more than a mask for brutish passions. In philosophy, there was a new emphasis on ‘intuition’ as the way to truth and even – as in the case of Nietzsche – a denial that any sort of ‘truth’ could exist in an inherently meaningless universe. In the arts, playwrights such as Strindberg tried to get behind man’s rational façade, to explore hidden needs and impulses that distort human relationships; while expressionist painters sought to depict inner states – human beings stripped down to their most basic emotions. Students of psychology, most notably the young Sigmund Freud, became obsessed by primitive motivational complexes, including the realm of the ‘unconscious’. Projecting these concerns on to groups of individuals, the new discipline of social psychology was founded on the assumption of collective irrationality. To take a prominent example, Gustave Le Bon, drawing on current theories of pathological susceptibility and hypnotism, developed a theory of ‘crowd psychology’. A crowd, as he conceived it, was more than an aggregate of individuals. Rather, it was a generic creation, a collective mentality, dominated by crass sentiments, open to hypnotic suggestion, and capable of thinking only in images. Controversially, Le Bon argued that a crowd need not involve the gathering of individuals in one location. Even isolated individuals could acquire the characteristics of a ‘crowd’ when engaging in a collective endeavour,

32


such as ‘democratic’ elections, which allow demagogic politicians to take advantage of the ignorance and credulity of the masses.1 This attempt to demolish the myth of ‘rational man’ was often accompanied by hostility towards science and the world projected by science – a world of systematic connections, where everything could be quantified and predicted, and where human behaviour would be ‘rationally’ organised into productive and efficient routines. Pareto was somewhat atypical in this respect. While his writings were predicated on the existence of an inner ‘psychological man’, resistant to reason and a slave to primitive instincts and sentiments, Pareto nevertheless aspired to create a science of society by establishing a systematic method of analysis, combining logical deduction with empirical research. Two antithetical traditions competed for supremacy in his work: (1) the rationalist tradition, with its faith in science and the constructive power of reason, and (2) the developing psychological tradition, with its portrayal of reason as, at best, a tool of the appetites. Pareto firmly believed that reason was subordinate to instincts. It could do no more than select appropriate means to the achievement of given ends, or assess whether a group of ends is consistent and whether they are attainable given relevant constraints. But the ends themselves are never, in his opinion, the result of rational reasoning or rationally performed observations. Our reasoning faculties are purely instrumental. In most human behaviour, however, reason does not even serve this limited function. ‘Non-logical’ conduct, Pareto maintains, is the principal ingredient in social life, and most of his Treatise is given over to the ‘proof’, elaboration, or illustration of this proposition. It is his contention that people are often mistaken about their real motivations, that they perform many acts through habit or instinct, and that they frequently attain ends quite different from those they were aiming at, either because they adopt the wrong means or because they do not see the remote consequences of their acts. Pareto points out that every social phenomenon may be considered under two aspects: as it is in reality (the objective aspect), and as it presents itself to the mind of this or that human being (the subjective aspect). This distinction is essential to an understanding of non-logical and logical behaviour. The latter includes ‘actions that logically conjoin means to ends not only from the standpoint of the subject performing them, but from the standpoint of other persons who have a more extensive knowledge – in other words, . . . actions that are logical both subjectively and objectively in the sense just explained’.2 What he calls ‘non-logical’ actions are subdivided into a number of varieties.3 Actions are non-logical (a) when they serve no end, objective or subjective (e.g. habitual or


33

instinctual acts that are informed by no discernible goal), (b) when an agent thinks a particular end is being realised but nothing is in fact achieved through the act as judged in the light of wider knowledge (e.g. magical operations, such as sacrifices to the gods in ancient times), (c) when there is an objective end but the subject’s behaviour is not driven by this end (e.g. linguistic usage which unconsciously generates rules of grammar and syntax),4 (d) when an end is actually achieved which diverges from the end the subject sets for himself, whether the objective end would or would not have been acceptable to him could he have foreseen it (all those cases where our intentions are thwarted by the phenomenon of ‘unanticipated consequences’), and (e) when the subjective end of a particular action lies outside the field of observation (e.g. religious observance). In summary, acts are nonlogical when the subject acts without explicit knowledge of the purpose of his action, or, having such knowledge, chooses means which – to a detached and better-informed observer – are either unlikely to achieve the purpose or likely to achieve something else. By contrast, acts are logical when the consequences anticipated by the subject are identical with the consequences that might reasonably be anticipated ‘by persons who have a more extensive knowledge’. Some commentators exaggerate the degree to which Pareto insisted on the fundamental irrationality of human conduct, even accusing him of unduly accentuating ‘the animal-like character of human action in general’.5 This seems unfair. For a start, Pareto made it clear that, in his usage, ‘non-logical’ is ‘by no means the same as “illogical” ’.6 There is nothing illogical, for example, about attending church every Sunday in the hope of ascending to heaven after one’s death. Such behaviour is non-logical, in Pareto’s terms, only because its subjective end is not open to empirical verification. But it does not actually violate any rules of logic or rationality and may – even in the absence of an afterlife – serve a positive function for the individual or society. Pareto explicitly rejects the Enlightenment assumption that only ‘rational’ actions (or theories) can have social utility.7 It is also mistaken to presume that his desire to highlight instinctive and habitual behaviour amounts to a virtual denial of human rationality. In human beings, he tells us, ‘the field of logical behaviour, exceedingly limited in the case of animals’, is ‘very far-reaching’.8 He was anxious to distinguish his position from that of the philosophical irrationalists. It is ‘false’ and ‘extreme’, in his words, to say ‘that man is guided by his sentiments alone and not by his reason’.9 In particular, reason plays an important role in the identification and pursuit of ‘interests’, though these interests also have an instinctual/emotional basis and include status and honour as well as

34 The science of politics material well-being. Pareto says that interests fall ‘in very considerable part within the purview of the science of economics’ and that logical (or rational) social action is prototypically economic. The economic is the only sphere of social activity in which means and ends can be set in a calculable relationship to each other. The model for logicoexperimental conduct in homo economicus, whose aim is the maximisation of material satisfactions through the efficient use of resources.10 But even the quest for status and reputation, while clearly rooted in subjective feelings, generally proceeds through rational choices whose results can be validated by an outside observer. It is therefore difficult to understand why Zeitlin should conclude that, for Pareto, interests are ‘conceived as non-rational’, as ‘a non-logical category, always subordinate to instinct and synonymous with sentiment’.11 This is an absurd formulation. To the extent that interests are ends-in-themselves, they are bound up with (not ‘synonymous with’) sentiment, for what we value in life cannot be determined by logic. But interests, as Pareto recognises, are also means to verifiable ends and therefore objects of rational calculation. If I have an interest in a higher salary, it is because more money would help me to attain definite goals, such as a higher standard of living and enhanced prestige. The attempt to satisfy this interest, along with the interest itself, would certainly be classified as rational (logical) by Pareto. We must bear in mind, however, that, for him, the distinction between logical and non-logical behaviour is arrived at by a process of abstraction, ‘because in real-life actions the types are almost always mixed together’.12 For example, I may act logically in my efforts to amass enough money to buy a Ferrari, but my desire to own such a car, as well as my specific actions in pursuit of that desire, will reflect my personality and tastes. Zeitlin’s caricature of Pareto’s views simply ignore such complications. Still, there is no doubt that Pareto stressed the power of ‘unreason’ in society. Recall that a non-logical action is typically one where the means-end relationship as seen by the performer fails to correspond with the means-end relationship as seen by a disinterested observer of the act. What accounts for this discrepancy? It may be that the deductive chain of reasoning is at fault. It may also be that the basis from which the reasoning starts is not clear, precise, and testable. To Pareto, a large part of non-logical activity is of the second kind. It starts from a private state of mind, some ultimate and non-rational attitude or impulse. To the performer, it seems that he is first thinking and then acting. In fact, Pareto claims, the reverse is true; he acts first, from his sentiments or impulses, and cogitates afterwards. The theory he elaborates as to why he is performing the action is ex post facto, a ‘logical


35

veneer’, or justification of the urge to act in a particular way. Or, to phrase it otherwise, it is a ‘rationalisation’ of the prior impulse or sentiment. Let us put it symbolically. We have a state of mind (A), an action (B), and a theory about action B (C). It is a natural human tendency to believe that action B is the result of theory C. In fact, both B and C are manifestations of state of mind A. Suppose for instance that a person has an aversion to theft (A). Therefore he will not steal (B). He tells himself, however, ‘that the gods punish persons who commit the act B ’. If he imagines that this theory (C) is why he refrains from theft, then he is deluded.13 He is being non-logical, though his lack of logic, in this case, causes no harm to society. The general point Pareto wants to make is that: ‘Non-logical actions originate chiefly in definite psychic states, sentiments, subconscious feelings, and the like.’14 These are the main operative forces in society – both our actions and our theories are manifestations of ‘psychic states’. This emphasis on the causal primacy of individual psychology – our basic instincts – impels him to focus on the constancy of human thought and action.15 Historians tend to be interested in the details that distinguish historical events from one another and make them unique. Pareto, with his more theoretical perspective, perceived similarities. He wanted to identify the constant factors behind the appearance of variability, since, in his view, historical societies ‘vary little in substance, but widely in forms’.16 Christians, for example, have the custom of baptism, which, we are told, removes original sin from the individual through the performance of certain rites. The pagans, too, had lustral water, which they used for purposes of purification. In other religions, not water but blood or other substances are used to remove the pollution that a person has incurred in one set of circumstances or another. The ritual practices that achieve such states of purification will also vary in form (e.g. complete immersion, nominal sprinkling). But for all the great variety of devices and the many explanations that are given for their use, ‘the thing which remains constant is the feeling, the sentiment, that the integrity of an individual which has been altered by certain causes, real or imaginary, can be restored by certain rites’. In the given case, there is a constant element and a variable element, ‘the latter comprising the means that are used for restoring the individual’s integrity and the reasonings by which the efficacy of the means is presumably explained’. The purpose of the variable element is to ‘explain, justify, demonstrate’ the constant element.17 At this point, Pareto introduces two new technical terms, hoping to escape the misleading connotations that old terms can conjure up. If you strip the variable part from the verbal utterances and

36


accompanying actions of human beings, you are left with a residuum – a universal pattern of thought. This is the constant element, and Pareto therefore calls it a ‘residue’. From this constant element, much as from some root in philology, there ‘derive’ a multitude of theoretical and rhetorical products. Pareto designates these – the variable elements – the ‘derivations’. A residue is a psychic state; a ‘derivation’ is a ‘nonlogical’ argument, explanation, assertion, appeal to authority, or association of ideas or sentiments in words. It is called a derivation because it derives from a particular mental state. However, derivations arise because it pleases men and women to imagine that they follow reason rather than sentiment, which is why ‘they look for, and always find, some theory which, a posteriori, makes their actions appear to be logical’.18 There is a certain ambiguity in the way Pareto uses the term ‘residue’. On the one hand, he warns us that residues ‘must not be confused with the sentiments or instincts to which they correspond’; they are manifestations of these sentiments and instincts ‘just as the rising of the mercury in a thermometer is a manifestation of the rise in temperature’. But he goes on to say that ‘elliptically and for the sake of brevity’, he will use ‘residue’ as a synonym for ‘sentiments or instincts’. Just as we say that water boils at 100˚C (instead of saying, more accurately if less concisely, that water boils when its calorific state attains the temperature of 100˚ as registered by a centigrade thermometer), we can maintain that residues (rather than the sentiments/instincts they correspond to) are the chief determinants of thought and action.19 Residues are not themselves psychological drives, but rather symbolic expressions of such drives. The desire for sex is an instinct; sexual puritanism is a residue – a basic and essentially invariable attitude of human beings. But since residues correspond so closely to underlying instincts or sentiments, nothing is lost, according to Pareto, by treating them as equivalent. His looseness with respect to definitions has generated some confusion among commentators. Charles H. Powers, for example, unhelpfully refers to sentiments as ‘standards of evaluation’ or ‘deep-seated values’, and residues as ‘observable behaviours’, ‘actions’, and ‘what people do’.20 Sentiments, for Pareto, are not cultural values or standards but universal behavioural predispositions that transcend particular contexts and emanate from the process of personality development. As for residues, they are not scientifically observed facts, such as ‘actions’; they are derived from concrete phenomena by a process of analysis and abstraction. As Pareto points out, they do not, in themselves, have any ‘objective existence’. Like ‘gravitation’ or subatomic particles, their existence is inferred from what we can observe.21


37

It should be obvious that the importance of residues far exceeds the importance of derivations. This is implied by the method of obtaining these hypothetical elements in the human mind, for – in general – that which is common to many phenomena is more important than that which is less frequent or more variable. Theology, metaphysics, and ethics consist, in great measure, of systematic and extensive derivations from certain residues. Pareto wrote dismissively of the vagueness and unreality of these elaborate structures, of their attempts to objectify what is subjective and inchoate. He contrasts ‘logicoexperimental thinking’, where ‘the value of a term increases in proportion to its exactness’, with ‘reasoning by accord of sentiments’ (ideological or metaphysical thinking), where terms ‘are more effective in proportion as they are vague and indefinite’. Terms such as ‘good’, ‘beautiful’, ‘just’, ‘natural’, and the like ‘serve to arouse certain sentiments’ but ‘do not correspond to anything exact’. In spite of their pretentious and routine deployment by philosophers and theologians, ‘no one has ever known what they mean’. These concepts, not having any ‘precise objective reality’, are ‘only a product of our mind’.22 The precedence of residues, of non-logical motivations, in Pareto’s analysis gives his work a relativistic bias – at least with respect to moral and philosophical precepts or theories. The constancy of human psychology means that derivations (like Marx’s ‘ideologies’) cannot be taken at face value. Grand intellectual constructs are reducible to a handful of simple psychic forces. Nor can we assume that some derivations are more ‘rational’ than others. From his standpoint, theories of ‘Progress’ or democracy have exactly the same status as those of karma and transmigration, as Catholic dogma or the mythology of the Eskimo. If some derivations are more faithful to reality than others, this can be determined only by empirical investigation, not by the dictates of intellectual fashion (itself a form of sentiment). In varying degrees, ‘reality is disfigured in the theories and descriptions of it that one finds in the literature of thought’. What we have is ‘an image in a curved mirror; our problem is to discover the form of the object so altered by refraction’. All reflections that depart from logico-experimental truth, that speculate about the nature of existence, or on how we should live our lives, distort objective reality – however functional they may be from the perspective of social cohesion.23 Deliberate manipulation is not necessarily to blame. At bottom, distortion stems from the fact that theories of human behaviour or human excellence – whether legal, ethical, political, or theological – must always adapt themselves to local or historical conditions.24 There may be basic uniformities in human thought and action, but the theoretical systems that grow out

38 The science of politics of such uniformities are contingent and variable. This is not because the search for truth is as yet incomplete; it is because theories about appropriate human social conduct, unlike the theories of logicoexperimental science, which never go beyond the facts derived from observation and experimentation, are necessarily contextual and value-laden, products of prevailing sentiments. The classification and characterisation of residues and derivations may be regarded as the foundation of Pareto’s contribution to political theory. Let us now examine this foundation in some detail.

Typology of residues and derivations For Pareto, as we have seen, residues (together with the sentiments they express) constitute the complex psychic states which delineate the motivational personality of the human being. Not being observable, they are arrived at by a process of abstraction from existing social practices. They are not constant types of response to certain environmental or social situations, but underlying predispositions and attitudes which are invariant in all contexts. They are spatially and temporally universal, representing enduring uniformities of the human psyche. That is to say, across all social forms, each type of residue is evident, though in varying proportions. An ardent classifier, Pareto divides residues into six different categories or ‘classes’. Class I residues: instinct for combinations. These residues reflect the instinct to invent things, to create, to associate things in new and different ways. Class I residues are synonymous with ‘imagination’, ‘ingenuity’, ‘originality’, and so on. They refer to the ‘experimental’ side of human nature – not in the sense of ‘logicoexperimental’ but in the sense of playfully trying all sorts of combinations and making unexpected discoveries. The ‘inclination to combine certain things with certain other things’ is the progressive element in human society. It may give rise to either logical or nonlogical activities or theories: ‘experimental science, theology, metaphysics, fatuous speculations as to the origins and the purpose of things, have a common point of departure: a resolve, namely, not to stop with the last known cause of the known fact, but to go beyond it, argue from it, find or imagine something beyond that limit.’25 The effect of this propensity in all cases is to create a new entity or association out of disparate elements. Class II residues: group persistence, or persistence of aggregates. This class of residue reflects the instinct to preserve and consolidate


39

existing arrangements, relationships, or beliefs. Without this impulse or sentiment, the combinations inspired by the Class I residues ‘would be ephemeral insubstantial things’.26 Residues of group persistence lie behind all loyalties and all traditions connected with people, places, and institutions. The family, the state, the nation, and the religious community are held together by such residues, which include all the psychic forces that resist change and flux. They are responsible for the transmission of customs and attachments from one generation to another. Pareto compares the instinct to preserve ‘combinations’ to ‘mechanical inertia’, since it ‘tends to resist the movement imparted by other instincts’.27 Class II residues, however, need not be associated with ‘reactionary’ ways of thinking and acting. The deification of abstractions such as socialism and democracy originates in the impulse to conserve existing ‘agglomerates of relations’ and associations by transforming them into objects of devotion.28 Class III residues: the compulsion to express sentiments by external acts. Celebrations, parades, occult and religious rites, ceremonies of all kinds express this basic human need to ‘do something’, to match feelings with actions. Class III residues, in Pareto’s opinion, can explain fanatical or ‘cultish’ behaviour in all its guises, whether religious or secular. The existence of these residues also supports the proposition that actions give rise to ideas and exposes ‘the usual mistake of assuming a development from the abstract to the concrete’.29 Class IV residues: sociality. Included here are all the dispositions which relate to man’s self-subjection to the requirements of society, and without which no society could exist. Among them are the need to conform and by the same token to enforce conformity on others. Pareto thinks that this residue reflects instincts of uniformity and imitation that we share with the animal kingdom. Also included in this class of residues are the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the good of the whole; the desire for social ranking of superiors and inferiors; sympathy and pity for one’s fellows; the need to be accepted by the group; and ‘neo-phobia’, a ‘sentiment of hostility to innovations that are calculated to disturb uniformities’.30 The role of these residues is similar to that of Class II residues, inasmuch as they serve to keep society together. Indeed, there seems to be a puzzling overlap between the two sets of residues, which Pareto himself acknowledges.31 Class V residues: integrity of the individual and his/her appurtenances and possessions. This class of residue reflects the instinct to

40

The science of politics ‘defend one’s own things and strive to increase their quantity’. Interests ‘ought strictly’ to be put in this category, but are excluded by Pareto because they ‘are of such great intrinsic importance in the social equilibrium that they are best considered apart from residues’. Class V residues are integral to the ‘development of personality’ and underlie all forms of propitiation and revenge, acts to preserve the honour and position of the individual in his own eyes and in the eyes of his fellows.32 Interestingly enough, Pareto includes under the heading of ‘one’s own things’ one’s own view of what society should be like. While a person’s integrity and well-being are bound up with a need for social equilibrium, the ‘equilibrium may be one actually existing, or an ideal equilibrium desired by the individual’. But ‘whether real or imaginary, if it is altered, or thought of as altered, the individual suffers, even if he is not directly affected by the alteration’. So the desire to abolish slavery in a slave-owning society would express a residue from this class.33 If one identifies with a particular ideal, that ideal becomes part of one’s identity – and defending it is equivalent to defending one’s integrity. Needless to say, the masses do not think in terms of equilibrium or disequilibrium; when their integrity is threatened or assailed, they are ‘conscious of an unpleasant disturbance’, which may take the form of acute psychological pain. The object of their displeasure – an insult, a theft, a burdensome tax, a physical assault, etc. – will then be called ‘unjust’: ‘When a person says: “That thing is unjust,” what he means is that the thing is offensive to his sentiments.’34 It is essential to Pareto’s argument that the insult or assault in question need not be suffered by the person who feels the pain. Sentiments of revulsion are evoked by anything that upsets a person’s sense of social equilibrium, of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. The urge to avenge a ‘wrong’ or to punish a miscreant stems from the need to restore social (and hence personal) equilibrium. In this sense, it can be said that men and women are indeed inspired by this or that ‘ideal of justice’, even though, according to Pareto, such ideals originate in sentiment and have no objective reality: ‘From the logico-experimental standpoint to say that an “injustice”, whether done to one person or to many, involves an equal offence against “justice,” is to say a thing that has no meaning. There is no such person as “Justice”.’35 Class VI residues: sex. Distinguishing this residue from mere ‘sexual appetite’, Pareto says that it gives rise to theories or opinions about sexual activity and how it should be regulated or repressed. When discussing ‘the sex residue’, he gives vent to his


41

anti-puritanical prejudices, treating the various taboos, forms of prudery, abstinence, and asceticism as ‘logicalized and dissembled’ expressions of repressed sexual desire.36 With other residues, Pareto attempts to explain their role in the maintenance of either social stability or social dynamism. In the case of the sex residue, however, he is unwilling to offer any kind of functional analysis of censorious attitudes or practices, and seems content to condemn them as either hypocritical or ridiculous. He clearly preferred ancient thinking about sex: ‘Graeco-Roman antiquity thought of the sexual act as satisfying a bodily need, on a par with eating, drinking, adorning one’s person, and the like; and all such things the ancients regarded with indifference.’ By way of contrast, the United States, with its ostentatious religious piety, is ‘the paradise of sex hypocrisy’.37 Pareto claims that sexual puritanism (‘the sex religion’) is a ‘constant’ factor in human history, ‘admitting only of changes in forms’. What about the ancients, then, with their matter-of-fact attitude to sex? It seems that they were the exception that proves the rule, as their sexual mores were inspired ‘not by sex residues, but by considerations of public utility’.38 In common with Freud (of whose work he was entirely ignorant), Pareto attaches much importance to the fact (if it is a fact) that many theories and ideals flow from the instinct of sex – and that social taboos reflect some kind of psychological or social necessity. In contrast to his Viennese counterpart, though, his discussion of sex is pathetically superficial. While he allows some prejudice to seep into his discussion of the sex residue, Pareto is committed to the proposition that residues are, intrinsically, neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’. They are useful, or negligible, or harmful in respect of, or relatively to, their place and function. The same could be said about his derivations – largely pseudo-logical rationalisations of sentiments. Animals, he points out, do not reason; they act exclusively by instinct. Human beings, on the other hand, want to think, and we also feel compelled to keep our instincts and sentiments hidden from view. We are often called upon to explain our behaviour, or to persuade others to behave in certain ways – and the human hunger for rationality means that we cannot crudely appeal to feelings. Yet our behaviour is essentially motivated by these inarticulate states of mind, a fact which ensures that our explanations or justifications will naturally contain an element of obfuscation, making it impossible for them to conform to the standards of logicoexperimental reasoning. Instead, ‘the human hunger for thinking’ is

42


satisfied ‘by pseudo-experimental reasonings [distortions of factual evidence, non-sequiturs, etc.], by words that stir the sentiments, by fatuous, inconclusive “talk” ’. In this way, ‘derivations come into being’.39 Recall that a residue is a force that transcends different cultures, or, in other words, an identical determinant of action in all cultures. Derivations, however, will vary from one culture to another – in content if not in structure: A Chinese, a Moslem, a Calvinist, a Catholic, a Kantian, a Hegelian, a Materialist, all refrain from stealing; but each gives a different explanation for his conduct. In other words, it is a case of a number of derivations connecting one residue that is operative in all of them.40 Although even the most rigorous derivations will involve a degree of sophistry, their relation to logic is a complicated one. A derivation may be strictly logical, and yet, because of some factual error in the premises, not accord with experience. Or again, it may be logical to all appearances, yet in view of some indefiniteness in its terms have ‘only a very distant bearing on experience’.41 In both cases, logic is being misapplied rather than violated. Derivations may be ‘pseudo-logical’, but this is not necessarily apparent to the naked eye. Even brilliant thinkers may remain unaware of the fallacies in their arguments. Note that Pareto uses the term ‘derivations’ to describe not just theories themselves, but the various types of fallacious reasoning that may be combined in these theories. That is to say, a ‘derivation’ (in the sense, theory) may incorporate a number of ‘derivations’ (in the sense, fallacious arguments). In his Treatise Pareto identifies four forms or classes of the latter, which seem to be arranged in the order of the degree of civilisation and instruction to which they would tend to appeal. Class I derivations: assertion. Included here are most proverbs, precepts, maxims – sentences which imply universal application of some value judgement. Take the affirmation, ‘Time is money’. Both time and money are measurable or ‘experimental’ facts, but the affirmation has been generalised beyond the possibility of objective verification. A subjective fact (aversion to wasting time) is transformed into an objective reality (wasting time is equivalent to wasting money). Such blunt assertions have little or no demonstrative value but sometimes have great persuasive force. They convince not simply because of the sentiments they engage but also


43

because they are stated in a ‘sententious tone, with great assurance’.42 Still, Pareto notes that ‘assertion pure and simple is a rare thing, especially among civilised peoples’, who expect simple declarations to be appended (almost as exclamations) to other, more sophisticated derivations.43 Assertion is the most rudimentary form of derivation. Class II derivations: authority. This implies that the ‘truth’ of propositions depends on some type of authority – of an ‘expert’ or esteemed figure, of traditions handed down from ancestors, of God (whose will is expressed in Scripture or the Koran), or even of abstract nouns, such as ‘Progress’, the ‘Popular Will’, ‘Truth’, or the ‘National Interest’, that come to enjoy the status of divine beings. According to Pareto, evocations of authority usually mask a more primitive – if subconscious – motivation for conduct. Consider the appeal to ‘God’s Will’: People often imagine that they act in one way or another in deference to the will of some supernatural being. Really they invent such a will as a result of their acting in that way. ‘It is God’s will’ . . ., cried the Crusaders of old. Really they were under the sway of a migratory instinct such as the ancient Germans felt – a longing for adventure, a passion for something new, weariness with an orderly humdrum life, eagerness for easy money. If ‘swallows could talk’, Pareto continues, ‘they too might just as well say that they change climes twice a year in obedience to the divine will’.44 Here we have a perfect illustration of the secondary, or ‘derivative’, status of derivations: they are mere rationalisations of behaviour that would have occurred in their absence. Appeals to authority, in Pareto’s estimation, stand as a testament to mankind’s capacity for self-deception. Class III derivations: accords with sentiments or principles. These derivations persuade a person to act in a certain way or to believe a certain statement because such action, such belief, is in accord either with his own sentiments or with those generally held. Here belong the statements where some ‘truth’ is alleged to have been admitted by ‘all men’, or ‘all intelligent men’, when as likely as not, according to Pareto, it is admitted only by the author of the derivation and the person who accepts it. Such statements depend on the residues of sociability, the need for uniformity, reverence for ‘the community’, etc. It is taken for granted that if a notion

44 The science of politics exists in the minds of ‘all men’ or at least of those who count, it necessarily corresponds to an objective reality.45 Derivations of this kind often include abuse of one’s adversaries – the suggestion that those who disagree are unenlightened or nasty or members of some despised ‘out’ group – and routinely exhibit circular reasoning. Pareto gives the example of Tolstoy, who wrote: ‘I have found good people, not in one, but in all churches and sects, and saw how they were all guided in their lives by one and the same idea, that had its foundation on the teaching of Jesus.’ The implication here is that ‘good people’, adhering as they do to ‘the teaching of Jesus’, support Tolstoy’s pacifism. But surely the category of ‘good people’ must include those who have different notions? Tolstoy’s statement can be saved, Pareto insists, only if ‘good people’ are defined as those who found their pacifism on ‘the teaching of Jesus’. This will enable Tolstoy to demonstrate the truth of his statement, ‘but the demonstration . . . will be a mere tautology’.46 Derivations of this sort will frequently include the words ‘obvious’ or ‘obviously’, as in ‘It is obvious that . . .’, when it is not obvious at all. Locutions such as ‘It is believed’, ‘It is understood’, ‘It is thought’ serve a similar purpose, implicitly invoking some imaginary universal consensus of the honest or the wise. Class III derivations also include the appeal to principles or ideals such as ‘Duty’, ‘Reason’, ‘Justice’, ‘Humanity’, and so on, that are presumed to enjoy wide acceptance. Why do we prostrate ourselves before (what are to Pareto) mere abstractions? His explanation was as follows. Persons living in civilised societies become familiar with certain juridical or moral relationships that are continually shaping their lives, with which their minds are gradually saturated, and which end by becoming part and parcel of their intellectual personalities. Eventually, through the natural human inclination to take what is relative as absolute, to objectify the values of one’s community, they forget that these concepts or principles were adapted to certain circumstances and they generalise them to serve all circumstances. So concepts of absolute morality or absolute law come into being. Then these persons go on to imagine that these relationships and ideas, which arose and developed in a given community, existed before the community and even gave rise to it. And so we get theories of a ‘social contract’ with its adjunct of the ‘debt to society’. Juridical concepts that presuppose society get transposed into some mythical state of nature. Hence the right to choose one’s governors, which developed historically, is abstracted from its social context and hypostasised into a ‘nat-


45

47

ural’ right. Pareto’s point is that we have an inherent urge to transform subjective ideas in our heads into objective realities – to which we then defer. Our inherent need for uniformity encourages us to assign universal prescriptive status to the principles that we and our neighbours hold dear. Class IV derivations: verbal proofs. This refers to the use of equivocal and indefinite terms to verify propositions ‘which do not correspond to any reality’.48 Here Pareto gives what is largely a treatise on a particular kind of bad logic, the bad logic which connects the first and third terms of its syllogisms by means of middle terms with vague or ambiguous meanings. Take the argument A = X, X = B, therefore A = B. If X has two meanings that cannot possibly be confused – ‘for instance the bark of a tree and the bark of a dog’ – we get a mere pun. But if X designates a large and fairly vague aggregate of sentiments, certain sentiments may prevail in the proposition A = X and certain other sentiments in the proposition X = B. In reality, X is two different things, but people do not notice that and applaud the argument. If X is, say, ‘Nature’, Pareto thinks it inevitable that the argument is of the verbal (fallacious) type: Example: ‘One lives well according to Nature. Nature recognizes no private property. Therefore one lives well without private property.’ In the first proposition, the term ‘Nature’ designates a vague sum of sentiments, distinguishes something that is in accord with our inclinations (what is ‘natural’ to us) from something that we do only under compulsion (from what is foreign or repugnant to us), and instinctively we assent to the proposition that ‘one lives well according to Nature’. The second proposition brings to the fore sentiments that distinguish things which the human being does (artificial things) from things that exist independently of human action (things that are ‘natural’); and there again the person following the lead of his sentiments will admit that private property is not a product of Nature . . . Put the two propositions together and it logically follows that ‘one lives well without private property’; and if this proposition chances to harmonize with the sentiments of the person at whom the argument is directed, he will regard it as sound from every point of view.49 As two different senses of ‘Nature’ are in operation here, the argument is fallacious. In reality, it takes the form A = X1, X2 = B,

46 The science of politics therefore A = B. Pareto says that, ordinarily, such logical sophistries will deceive no one who – for reasons of sentiment – is not already disposed to be deceived. The believer in private property will sense that something is amiss and apply his mind to spotting the fallacy – though he is just as likely to be convinced by an equally sophistic argument if it accords with his own sentiments. Most types of Class IV derivations depend on the ambiguity or vagueness of the words used in moral and political discourse, many of which ‘correspond to nothing real’.50 ‘Good’ and ‘bad’, ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ are simply labels we apply to conduct or situations that meet our approval or disapproval. Other terms do ostensibly denote real facts or things, but are sufficiently indeterminate to be applied inconsistently. Pareto observes, for example, that ‘in discussing freedom and the chains that shackle it, the nature of those chains is designedly left vague’. As a result, some ‘free-thinkers’ draw no distinction ‘between chains that are voluntarily accepted and chains that are imposed by an external power’. Hence we hear of people being rendered ‘unfree’ by their adherence to this or that religion or ideology – even though their ‘chains’ are ‘voluntarily accepted’. This would seem to distort the word ‘free’ from its usual acceptation and give it an approximately opposite meaning, since suppressing the ‘incorrect’ world view is taken to be a form of liberation. Pareto feared that this eccentric definition of freedom was becoming common, with governments increasingly justifying their restrictive interventions (e.g. employment laws) as essential to ‘freedom’.51 What can be the cause of such obstinate insistence on designating different, nay opposite, things by a single term? For Pareto, the answer is simple: ‘a desire to exploit the agreeable sentiments that the term suggests – the same reason that prompted the Roman Empire to go on calling itself a republic.’52 The favourable connotations attached to certain words in political discourse account for the distension of their meanings to the point where ‘verbal proofs’, as opposed to rigorous deductions, become possible. But, according to Pareto, not all verbal proofs are based on indeterminate terms. Deceptive reasoning can also take the form of inappropriate comparison, the fallacious use of metaphors and analogies. Comparison, if offered as a means of explanation, as a way of getting from the known to the unknown, performs an indispensable role in ‘logico-experimental’ reasoning. Offered as demonstration, however, analogies and metaphors ‘have not the slightest scientific value’. Because a thing, A, is in


47

certain respects similar, analogous, to another thing, B, it in no sense follows that all the traits present in A are present also in B. When an analogy or a metaphor (an analogy that derives extra rhetorical force by dispensing with the words ‘like’ or ‘as’) is used as an assertion of similarity for purposes of persuasion, then it is a derivation.53 Pareto claims that such derivations are much loved by metaphysicists and theologians. The works of Plato, for example, are ‘one string of metaphors and analogies offered as proofs’.54 In the Republic, he solves the problem of justice by analogy. To begin with, he sets up an analogy between the search for justice and the reading of a script. Is not a piece of writing more readily deciphered when it is written in big letters? Let us look, therefore, for something in which justice appears in ‘big letters’. Justice is present both in the individual and in society. But since society is larger than the individual, it will be easier to discern justice in society. This mode of argumentation continues throughout the whole book. The use of metaphor and analogy in order to ‘prove’ this or that proposition can help us to illustrate the complex relationship between residues and derivations. Pareto draws a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ residues underlying the various derivations. The primary residue expresses the purpose behind the derivation. For example, seeing society as an ‘organism’ reflects a residue of persistent aggregates, a sentiment of social unity, a desire to conceive and present society as a harmonious system of complementary functions. However, a secondary residue also comes into play here, a residue ‘used for purposes of derivation’.55 The detection of resemblances – which inspires the use of metaphor and analogy – is a residue of combination. This example demonstrates how any given derivation may manifest residues of different classes and do so in different ways.

The equilibrium model of society Although they express our natural human desire to be, or seem, reasonable, derivations offend against logic and ‘overstep reality’.56 So says Pareto. But this raises a question. If our ideas about man and society stand removed from logico-experimental reasoning, why has the human species been so successful? Why has our collective life not been incapacitated by the delusive haze of non-sequiturs and metaphysical dogma that clouds our vision? In practice, the divergence between derivations and reality must somehow or other have been

48


corrected. By way of explanation, Pareto uses the term composition in the technical sense, borrowed from mechanics, in which two forces acting in two different directions are resolved into a force acting in a third direction. To take the simplest case, two directly contradictory derivations (say, one instructing people to love their neighbours as themselves, the other enjoining the vendetta as a duty) will partially cancel each other out, and perhaps give rise to a more realistic derivation urging us to tolerate those we dislike. ‘The more complex, but also the more frequent, form is the case where there are many derivations, A, B, C . . . that are not directly contradictory, and which, when combined and mutually composed, give a resultant that approximates reality more closely than any of them singly.’57 This formulation is reminiscent of J.S. Mill’s famous dictum that the truth is best approximated by the dialectical interaction of competing theories and doctrines. But there is another reason why derivations, however divorced from experimental reality, are not necessarily detrimental to human wellbeing. At many points in his Treatise, Pareto stresses that although he may ridicule the intellectual pretensions of social doctrines and expose their pseudo-logicality, he does not deny that they may have ‘social utility’ under appropriate conditions: ‘the experimental “truth” of certain theories is one thing and their social “utility” quite another’. The ‘two things’, he goes on to say, ‘may, and often do, stand in flat contradiction’.58 By ‘social utility’, he means utility for preserving the cohesion and/or inspiring the activities of a society or social group; something which is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ in itself, but which may, in some circumstances, be a prerequisite for the ‘practical purpose of human beings’, which he defines as ‘the welfare and prosperity of themselves and their societies’.59 Derivations should be judged not in terms of their literal meaning but, rather, functionally. In so far as they embody ideals and values, derivations, argues Pareto, are functional because they stimulate conduct along and towards desired goals. Despite being non-rational constructions on non-rational foundations, they are useful ‘for purposes of persuasion, for arousing sentiments and urging people along a given line of conduct’; and they are useful for these purposes ‘because the human mind requires the ideal and the real in varying dosage’.60 Indeed, he echoes his friend, Georges Sorel, in arguing that a social doctrine, if it is to have any influence, must ‘take the form of a “myth” ’. Yet – confusingly – Pareto also claims that ideals are ‘imaginary’ objectives, which satisfy ‘the human desire for logical, or pseudo-logical, ratiocination’, but ‘do little or nothing in the way of determining conduct’.61 Ultimately, his theory of society was


49

psychological, with both behaviour and belief being a function of the distribution and interplay of individual psychic states. Pareto was, however, unwilling to rest content with psychological reductionism – a doctrine he regarded as simplistic. Small wonder that he was ambivalent about the causal impact of ideas. Could he devise a model of society that avoided the apparently reductive logic of his residue theory? The solution was to be found in his scientific background, which encouraged him to see society as a system in equilibrium, involving the simultaneous variations of mutually dependent variables. As someone who had written a thesis on the mathematical theory of equilibrium in elastic solids, Pareto knew that this form of analysis had been used with great success by the physicist and the chemist with their physical and physico-chemical systems, and by the biologist with his organic system. The proximate source of his conceptual scheme, however, was the mathematical economics of himself and Walras. The most notable achievement of Walrasian and Paretian economics had been the development of a mathematical theory of general equilibrium. Assuming perfect competition and uniformity of price throughout a given market, the Lausanne economists then showed mathematically what kind of conditions had to be present in order to achieve a stationary equilibrium. This they did by means of a series of simultaneous equations equal in number to the variables of the system. The set of prices and quantities which in any given case satisfied these equations would constitute equilibrium, and the repercussions of variation in any one element could be mathematically traced throughout the system. In this way mathematical economics could allow for the fact of interdependence among all parts of the economy, such that change in the supply or demand or price of one commodity affected all other prices and quantities. Pareto drew what to him was an obvious inference: the concept of equilibrium provided a useful tool for handling the complexities of social life, since society was simply the economic sphere enlarged to encompass human irrationality. The logical/theoretical problems were in both cases identical.62 Pareto had a choice between two models for his enquiry: the model of society as an organism, and the alternative model of society as a system of mutually interacting particles which move from one state of equilibrium to another (i.e. the mechanical analogy). Mechanics was of course the area in which Pareto had originally been trained, but the mechanical analogy commended itself to him for its analytical power as well. He did not deny that society resembled a living organism more closely in some respects than it resembled the system of material points

50


acted upon by certain forces which mechanics assumed. The organic analogy alone could shed light on the process of societal evolution, since evolution was foreign to physical systems. But to comprehend the social system at any given point in its evolution, mechanics offered far and away the most incisive model. Unlike living organisms, which are rigidly organised, a system of material points allows for considerable variation in the motion of its interacting particles and can therefore mimic the complicated actions and reactions of social phenomena. The mechanical model also allows one to consider ‘virtual’ movements – that is, movements within the system which result when one of its points has been artificially moved in a certain direction. (Living organisms do not display this level of flexibility.) The ‘artificial’ modification, as distinct from a modification that the system would undergo normally, brings about an immediate reaction, tending to restore the original state. This is what is meant by saying that the system is in equilibrium.63 Pareto was aware of the defective nature of this tool in the social sciences. Most societies at most times do manage to shake off disturbing influences, but it is nevertheless a fact that they also – perhaps slowly – succumb to significant change. Social equilibrium evidently must be dynamic rather than static. Now in mechanics D’Alembert’s principle64 made possible a thorough study of dynamic states, but no analogous principle had yet been discovered for social science. Hence ‘we are obliged to consider a series of static equilibria rather than the dynamic equilibrium’.65 Pareto refuses to see this as a serious obstacle, since ‘successive states X1, X2, X3 . . . reached at certain intervals of time’ are ‘analogous to the state of dynamic equilibrium in a physical system’.66 As a rare concession to readers less gifted than himself, Pareto here offers a simile. Two men are descending a slope, one on a sledge, the other on foot and pausing after each step. The two had left the top at the same time, travel down together, and arrive at the bottom simultaneously. In a general sense their movements are much the same. ‘But the movement of the man on the sledge is a continuous movement which, if we study it, involves us in a problem of dynamics. The movement of the man descending on foot represents a series of successive positions of equilibrium.’67 Pareto employs the concept of general equilibrium as a conceptual instrument to give clarity and precision to our understanding of forces operative in the real world. Equilibrium in this sense is a scientific construct, not an accurate description of empirical social reality. Still, its implications for how we understand the world are hardly neutral. Was it designed to uphold and reinforce certain social preferences? His


51

assignment of systemic properties to society prompts speculation about both his intentions and the logic of his theory. First of all, it has been argued that Pareto’s particular use of the equilibrium model logically and substantively incorporates the preeminence of the status quo. Consider the following passage: We can also say that the fact of the existence of society results from the facts observable within it, that, in other words, these latter facts determine the social equilibrium; and, further again, that if the fact of the existence of a society is given, the facts arising within it are no longer altogether arbitrary but must satisfy a certain condition, namely, that the equilibrium being given, the facts which determine it cannot be altogether arbitrary.68 ‘What is’ is granted a normative status by this understanding of the equilibrium model, since it is assumed that every existing social fact is contributing to social stability (equilibrium), and – in addition – that stability is the normal condition of society. Of course, there is no logical reason to assume that only existing social facts could bring equilibrium or that all of them contribute to that equilibrium. (Some of them may be superfluous.) Such subtleties did not seem to worry Pareto. His presumptive bias in favour of the status quo is further illustrated by his juxtaposition of virtual/artificial and real/normal ‘movements’ (transitions from one social state to another). Equilibrium, he tells us, ‘is such a state that if it is artificially subjected to some modification different from the modification it undergoes normally, a reaction at once takes place tending to restore it to its real, its normal, state’.69 The distinction between normal and artificial also pervades Pareto’s differentiation between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ movements. ‘Artificially’ induced changes are identified with ‘virtual movements’ – those that are ephemeral or insubstantial or (even) wholly imaginary. ‘Real’ movements involve ‘the study of what is’, whereas virtual movements originate in speculation about ‘what ought to be’. The inescapable conclusion is that there is something ‘unreal’ about approaching society with ‘artificial’, ‘ought’ demands: i.e. demands that do not spring ‘naturally’ from the ‘normal’ workings of reality and are simply a function of sentiment.70 None of this means, however, that Zeitlin is right to maintain that ‘Pareto’s method . . . is designed to deny historical change’.71 Pareto the citizen was suspicious of deliberate change, which – to him – was typically based on wishful thinking, not concrete knowledge. This bias leaves its imprint on his analysis, which appears to justify being rather

52


than becoming, continuity rather than disruptive transformation. Yet Pareto the theoretician did insist that the social equilibrium was a dynamic equilibrium; he accepted – as we shall see more clearly later on in this chapter – that social change was ‘normal’, ‘real’, and sometimes revolutionary. Neither did he think – when wearing his theoretician’s hat – that continuity was always beneficial: ‘Every case has to be examined on its particular merits.’72 Too much stability, he claims, defeats progress, not only in the arts and sciences ‘but in social matters as well’.73 Moreover, revolutions may be ‘beneficial to a community’ in so far as they manifest ‘salutary’ social forces and eliminate a ‘spineless’, enervated ruling class. He cites the French Revolution as a case in point.74 Nevertheless, he never deviated from his conviction that the relative permanence of the residues limited the possibilities for genuine change.75 This is why ‘worshippers of the goddess Reason’ consistently fail to achieve their radical aims, no matter what instruments of coercion are placed at their disposal. For they labour under the absurd misconception that ‘the modes and forms of society are determined by reasoning’ instead of underlying sentiments.76 According to Pareto, change was primarily, if not exclusively, in form, with substance generally remaining unchanged. History is a series of variations on certain basic themes. He gives the example of the Catholic Church and its victory over paganism: it could gain the acceptance of Graeco-Latin civilization for the theological concept of a single God – or Trinity – but at the price of permitting the abiding residues of the old religion to continue expressing themselves in the worship of saints and in many customs that at bottom were not greatly at variance with those which had prevailed in the past.77 For him, the competing religions are all varying forms of a single substance. ‘The same may be said’, he continues, ‘of the various forms of government’, each of which explicitly or implicitly has its own version of ‘divine right’, its own sacred principles of legitimation: The modern free-thinker enforces, in the name of Science, Holy of Holies, a morality but slightly differing from the code that the God of the Israelites proclaimed for His people, or the code that the Christians received from their God; or the codes that now one, now another, of the ancient peoples received from gods or from lawgivers legendary or divine.78


53

Given this notion that, at bottom, everything always remains the same, one could perhaps be forgiven for presuming that Pareto’s concept of the social system cannot account for ‘real’ change – despite his occasional protestations to the contrary. While I find such criticism misguided, it will not easily disappear as it has a plausible basis in the texts. Let us remind ourselves that, for Pareto, the universality of human psychology underlies the equilibrium model, which in turn embodies the assumption that attempts at deliberate change will be ineffective. ‘If an existing state of social equilibrium is altered’, he says, ‘forces tending to re-establish it come into play – that, no more, no less, is what equilibrium means.’79 This accounts for the phenomenon of unintended consequences, whereby apparently rational reforms or policies have incidental effects that no one anticipated and that can – as in the case of alcohol prohibition in the USA – lead to perverse outcomes. A society in equilibrium is naturally resistant to social schemes whose purpose is to push society in this or that direction. The hypothesis of reciprocal determination in the social system would also help to explain why the intentions of reformers are so often mocked or thwarted. For if the units constituting the system are mutually dependent, if ‘actions and reactions follow one another indefinitely’, the repercussions of movement in one unit combine with movements in other units, modifying them to some extent and thus producing certain effects which depart from the effects that might have been predicted or desired.80 Notice, though, that the Paretian system is unfriendly to planned change – change that flows from abstract theoretical imperatives and presumes to follow a blueprint – not to change as such. In this context, we must recall Pareto’s distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘artificial’ disturbances to the social order. His equilibrium model is broadly functionalist in the sense that actions, whether collective or individual, are ‘selected’ by their functional or dysfunctional consequences. But what is functional at one time may not be functional at others. Changing circumstances may cause a ‘normal’ disturbance to the social balance. Existing modes of thinking and proceeding may appear ‘at odds with reality’ and the system may become unsustainable in its present form. Where a social system is losing equilibrium, ‘the pendulum starts swinging in the opposite direction’. Such ‘swinging’ is, to Pareto, ‘normal’. As he puts it, the ‘social order is never at perfect rest; it is in a perpetual state of becoming’.81 While he may have chosen to describe this ‘becoming’ as a formal rather than a substantive phenomenon, there is no doubt that his systemic approach can explain, and justify, ‘real’ (‘normal’) change – as long as it reflects an

54


underlying shift in the balance of social forces. The essential permanence of the human condition can never rule out socio-political diversity and development, in his view. Others disagree and accuse Pareto of trying to square the proverbial circle.82 If, as he says, society should be analysed in terms of the basic and essentially constant behavioural propensities characterising the human species, then how can he also assert that society is a dynamic array of forces, in continual motion, ‘being borne along by a general movement which slowly modifies it’?83 Even if we concede that the equilibrium model allows for change, a world determined by human psychology would be effectively static, according to the critics. What puzzles his more assiduous readers is that Pareto adheres to both analytical models at once. On the one hand, he employs the language and tools of the system analyst and forthrightly rejects causal monism: The form of society is determined by all the elements acting upon it and it, in turn, reacts upon them. We may therefore say that a reciprocal determination arises.84 It must not be forgotten that actions and reactions follow one on another indefinitely and, as it were, in a circle. . . . The state of concrete equilibrium observable in a given society is a resultant of all these effects, of all these actions and reactions.85 On the other hand, Pareto insists that all social phenomena are made intelligible through residues, the universal determinants of human behaviour. Can these two modes of analysis be reconciled? Is there not a contradiction between causal explanation and functional interdependence? If residues enjoy causal primacy, if human thought and behaviour stem from basic motivational complexes, then surely this reduces to a unicausal explanation of all social phenomena. Where is the reciprocity? Conversely, if society is a system of simultaneous and mutually dependent variations among the different social facts, then cause–effect relationships appear to be impossible. Pareto betrays not the slightest anxiety about this presumed inconsistency. Indeed, if I read him correctly, he thinks that the two approaches are actually compatible. Combining them is ‘workable when we have a principal phenomenon that exactly or approximately assumes the form of a relationship of cause and effect, and then incidental, secondary or less important phenomena with which interdependence arises’. Such is the case in celestial mechanics, and Pareto claims that the social situation can also be reduced to this type of


55

system. Since residues are much more stable than derivations, we can ‘regard them as in part “causes” of derivations, but without forgetting secondary effects of derivations, which sometimes, be it in subordinate ways, may be “causes” of residues’.86 As Henderson points out, to describe ‘residues’ as ‘causes’ is, for Pareto, true to a first approximation of reality.87 In a second approximation, we see that derivations also react upon residues, such that these residues are dependent upon the derivations. Cause and effect analysis represents an abstraction from the complexities of reality in order to gain a purchase on recurrent patterns within that reality. In this sense it is similar to the homo economicus of pure economic theory, or the irreducible matter of rational mechanics, abstracted from friction or air resistance. An ideal world is created as a heuristic device, but it is no substitute for the real world, where other properties abound. Hence Pareto can insist on the causal priority of residues and still affirm that they ‘are among the elements that stand in a relationship of reciprocal determination with the social equilibrium’.88 There is a key passage in the Treatise where what he has in mind is expressed in very simple language. ‘The sentiments or instincts that correspond to residues’, we are told, are ‘the main factors in determining the social equilibrium’.89 Residues, in other words, are primus inter pares – first among equals. Let us now try to flesh this out in some detail. It is often assumed that Pareto’s analysis devalues the importance of ideas. ‘For him’, Borkenau writes, ‘ideas are either logical [scientific] . . . or they are empty talk.’90 Remarks like this rest on a misunderstanding of what Pareto meant by the constancy of residues. Residues are constant in the sense of always being present in the human condition. Basic psychic states are, or have been, discernible in all people at all times. Nevertheless, their distribution and intensity within any given society are variable. Even the individual personality, within certain constraints, is psychologically malleable, according to Pareto. Derivations may exert only a ‘feeble influence’ on residues, but their role as intermediaries is not negligible.91 The psychic character of an individual is composed of many residues, each of which may be stimulated or brought into play by this or that derivation. Although a person’s array of residues constitutes or governs his or her receptivity to various derivations, these derivations can influence behaviour by arousing or giving expression to one or another residue. Sentiments that were weak or confused suddenly become strong and crystal clear.92 Imagine, for example, someone who feels a vague resentment at the words and deeds of the wealthy. One day he reads The Communist Manifesto and immediately decides to become a political activist. A

56


sullen and passive ‘spectator’ of events is transformed into an enthusiastic rebel. A variety of words can be used to explain the effect of derivations on residues. Thus, they ‘channel’, ‘energise’, ‘intensify’ sentiments, ‘bring them to the focus of consciousness’, and so forth. The proportional intensity of the classes of residues – Pareto would be obliged to say – changes ‘slowly’ in a given society.93 But the proportion may be significantly different from society to society, and in this lies whatever sense there is in discussions of ‘national character’. Those who wish to sway mass behaviour, or to win acceptance for particular policies, must appeal to this ‘character’ – something they can do only through derivations. As Pareto puts it, ‘selling’ a social policy or a political candidate is not the same as selling a machine. When an engineer or salesman has found a good machine, he can attract buyers by using logico-experimental arguments, since the ‘choice of machine is primarily a logical act’. The statesman or politician, however, must resort to derivations, for in social matters sentiment is the most powerful factor by far, and sentiments must be ‘aroused’ by derivations which ‘overreach cold realities’, which defy logic or conjure up images of transcendence. This is why – as noted earlier – Pareto endorses Sorel’s idea that social or political doctrines can be effective only if they incorporate mythical elements.94 Nor is this all. Pareto devotes many pages to demonstrate that societies are able to develop and progress solely, or largely, because human beings are moved by ideals, which encourage them to persist in the face of resistance and adversity.95 It is not only ideals that, according to Pareto, affect the intensity and distribution of residues. Behaviour, too, can shape the psychic structure of both individuals and collectives: The acts in which sentiments express themselves reinforce such sentiments and may even arouse them in individuals who were without them. It is a well known psychological fact that if an emotion finds expression in a certain physical attitude, an individual putting himself in that attitude may come to feel the corresponding emotion.96 This is a concession to the Marxist view that the role one occupies within the social structure will determine one’s psychology. If you are a capitalist and behave like a capitalist, then you will acquire the mental habits of a capitalist. While Pareto would not of course go this far, and while he criticised Marx for positing one-way causal relationships, he nonetheless praised his illustrious predecessor for refusing to take


57

ideas at face value, or – to be more specific – for tearing down ‘the ethico-humanitarian edifice of a classical economics based on middleclass interests’.97 ‘Interests’ comprised a crucial element of Pareto’s social system, playing a ‘very important part in determining the social equilibrium’. Included in his definition of interests were ‘material goods’ as well as ‘consideration and honours’.98 Pareto may have poured scorn on Marxist reductionism, but he agreed that ‘most men make convictions of their interests’, seeing their own material wants or desires for preferment as imperatives of ‘justice’, ‘nature’, and other ‘metaphysical entities’.99 Unlike Marx, he rejected interest as the unique basis of ideology, and insisted that interest is modified by other autonomous social factors, especially residues. Still, as his sharp analysis of ‘protectionism’ illustrated, he was acutely aware of the economic motivation behind much theory construction.100 Interests could also alter the residual substratum of human attitudes, though somewhat indirectly. What Pareto referred to as ‘new circumstances’ – particularly economic circumstances – ‘occasion changes in modes of life’ and (therefore) in the prevailing pattern of psychological responses in the community.101 He makes the point that a rapid increase in wealth will weaken Class II residues along with those individuals who benefit from them, citing ancient Rome and Athens as examples. Economic expansion naturally coincides with an increase in Class I residues, as bold innovators (entrepreneurs, inventors) gradually supplant the stolid guardians of tradition. Calling these phenomena ‘undeniable facts’, Pareto claims that they help to substantiate his conception of society as a system of mutually dependent variables,102 where ‘sentiments depend on economic conditions, just as economic conditions depend on sentiments’.103 Once again, we must marvel at Zeitlin’s consistently misleading critique, which boldly claims that Pareto ‘virtually ignores the question of social conditions’.104 The assumption that he was a psychological reductionist is as familiar as it is wrong. Pareto, it is often supposed, gave no credence to social determinism and the power of collective beliefs. He is routinely placed in the same category as Freud and accused of reducing the mechanics of the social process to a number of preponderant and archetypal psychological responses – to primitive drives, such as aggression and fear.105 Enough has been said here, I feel sure, to refute such interpretations. Pareto did not discount the role of environment and belief in reinforcing or even moulding human behaviour. Indeed, one of his contributions to social science is the concept of causal pluralism, of which he, with Weber, was one of the principal theoreticians. As noted earlier, however, his theory of

58 The science of politics society is basically psychological. Individuals are seen as complex personalities, variously motivated, such that behavioural differences reflect or correspond to differences in the relative intensity or strength of the various residues. What people need, expect, and seek in their social and personal lives is governed by the persistent residual composition of their psychology. It follows that politics is essentially a function of the aggregate interplay of psychic states.

A psychology of politics As noted earlier, Pareto’s use of the term ‘residues’ was not as rigorous as it might have been. Strictly speaking, it referred to the verbal or behavioural expressions of underlying sentiments or instincts. However, ‘for the sake of brevity’, he also used the term to denote the sentiments or instincts to which it corresponded.106 Just to compound any confusion, the word ‘sentiment’ seems to assume different meanings in different contexts. Sometimes it is identified with ‘instinct’ – with the subconscious and basic motivational forces impelling human action. In several passages, he finds it appropriate to give examples from the animal kingdom to illustrate the ‘sentiments’ of reciprocal goodwill, self-sacrifice, and protecting one’s young. The hen’s biological imperative to ‘defend her chicks’ is thus described as a ‘sentiment’.107 He even explains such sentiments in the evolutionary terms of the sociobiologist – as necessary to the survival of the species in question. At other times, the term ‘sentiment’ is employed to designate a socially transmitted attitude rather than an innate response. The bad omen, for instance, that is associated with the presence of thirteen persons at a table may, Pareto suggests, derive from a sentiment of horror at Judas’s betrayal of Christ; but it has now become a sentiment in its own right, with people feeling ill at ease at a table of thirteen without the least thought of Judas.108 This anxiety is obviously a learned response, not a biophysical drive. Talcott Parsons concludes that sentiments of this kind are nothing more than value attitudes, albeit ones that vary little from one culture to another.109 In his Manual of Political Economy, however, Pareto cautions us against engaging in ‘empty and meaningless discourses’ about whether sentiments are innate or culturally acquired. They are both. They ‘originate in the nature of man together with the circumstances in which he has lived’.110 And so readers of Pareto may come away with three contrasting ways of understanding sentiments: (1) they are the product of nature, (2) they are the product of nurture, and (3) they are the product of both, as ‘nature’ vs. ‘nurture’ is a false dichotomy.


59

This ambiguity can perhaps be accounted for by his aversion to psychological analysis, for which he felt ill-equipped. Pareto left the study of drives, urges, impulses to the professional psychologists. He offered no investigation of motivation formation or of the ‘unconscious’ and its mechanisms and processes. Nor did he show any interest in the results of such investigations. His approach has been described as ‘psychologism without the psychology’.111 States of mind as such were the province of the psychologist, while Pareto was concerned to analyse only their outward and directly observable manifestations. Although he looks forward to the day ‘when the laws of social science can be deduced from the principles of psychology’, that time is not yet. For the moment we must explain social phenomena by confining our gaze to external acts. Like the concept of ‘force’ in mechanics, the concept of ‘sentiment’ is useful enough as a theoretical category that helps to explain empirical regularities. Its existence is inferred, not observed – and there is really no need for us to inquire into its origins or to define it with absolute precision if the consequences we attribute to it ‘are verified by the facts’.112 Antonio Lombardo rightly characterises Pareto’s approach as ‘psycho-social’, inasmuch as it derives common or universal behavioural propensities from an empirical study of society.113 Pareto’s supposed conceptual sloppiness has come in for much criticism, but the question whether states of mind (responses, attitudes) are genetically transmitted or culturally acquired has still not been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Clearly opting for either solution, to the exclusion of the alternative, is not necessarily a virtue. In the decades following Pareto’s death, academic psychologists devoted considerable attention to ‘personality’ and its role in politics. In a manner suggested by Pareto, they were trying to deduce social behaviour from the inner workings of the psyche, and their discoveries have – if anything – corroborated his speculations. Personality is defined by Linton as ‘the organized aggregate of psychological processes and states pertaining to the individual’.114 As Pareto understood, the human psyche is not susceptible to direct observation. We can deduce its qualities only from the overt behaviour (including responses to questionnaires) in which these qualities find expression. Personality is, in short, a ‘hypothetical construct’.115 Going a step further, the only grounds for assuming the existence of personalities as operative entities persisting through time is the consistency in the overt behaviour of individuals. The individual’s repetition of similar responses to similar stimuli can only be accounted for on the assumption that experience is, in some way, organised and perpetuated by enduring mental patterns.

60


In Pareto’s classification of residues, classes I and II correspond to personality types. The person with an overwhelming preponderance of Class I residues will be imaginative and clever; he will revel in complexity and difference, and seek to manipulate his environment to suit his needs – resorting to duplicity if necessary. Wherever he looks, he sees the possibility of new combinations, new arrangements. Pareto likens this type to Machiavelli’s ‘fox’ – that is, the politician who survives and thrives through cunning. The Class II personality type is someone who worships tradition and authority, and is quite happy to use force to secure both. He is intolerant of complexity, remaining wedded to simple virtues, such as honesty, dignity, and duty. Pareto compares this type of personality to Machiavelli’s ‘lion’ – that is, a politician who survives and thrives through ruthless singlemindedness in the pursuit of social order. Where the fox is flexible, the lion is rigid. The lion/fox dichotomy is reflected in William James’s contrast between ‘tough-minded’ and ‘tender-minded’ temperaments, which was later adopted by Hans Eysenck in his effort to classify patterns of political attitudes.116 Unlike Pareto’s, his classification is not based on abstract reasoning or historical observation but on a very thorough mathematical analysis of the answers to a questionnaire (a factoral analysis). Other psychologists have also used James’s categories in order to study the role of temperament in politics. T. Coulter, for example, demonstrated that communists and fascists reveal the same ‘tough-minded’ personality structure, exhibiting high levels of aggression and intolerance of ambiguity.117 Despite decades of rigorous quantitative analysis, the physiological accompaniments of particular psychological types are still a matter of speculation and disagreement. Evidence indicates that Pareto was right to be equivocal on this matter. Most psychologists would agree that personality is primarily a configuration of responses which individuals have developed as a result of their experiences. But common sense tells us that the innate qualities of individuals will influence strongly the sort of experiences which they derive from social interaction. In Paretian terms, the pattern and distribution of residues in any given individual will be shaped by his or her experiences, but the residues themselves are determined or at least conditioned by our genetic endowment or evolutionary needs. What is the mix of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’? Psychologists will differ – and it is clear that the process of personality formation cannot be measured through laboratory techniques. There is no possibility of creating controlled environments comparable to the socio-cultural configurations within which all


61

human beings develop. Nevertheless, Linton points out that anthropologists substantially agree that much the same personality types are to be found in all societies, notwithstanding vast differences in culture and technology.118 This finding would tend to substantiate Pareto’s theory of residues, but it still does not resolve the ‘innate’ vs. ‘learned’ conundrum. It is generally accepted by psychologists that patterns of child-rearing are crucial for the establishment of personality types. As child-rearing is a cultural factor, why do the same attitude structures crop up in vastly different societies? While cultural patterns of family interaction permit a considerable range of variation, in all societies family situations display similar patterns of informal relationships. Thus, even in the most strikingly patriarchal societies, one encounters a surprising number of families in which the wife and mother is the dominant member. Moreover, there are a whole series of biologically conditioned situations which repeat themselves irrespective of the cultural setting. In any society, there will be eldest children and youngest children, only children and those reared as members of a large sibling group. There will also be favourite children, wanted or unwanted children, black sheep who are constantly subject to criticism and discipline. Even while operating within the culturally established limits of parental authority, various parents may be affectionate and permissive or cold and sadistic. As Linton concludes, when ‘essentially similar individuals in different societies are exposed to similar family situations, the result will be a marked similarity in the deeper levels of their personality configurations’.119 Cultural conditioning, it seems, is perfectly compatible with a degree of universality and does not detract from the possibility of ‘personality’ being an independent variable, with certain biological correlates. The idea of residues or personality types may find considerable support amongst psychologists, but not everyone is convinced that these things actually exist in any real form. Are residues psychic causes of overt actions or merely descriptions of these actions? Since residues (in the sense of ‘sentiments’) cannot be observed, Pareto must deduce their existence from the behaviour they are meant to explain, as he himself concedes. Finer protests that this is the argument of animism: ‘The native asserts that the movements of a tree are the movements of the god that possesses it. He then proves the existence of the god by pointing to the movement of the branches.’120 But even Finer admits that the circularity of the native’s reasoning does not necessarily prove that the god is non-existent. As for the absence of any independent proof that residues actually exist, the statistical and scaling techniques of modern psychology make the validation of statements about character type

62


possible, and – as we have seen – give some justification to Pareto’s inspired guesswork. Anyhow, Pareto could defend the scrupulous scientificity of a method which infers the reality of unobservable phenomena from the properties or behaviour of what can be observed. Subatomic particles, for example, are a hypothetical construct, but no modern physicist doubts their existence. Yet the differences between the physical and social sciences throw doubt on Pareto’s case. To begin with, the meaning and significance of human behaviour, unlike the workings of nature, are open to interpretation. Consider the distinction between ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’. In extreme cases, it is easy enough to slot political leaders into one category or the other; in most cases, however, our judgements will be value-laden. For example, where a national leader introduces emergency legislation to deal with terrorism, we could describe this (a) as a repressive move by a power-crazed politician who exaggerates threats and overreacts, or (b) as a necessary measure to maintain the territorial and institutional integrity of his country, as well as the safety of its citizens. Description (a) could support the proposition that the cause of the leader’s actions is his possession of Class II residues; description (b) implies objective or environmental causes, since the leader ‘had no choice’. On the latter description, circumstances would force even a fox to behave like a lion. There is no way of resolving this matter objectively, for how we characterise political events will be determined by our mental framework of perceptions and values. To go back to our example, it is certain that those who view the terrorists as ‘freedom fighters’ and sympathise with their aims (if not their methods) will be inclined towards description (a); while people who disapprove of the terrorists’ goals, admire the status quo, and place great value on social stability will naturally prefer description (b). Pareto, as a positivist who upheld a rigid distinction between ‘fact’ and value, ‘description’ and ‘evaluation’, wrongly ignored this complication, which rather undermines the usefulness of his typology of ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’. If the point is to infer the causal primacy of residues from an analysis of actual behaviour, it is rarely possible to do this in a value-free way. Anyhow, in the absence of controlled experimentation, we cannot say for certain that the ‘personalities’ we ‘observe’ in the world around us (or deduce from survey data) are anything but social constructs – dependent variables masquerading as independent variables. This is the view of assorted Marxists and postmodernists, who see the human personality (dispositions, feelings, sentiments) as a passive derivation from one’s place in the prevailing power structure. Idealists, too,


63

dismiss the idea of personality types existing in isolation from the holistic forces that shape the community – in this case, the dominant set of norms, values, and symbols. Charles Perry, for example, ridicules Pareto’s attempt to define residues independently of the cultural and social conditions determining their mode of expression. Verbal manifestations (i.e. derivations), according to Perry, are much more important than Pareto thinks, because society is held together by words and symbols. To phrase it differently, forms of discourse determine and underpin patterns of cooperation. They do not so much ‘distort’ reality as ‘construct’ it. To compare – as Pareto does – scientific description (true, ‘logical’) with derivations (distorted, false, nonlogical) is to be guilty of a category mistake. Theories of justice or obligation, forms of marriage or national identity – these cannot be ‘true’ or ‘false’ in the manner of scientific or formal (e.g. 2 + 2 = 4) statements. Social reality cannot ‘disprove’ such derivations for the simple reason that they are social reality. It is only through them that we can make sense of human actions.121 There is something in this argument, though it goes too far in assuming that there are no ‘hard’ facts by which to judge the various theories of society. It is also the case that Pareto, pace Perry, does recognise that the problem of organising human activities is not identical with the problem of describing reality. Hence his insistence that ‘false’ beliefs may be socially useful. Yet he does often belittle derivations for their metaphysical pretensions and ‘meaningless’ concepts, for their lack of precision and rigour, as if science could provide the paradigmatic form of social knowledge. The impression conveyed – in the words of Ellsworth Faris – is that he ‘simply cannot understand why men write such silly things and utter such incomprehensible absurdities’.122 Perhaps more unfair is the familiar charge that Pareto’s residues/ sentiments are innate. ‘The failure of Pareto’, Faris declares, ‘is due to . . . the error of mistaking that which is collectively originated and socially transmitted for a unitary and inherited individual tendency.’123 Faris’s own view is precisely the opposite of the view he (rather inaccurately) ascribes to Pareto: Instead of the instincts of individuals being the cause of our customs and institutions, it is far truer to say it is the customs and institutions which explain the individual behaviour so long called instinctive. Customs create instincts, for the putative instincts of human beings are always learned and never native.124 Apart from being a criticism of Pareto, this passage amounts to a

64


clear statement of methodological holism, a perspective according to which collective phenomena are given priority over individuals in explanation. For those adhering to this principle, ‘social systems constitute “wholes” at least in the sense that some of their large-scale behaviour is governed by macro-laws which are essentially sociological in the sense that they are sui generis and not to be explained as mere regularities or tendencies resulting from the behaviour of interacting individuals’. The alternative, methodological individualism, holds that all attempts to explain social phenomena are to be rejected unless they are couched wholly in terms of facts about individuals, ‘their dispositions, situations, beliefs, and physical resources and environment’.125 Or, as J.S. Mill memorably put it, ‘the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but the actions and passions of human beings’.126 A collectivity is just an aggregation of individual persons, not a reality in its own right. Because his residue theory seeks to explain social phenomena in terms of individual dispositions, as distinct from social structures, Pareto is widely assumed to be a methodological individualist.127 Assessing this assumption is not straightforward, as the doctrine takes a variety of forms and advances a range of different claims in accordance with how much of ‘society’ is built into the supposedly explanatory ‘individuals’.128 For instance, Pareto’s allowance for the possibility that residues could be influenced by prevailing ideas or economic circumstances is congruent with methodological individualism. An explanation of social processes and events may be individualistic even if its propositions incorporate predicates with some measure of social reference. Individual persons – their beliefs, situations, interactions – would still be accorded priority. Nevertheless, Pareto says things that seem to conform to the holistic perspective. Functional explanation, which is implicit in his equilibrium model of society, speaks of benefits to the system as a whole – which system is presumed to have a degree of autonomy, irrespective of the intentions of the participating social actors. Pareto refines his argument by insisting that a community can be understood in two ways: (1) as a collectivity of individuals, each with his or her own special needs and interests, or (2) as an organisation or unit, with a real existence over and above the individuals who compose it.129 The former understanding comports with the prescriptions of methodological individualism; the latter is characteristic of holism. Yet Pareto seems to think that they are equally valid and non-contradictory. When discussing the ‘ruling class’ in so-called liberal democracies, he asserts that ‘the chief element’ in what they do ‘is in fact the order, or system, not the conscious will of individuals, who indeed may in certain cases be


65

carried by the system to points where they would never have gone of deliberate choice’.130 Such unity as they exhibit is a systemic requirement as opposed to a voluntary choice. Pareto clearly accepts that the actions of a society or group may be very different from the mere sum of the actions with which its several members would react to the situation in the absence of the system of relationships that render them a society or group. Cognition, emotion, and behaviour are socially grounded and not necessarily explicable from the principles of individual psychology. Where, then, does this leave his famous residues theory, which is predicated on the causal primacy of individual mental states? Historians of political thought should resist the natural temptation to iron out any inconsistencies they find in the thinkers they discuss. Still, it is worth reminding the reader that Pareto was a liberal economist whose standard of Pareto-optimality identified the well-being of the community with the well-being of each of the individual members. His supposedly ‘holistic’ passages need to be put in context. He was never tempted, à la Hegel or Durkheim, by metaphysical notions of a supra-individual ‘social mind’. In the aforementioned passage where he elaborates on the ‘ruling class’, he rejects the ‘tendency to personify abstractions or merely to think of them as objective realities’, which inclines many people to picture the ruling class as ‘a person, or at least a concrete mind’. To the contrary, the behaviour of the ruling class is ‘the [unintended] resultant of an infinitude of minor acts, each determined by the present advantage’.131 Pareto did not believe, as did Marx and other holists, that the individual is somehow ‘unreal’ when abstracted from the social context, and that patterns of human behaviour must be defined in terms of collective agents. Even when he speaks of society as if it were a reality sui generis, he still conceives it – and the groups within it, such as the ‘ruling class’ – as the creation of the interrelated effects of individuals, whose needs and wants are grounded in something transcending the vagaries of history. If methodological individualism requires us to study the individual human action as the basic building block of aggregate social phenomena, then we can say that Pareto broadly adhered to it – albeit without denying the social dimension of individual thought processes. How useful is Pareto’s psychology of politics? His recognition of systemic properties and social conditioning indicates that he was making fairly modest claims. Psychological mechanisms, for Pareto, are the main factors in the explanation of social behaviour, but by no means the only ones. Nevertheless, his assumption that there are fixed human needs or dispositions persisting through changed circumstances

66


remains distinctly unfashionable among social and political theorists. The urge to ‘deconstruct’ the human personality by ‘dissolving’ it into the context of social or symbolic structures seems irresistible. Within the academy at any rate – for most people hold fast to the common-sense view that human nature is far from being a social construct, and that our behaviour is in large part determined by underlying traits and propensities. Of course, common sense may be wrong. What Steven Pinker refers to as the doctrine of the ‘Blank Slate’ has, in his words, ‘served as a sacred scripture for political and ethical beliefs’ throughout the past century.132 According to this doctrine, the human mind has no intrinsic structure and can be inscribed at will by society. It follows that the differences we observe in the behaviour of individuals or races or sexes come not from differences in their innate mental constitution but from differences in their experiences. Change the experience – change the customs or the social arrangements – and you change the way people think and act. The appeal of this doctrine to the progressive mind is obvious. Social and political problems are seen as remediable defects in our institutions rather than tragedies inherent in the human condition. People who do evil or irresponsible things are not irredeemably bad; they are products of a society that has corrupted them and that can, if appropriate changes are made, transform them into socially responsible characters. Many commentators may therefore feel that it is rather pessimistic and reactionary to attribute causal efficacy to individual psychology. After all, psychological explanations of society, from Hobbes to Freud, tend to stress the ‘dark’ side of the human character. Bear in mind, though, that the inventor of the idea of ‘the authoritarian personality’ was a radical left-wing theorist, Theodor Adorno.133 In any case, the Blank Slate doctrine is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of contrary evidence. Developments in psychology, as we have seen, lend credence to Pareto’s residues in the sense of ‘psychic states’. It is generally accepted by psychologists that we possess ‘predispositions’ by which we act or through which we interpret our experience.134 Survey evidence demonstrates, at the very least, that experience is mediated by the mind. Hanging labels on repetitive types of thought and activity (e.g. lions, foxes) does not necessarily explain their genesis, but there is a prima facie case for maintaining that persistent mental states form part of the causal chain that impels human behaviour. Impressionistic support for this proposition can be found in the historical record. Is it really likely, for example, that the remarkable similarities between fascism and communism (in practice) are not at least partly due to permanent features of the human psyche – features


67

that ‘holistic’ Marxists, wedded to the Blank Slate, simply overlooked? Attempts to uphold a division between the Blank Slate given by biology, and the contents inscribed by experience and culture, have been further undermined by recent findings in the sciences of mind, brain, and evolution.135 Cognitive scientists have shown that universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial divergences across cultures (for example, Chomsky’s discovery that the generative grammars of individual languages are variations on a single pattern); neuroscience has demonstrated that all our thoughts and feelings depend on physiological events in the tissues of the brain (for example, convicted murderers are likely to have a smaller and less active prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that inhibits impulses); and evolutionary psychology has explained the traits we see in human beings as adaptive mechanisms that allowed our ancestors to survive, find mates, and reproduce – which means that the rudiments of our mental life are largely a product of natural selection, not transient social conditioning. Given the evidence before us, it seems intuitively implausible to ignore psychic states when explaining political happenings or speculating about the future. It does not follow, however, that Pareto’s identification and taxonomy of these states are entirely satisfactory.136 Critics routinely allege that his residues are arbitrarily selected and ineptly classified. There is indeed some overlap between the different classes, and no one would deny the asymmetry between the first two, which correspond to personality types, and the rest, which Pareto by and large ignores during his historical analysis.

The circulation of elites This chapter has suggested some intriguing resemblances between Pareto and Marx. Both insisted on the priority of practice over theory; both highlighted the distorting function of ideology/derivations; both wanted to uncover the hidden reasons behind human actions. To these we can now add another similarity. Pareto and Marx alike derived generalisations from historical experience, fitting historical facts into a theoretical framework. Conventional historians tend to impart a uniqueness to historical events by concentrating on the details of setting and circumstance. Our two thinkers were more interested in the guiding threads, or – as they would prefer – the ‘laws’ governing human history. The parallels end here. For Marx, like Hegel, conceived of the development of mankind as a linear process towards a determinate goal. Hegel saw this evolution as the dialectical progression of a hypostasised ‘mind’, whereas Marx substituted the ever-advancing

68 The science of politics productive forces for this idealistic abstraction. But history, for both men, was an evolutionary succession of phases, in which human potentialities were successively realised through historical time. Pareto, writing in a period of pessimism and doubt about ‘progress’, thought this scenario was nonsensical: history was not fated to have a happy ending – or any kind of ending at all. As a positivist, he ridiculed the ascription of metaphysical ‘ends’ to empirical phenomena. Echoing Machiavelli, he depicted history as a cyclical process, with ‘ascending’ and ‘descending’ curves; as a record of struggle, of endless ‘rise and fall’, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. While technology may progress, our social relations do not: human beings always end up where they started. History, on his reckoning, perpetually oscillated between ages of ‘faith’ and ages of ‘scepticism’.137 Although he was not proposing the absurd principle that history repeats itself in an identical manner, Pareto felt that it was too easy for historians to get bogged down in detail and minor differences, to miss the forest for the trees, and to overlook what is ‘constant in the complex and ever shifting thing we have before us in the concrete’.138 The existence of recurrent patterns was ‘proof’, to him, that history reflected certain ‘constants’ in human nature, which had to be abstracted from the complexity and variability of past events. These uniformities were revealed, needless to say, in his motivational analysis. Marx’s conception of class conflict became a conception of personality conflict, the assumption being that personality types do not change over time. As an inexorable consequence, struggle was bound to remain permanent in human affairs. What Marx referred to as ‘the riddle of history’ would never be solved. Unlike Pareto, Marx was essentially a child of the Enlightenment who believed in the perfectibility of man. The logical conclusion, as Marx saw it, was an egalitarian future where harmony and rationality would be the birthright of all human beings. Pareto dismissed this idealised picture of human potential as a kind of religious sentiment, fuelled by the desire ‘to experience agreeable sensations’. It had no scientific basis whatsoever. ‘The assertion that men are objectively equal’, he declares, ‘is so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted.’139 His starting point is that human society is far from being homogeneous. People differ ‘not only according to the very obvious characteristics such as sex, age, physical strength, health, etc., but also according to less observable, but no less important characteristics such as intellectual qualities, morals, diligence, courage, etc.’.140 In every branch of human activity, some people are more capable than the others. We can call them an elite. The nature of an elite is dependent on the qualities which one seeks in it: ‘There can be an aristocracy of


69

saints, an aristocracy of brigands, an aristocracy of scholars, an aristocracy of thieves.’141 Of course, the line between the elite and the nonelite, the aristocracy and the ‘common part’, will be arbitrary, drawing an absolute distinction between people whose abilities vary imperceptibly, just as in examinations those who are passed are sharply and arbitrarily distinguished from those who are ‘failed’, even though only one or two marks may separate their respective performances. Life itself, not to mention scientific analysis, demands that we make such distinctions. So we get two strata in society: (a) a ‘lower stratum’ (all the low achievers), and (b) a ‘higher stratum’ (all the high achievers). Very few members of the latter, however, will possess the particular talents required by politics or manage to exercise any political influence. The elite must therefore be divided into two further components: (a) a governing elite, and (b) a non-governing elite.142 It is the former that interests Pareto – and his key thesis is that such an ‘elite exists in all societies and rules them, even when the regime is seemingly one with the most widespread democracy’.143 The Treatise contains an oft-quoted passage where the point is made with uncharacteristic concision: ‘whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs.’144 This remarkable conclusion – the essence of his elite theory – is linked to his economic analysis. In investigating the distribution of wealth and income in Western societies, Pareto had found that it varied little from one period to another and followed a highly unequal pattern that came to be known as Pareto’s Law. It can be represented, figuratively, as a pyramid, or ‘a sort of upturned top’, broad at the base and tapering to a point at the summit. This distribution ‘is not due to chance’; instead, it ‘probably relates to the distribution of the physiological and psychological characteristics of human beings’. To drive his point home, Pareto likens the social structure to a living organism, a mass of molecules in motion which nevertheless retain a relatively constant form. Similarly, ‘the molecules composing the social aggregate are not stationary’. Some individuals are growing rich, others are growing poor. In the social organism, as in a living organism, ‘the processes of assimilation and secretion are incessantly changing the molecules composing the tissues’, but the exterior of the organism undergoes only insignificant changes. Although its membership is constantly in flux, the existence of an economic elite, like the existence of a medical or a mathematical elite, is inevitable. It should go without saying that the same individuals will not appear in the various elites. Different spheres of activity require different talents. Artistic brilliance or moral excellence is not usually combined with money-making ability, for example.

70 The science of politics ‘People who buy steel cannon need a Krupp, not a St Francis.’ But if human beings are disposed according to the degree of their political and social power, it will be found that individuals in this ‘pyramid’ will occupy pretty much the same position in the pyramid representing the distribution of wealth. Those with the most political clout are generally also the richest. This was another one of Pareto’s ‘laws’: the governing elite and the economic elite are necessarily intertwined, and the equal distribution of political power, like the equal distribution of wealth and income, is nothing but a pipe dream.145 Marx, of course, would have rejected such pessimism. And while he also saw a correspondence between economic and political power, the economic power, for him, determined the political. Pareto, on the other hand, viewed both forms of power as determined by the presence in individuals of those psychic traits that enable them to control and manipulate their fellow human beings. All power elites, he asserts, govern the masses through a combination of ‘force and fraud’ – that is, by means of coercion and guile or cunning. Generally, however, they exhibit a preference for one or the other. This temperamental dichotomy corresponds to the two basic types of political leader, whom Pareto – borrowing Machiavelli’s colourful terminology – calls ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’. Those who fall into each category are, as we have already seen, endowed with certain psychological proclivities, or residues. The personality type defined by Class I residues (foxes) governs by consent, by appealing to prevailing symbols and sentiments in order to build alliances and strike deals. Cunning and rationality are preferred to force and faith.146 The Class II personality type (lions) is dull but idealistic, fond of continuity and order but receptive to clever theories and contrived images that foster the cohesion of the social aggregate – the family, the nation, the class, the community. Lion-like leadership is often sustained by great religions, or by ‘holistic’ secular ideologies such as socialism and nationalism. The Class II politician fears the disruptive potential of dissident voices or behaviour and is therefore inclined to use force to attain his objectives. The language of persuasion and compromise is foreign to him. And unlike the foxes, who take pleasure in clever debate and logical solutions, he burns ‘no incense to the goddess Reason’.147 Pareto’s typology of political systems is therefore two-fold. All are oligarchies, regardless of their constitutions, but in some ruling elites Class I residues predominate while in others Class II residues prevail. This typology does not correspond to the conventional division between ‘left’ and ‘right’. A Class II regime will be authoritarian, but its guiding ideology may be egalitarian or hierarchical, Marxist or


71

traditionalist. For Pareto, holistic doctrines all have the same residual root. As for regimes led by foxes, they are likely to be participative, liberal, urban and technologically advanced. In modern times, such a system would conventionally be called a democracy. Pareto prefers the term ‘demagogic plutocracy’ (plutocrazia demagogica). Although he never deviates from his belief that popular representation is a ‘fiction’ in our so-called democracies, he admits that it is a necessary fiction, since the masses tend to be idealistic and literal-minded (i.e. lion-like). They are effectively motivated, affirmed Pareto, not by naked interest but by ‘living faiths’, which they tend to accept without much reflection. While democracies do not officially align themselves with this or that religious faith, the ‘sovereignty of the people’ functions as an imitation deity. ‘King Demos, good soul, thinks he is following his own devices’, but from the days of Aristotle down to our own, he is more or less ‘bamboozled’.148 The people may reign but they never rule. Our vaunted ‘democracy’ is no more than an aesthetically pleasing mask hiding the hard face of plutocracy. If a governing elite could apply force and persuasion in the appropriate proportions, it could, in principle, maintain itself forever. No elite, however, has ever succeeded in doing so. ‘History is the graveyard of aristocracies.’149 Pareto thus offers a dual hypothesis, which he feels is confirmed by historical evidence. To wit, an elite of lions will be deficient in the spirit of innovation and compromise, and this shortcoming will eventually undermine its ability to keep the masses satisfied; conversely, an elite of foxes will lack the will power to use force, and this will eventually erode its authority, perhaps to the point of social anarchy. While the decline of ruling elites is inevitable – another Paretian ‘law’ – they can fend off decay temporarily by attracting recruits ‘from the lower classes’ who bring with them ‘the vigour and the proportions of residues necessary for keeping themselves in power’. Because of this process of ‘class circulation’, it is silly to think of the ruling elite as a static and cohesive body of individuals holding secret meetings to devise mechanisms of subjection. Rather, the elite is ‘always in a state of slow and continuous transformation’. It flows on ‘like a river, never being today what it was yesterday’.150 From time to time, however, ‘floods’ (revolutions, ‘sudden and violent disturbances’) occur.151 An elite of lions replaces an elite of foxes or vice versa. Pareto’s theory of alternation, of rise and decay, can be briefly outlined. A society where interests are predominantly industrial and commercial will normally have a shrewd and astute ruling class, rich in combination instincts but rather lacking in instincts of group persistence. The individual comes to prevail, and by far, over family,

72


community, nation. Short-term material interests take precedence over the less tangible interests of the wider collectivity. ‘The impulse is to enjoy the present without too much thought for the morrow.’ The cleverness and imagination of its elite can carry such a society a long way. But at some point, virtues turn into vices. Preoccupied with material prosperity, the elite will become complacent and recruit new members in its own image. In consequence, the gap between the residues of the masses and those of the elite grows too large. Opposition within the subject class begins to mount as the elite slides into decadence. In the first stages of decline, ‘power is maintained by bargaining and concessions, and people are so deceived into thinking that that policy can be carried on indefinitely’.152 Buying off adversaries can work for a while, but it is no substitute for the use of force against those who would threaten the social equilibrium: the use of force is indispensable to society; and when the higher classes are averse to the use of force, which ordinarily happens because the majority in those classes come to rely wholly on their skill at chicanery, and the minority shrink from energetic acts now through stupidity, now through cowardice, it becomes necessary, if society is to subsist and prosper, that that governing class be replaced by another which is willing and able to use force.153 About the French Revolution, Pareto wrote: If the class governing in France had had the faith that counsels use of force and the will to use force, it would never have been overthrown and, procuring its own advantage, would have procured the advantage of France. Since it failed in that function, it was salutary that its rule should give way to rule by others; and since, again, it was the resort to force that was wanting, it was in keeping with very general uniformities that there should be a swing to another extreme where force was used even more than was required. Had Louis XVI not been a man of little sense and less courage, letting himself be floored without fighting, and preferring to lose his head on the guillotine to dying weapon in hand like a man of sinew, he might have been the one to do the destroying. . . . It was a good thing that power should pass into the hands of people who showed that they had the faith and the resolve requisite for the use of force.154 Innovation, subtlety, sensitivity to nuance – these are wonderful


73

things, and ruling elites that embody these virtues can exhibit Odyssean strength while their societies enjoy the fruits of economic and technical progress. But many blessings propagate beyond the limit of their usefulness. Class I leaders are prone to becoming too humane, too theoretical, too visionary, too sentimental – altogether too deficient in the ruthlessness and energy needed to maintain economic development and combat centrifugal forces. They are at their most vulnerable during periods of economic debility, or when the social order is threatened by enemies, foreign or domestic, who interpret ‘reasonableness’ as an invitation to attack. Ensuing instability prevents society from fully appreciating the fruits of past achievements, and the ‘foxes’ are eventually overthrown by a new elite of ‘lions’ who represent the values of the subject class and are ready to rule by the sword.155 Social equilibrium is restored – temporarily. After an initial burst of energy, an elite rich in Class II residues begins to flounder. It too is doomed to lose power in due course of time. Why? The first reason is external pressure. Such a regime tends to be ‘crystallized in its institutions’ – rigid, unadaptable. Partly, this is a matter of principle, as Class II residues place a premium on continuity and stability. The essential conservativism of a lion-led regime means that it does not value new enterprise and is inherently uncongenial to people with instincts for economic combinations (speculators, entrepreneurs). Although it may grow wealthy through conquest (Sparta, the Roman Empire), no new wealth is produced in this manner, and the cost of imperial ambitions renders prosperity precarious. Other things being equal, a state of this kind is no match for a state governed by imaginative, adaptable Class I types.156 This is how Pareto accounts for the defeat of Germany and Austria in the First World War. Their rulers, heavily endowed with Class II residues, were instinctively programmed to prefer traditional dogmas over ‘intelligent calculation’.157 The other reason for the inevitable decline of ruling elites of the Class II variety is strictly internal. Not having the technical and money-making skills that their societies require, they will eventually (and however reluctantly) recruit or promote ‘individuals who are well supplied with Class I residues . . . because such people as a rule are great producers of wealth and so contribute to the well-being of the governing class’. For example, in the days of absolute monarchy, various ‘speculators’ (entrepreneurs, financial experts) ‘supplied the sinews for the extravagances of the kings’. However, ‘gradually, as time goes on, they prove to be borers from within, by divesting the class of individuals who are rich in Class II residues and have an aptitude for using force’. So the speculators in

74


France first brought about the triumph of absolute monarchy and then its ruin.158 Presented in outline, Pareto’s view of history may seem simplistic, but his analysis of specific situations is usually sensitive to detail and variation. He was well aware of the tension between the generalities of theory and the infinite permutations of historical fact. A case in point is the relatively extensive discussion of ancient Rome in his Treatise.159 While he explains the social evolution of both republic and empire in terms of the strengthening or weakening of Class I and Class II residues, he warns against the ‘oversimplification of extremely complex situations’ and generally remains true to this precept, never losing sight of the gradually shifting composition of the Roman elite or the fluidity of its relations with the populace.160 Neither does he ignore the interplay between what he dubs ‘circumstances’ and the distribution of psychological qualities. Nevertheless, the complications of historical reality in no way reduce his appetite for broad generalisations or ‘uniformities’. For him, the decline of the Roman republic and the later decline of the empire can both be explained – ultimately – in terms of residues. The republic suffered from too much economic speculation and an unwillingness, in its latter stages, to defend itself through violence. It became weak in persistence residues. On the other hand, the empire ossified into a rigid bureaucratic order, incapable of renewing itself from below. Suffering from a dearth of combination instincts, it eventually lost the capacity to innovate and was materially weakened by military dominance and adventure. In general, Pareto describes the cycles of history as alternating phases of scepticism and faith, materialism and idealism, freedom and conformity. His many critics see such bold and sweeping statements as provocations. It has been argued – most notably by Benedetto Croce – that, despite his historical erudition, Pareto lacked ‘historical consciousness’ (coscienza), or ‘historical sensibility’.161 But as Dino Fiorot has reminded us, Pareto was not, and never pretended to be, a ‘historian’ in the conventional sense of the term. He did not try to ‘recreate’ the past or see it from the perspective of historical protagonists. Rather, he was a theorist who interpreted historical facts as instances of general rules or principles.162 Of course, the reduction of human history to a pair of polar psychic stances – lions and foxes – is a simplification. Pareto acknowledges this but invites us to consider the limitations of the more conventional approach: Today the inclination is to gather every minutest detail and argue endlessly over matters of no importance. That is helpful as regards


75

the preparation of materials, but not as regards using them. It is the work of the quarryman who cuts the stone, not of the architect who builds the edifice. When one is looking for uniformities, details big or little are to be thought of as means, not as ends.163 Indeed, when one is ‘looking for uniformities’, ‘too many facts, details too minute, may be a hindrance rather than a help’. If one dwells on all the ‘petty circumstances’ that figure in a situation, one easily loses one’s way, ‘like a person travelling in a thick underbrush’. The obvious danger is ‘mistaking what is secondary for what is principal, what is very variable for what is quasi-constant’. The proposition that ‘history never repeats itself’ and the contrary proposition that history is ‘always repeating itself’ are both correct, albeit on different levels of generality: It would be inconceivably absurd to imagine that history could produce an event identically repeating the Peloponnesian War, in the sense of being an exact copy of it. But then again, history shows that that war, which arose in the rivalry between Athens and Sparta, is only one item in an endless series of similar wars that have been brought on by similar causes, that in that sense there are numberless copies of it that are likenesses, to some extent at least, from the wars that arose in the rivalries between Carthage and Rome down to all the other wars that have been fought in all periods of history between then and now.164 The message is clear: those who want to find out why wars happen will search for ‘uniformities’ in history and avoid immersion in the endless details that distinguish one situation from another. In order to discover the ‘structure’ (or ‘edifice’) of the historical process, we must resort to abstraction and accept that different phenomena will be encompassed by a single category, though it is actually a composite of numerous elements – in the same way that a geologist gives the name ‘clay’ to a compound of a number of chemical elements.165 Pareto was right to underline the role of abstraction in scientific procedure, which by simplifying reality allows the scientist to generalise more effectively. Newton, for example, in his endeavour to achieve an astronomical theory of tides, invented a hypothetical ocean of uniform width and depth, following the equator. To isolate the effect of the moon on the seas, he left out of consideration all the inequalities of the ocean floor, which make the tides in different seas so unlike each other. However, Pareto, by identifying his approach with that of the

76


natural scientist, only succeeds in provoking his critics to further outrage. The study of history, they say, is hardly scientific in the manner of physics or biology. Historical events cannot be replicated in laboratory experiments, and in any case Pareto did not systematically analyse the historical record to see if it corroborated his generalisations. The historical phenomena he cited as ‘proof’ or verification of his theories were more in the nature of illustrative examples. While such criticism is not far wide of the mark, it must be said that Pareto, in his determination to describe his method as ‘logico-experimental’, made an unnecessary rod for his own back. Of necessity, his mode of empirical ‘testing’ was essentially qualitative and interpretive, not scientific in the normally accepted sense. Like Marx, he applied his theoretical propositions to events in an effort to show that they were consistent with, and helped to illuminate, historical reality. Whatever his intentions, he was not really using the events to verify the propositions. His method relied on observation, not testing – a fundamental difference he tended to ignore. In truth, his historical ‘hypotheses’ were too vague and general to be liable to proof or disproof. It could not be otherwise. Speculation about society or human behaviour can be illustrated or even to some extent supported by historical and contemporaneous instances, but neither is derived from them in anything like a logicoexperimental method. Pareto could have admitted as much without diminishing the value of his penetrating historical analyses. But he treated the logico-experimental method as a kind of polemical weapon of mass destruction, trained on his numerous theoretical opponents. Those with whom he disagrees are ‘non-logical’, guided by ‘sentiments’ and metaphysical illusions; he, on the other hand, is a scientist, careful not to ‘overstep experience’,166 or to confuse personal preferences with truth. All his criticisms – of natural law, of contract theory, of utilitarianism, of socialism, of democracy – flow from this central premise. Let us now examine these criticisms, and see whether their validity is dependent on the accuracy (or otherwise) of his self-image.

4


Introduction Having reduced all ideas about social arrangements to underlying sentiments or mental patterns, Pareto had no time for the conventional approaches to moral and political philosophy that dominated his era and continue to dominate ours. To him, modern philosophers – even some of those drawing on the tradition of British empiricism – had not managed to escape the medieval inheritance of metaphysical abstraction. For philosophers of the idealist persuasion who spoke of ‘essences’ or ‘substance’, he expressed nothing but contempt. Typical was his dismissal of the ‘ethical state’, a doctrine holding that the state essentially embodies the ‘spirit’ of society. Pareto points out how this idea is supported with metaphysical argument: When one speaks about the state, more often than not one speaks about an entity which does not exist, and we are back in those wonderful days when one talked about a substance modified by accidents. It was believed that whiteness could exist independently of white bodies. The state would therefore be something abstract of which governments are the accidents. Thus, everything that is good is the product of the substance – the state – while everything bad is the fault of the accidents – the government. It is easy, then, to demonstrate that the state is ethical and perfect!1 Pareto likens himself to Diogenes, who said to Plato: ‘I can see the table and the glass but I cannot see the substance of the table or the glass at all.’ When Pareto observes the state in reality, he sees some men being forced by other men to do things they might otherwise not wish to do. To invest this activity with a metaphysical ‘halo’ of ethical ‘substance’ is – in principle – to preclude debate about the role of the

78


state, and – in practice – to forestall criticism of those who enjoy the privilege of commanding others. Given his attachment to the scientific method, Pareto’s disdain for idealist philosophy is entirely predictable. More intriguing are his criticisms of the analytical tradition of ‘enlightened’ philosophising, which is generally sympathetic to empirical methods and hostile to elaborate speculative systems. Philosophers working in this – mainly liberal – tradition have always been on the receiving end of scathing criticism. Communitarians or traditionalists decry such philosophy for its corrosive and hubristic reliance on abstract reason, and for its neglect of circumstances, particularity, and locality. Marxists and neo-Marxists habitually ridicule the analytical vision of isolated individuals choosing values in some kind of abstract way, detached from their historical context and uncontaminated by the class-divided societies that constitute their identities. More recently, postmodernists and other ‘anti-realists’, such as Richard Rorty, have interpreted the ideal of rationality as a cultural construction, thereby denying the logical independence of reality from human minds and concepts. Pareto betrayed little sympathy for such criticisms. As a man of the right, he had nothing but scorn for leftist demonology – for the rhetoric of class war or for depictions of the social order as a comprehensive system of domination by big property-owners. But neither was he a traditionalist conservative in any recognised sense of the term. Like the progressive thinkers of the Enlightenment, he was committed to natural-scientific methodologies as a regulative ideal for all rational enquiry. Received traditions, whether derived from religion or customary social practices, could yield no definitive knowledge of the world or of our place in it. What troubled him about the political philosophy associated with ‘enlightened’ liberalism was not its reliance on reason but its abuse of reason. For Pareto, the purpose of reason was to render things transparent. In political theory, this meant exposing the nature of social relations and uncovering the foundations of our normative schemes. What disturbed him about conventional moral and political philosophy was that it did not rest content with the quest for transparency. In addition, it pursued a prescriptive agenda, dedicated to the destruction of traditional claims to moral knowledge and their replacement by artificial constructions of reason. According to this perspective, reason was not merely an instrument of demystification; it became a tool for criticising value systems in the name of other value systems. Pareto saw this as a spurious exercise: ‘We have no knowledge whatever of what must or ought to be. We are looking strictly for what is.’2 There is no scientific basis for the view that logic


79

alone can deliver normative propositions. The ‘worship of reason’ as a guide to human progress ‘may stand on a par with any other religious cult, fetishism not excepted’.3 Ethical cognitivism is therefore a fallacy. There are no ‘objective’ (in the sense of external and verifiable) moral standards, discoverable through the processes of deductive or inductive reasoning. Rational methods can neither prove the existence of a natural moral order nor endow words such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ with a descriptive meaning. From what has been said so far, it might appear safe to regard Pareto as an adherent of ‘nominalism’, the philosophical theory that the variety of objects to which a single general word, such as dog, applies have nothing in common but the name. The opposing theory, ‘realism’, would seem to be precisely what he detests, since it holds that things named by general words, including universals, have a real existence independent of their names. It is therefore puzzling that Pareto professes to have no interest in solving ‘the metaphysical problem of Nominalism and Realism’, as attempts to do so would take him beyond ‘logico-experimental bounds’.4 He even says that nominalists and realists ‘are merely describing their own sentiments’ and are therefore both ‘right’.5 On this logic, Pareto’s reduction of terms like ‘justice’ and ‘morality’ to underlying sentiments is itself nothing but an expression of his own ‘private tastes’ and not a logico-experimental truth. Mostly, however, he is emphatic that these terms ‘do indeed arouse indefinite sentiments but otherwise correspond to nothing real’.6 As we saw in Chapter 2, Pareto oscillates between two distinct postions when it comes to metaphysical ideals. On the one hand, he concedes that they are simply not amenable to logico-experimental techniques, which means that he cannot ‘pass judgement’ on their relative merits and virtues. It is ‘inept and idiotic’, he tells us, ‘to set up experience against principles transcending experience’.7 Pareto adopts this ‘agnostic’ position whenever he is considering religion or God, acknowledging that ‘truth’ or ‘falsehood’ in this area depends on standards that lie outside of objective experience. At other times, however, the mask of neutrality slips and ‘prudent scepticism’8 gives way to hostile disbelief. Submitting to the logic of his residue/derivation analysis, he claims – without qualification – that ideas such as ‘natural law’ or ‘justice’, being in ‘patent disaccord with logic and experience’, should simply be regarded as ‘not existing’ or even ‘meaningless’.9 In the case of religion, he is an agnostic; in the case of secular metaphysics, he appears to be an outright unbeliever, anxious to explain the content of ideas in terms of subjective preference and communal traditions.

80 The deconstruction of political philosophy I suspect that this superficially baffling disparity has something to do with the rationalist pretensions of the secular ‘metaphysicists’ (Pareto’s term). Theologians ultimately appeal to faith; they are perhaps less likely to succumb to the grand fallacy that reason alone can prescribe how we should live. Setting his face against the fashion for prescriptive logic, Pareto cannot resist the temptation to ‘deconstruct’ the doctrines and theories that form the bedrock of ‘enlightened’ theorising about politics and morality.

Kant’s categorical imperative To Pareto, Kant was the archetypal metaphysicist, substituting ‘Reason’ for God as the ultimate source of morality, and falling into the trap of believing that principles which shape our society and saturate our minds must somehow be ‘absolute’. In political and moral philosophy, Kant is the symbol of resistance to the forward march of the logicoexperimental method, the defender of introspection and verbal legerdemain against empirical analysis. Pareto wryly adds, however, that the incoherence and distance from reality of Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ does not prevent it from being much ‘admired by many good souls’.10 For the ‘great’ German philosopher, the demands of morality are peculiarly and characteristically unconditional, absolute, or ‘categorical’. This being so, he argued – in direct opposition to Hume – that moral distinctions must be derived from reason and not from any sentiment, passion, or desire. For if it were otherwise, the demands of morality would have to be in principle variable, contingent upon changes in the sentiments of human beings. Because the principles of morality are independent of empirical contingencies, they must be rationally demonstrable. The starting point of Kant’s analysis is found in the notion of ‘good will’. In assessing the moral worth of an action, we should attend not to the actual results of the action (which may be determined by contingencies beyond the agent’s control) but solely to the direction of the agent’s will. Did he or she act simply or solely ‘for the sake of duty’ or to achieve some particular result? The problem of moral decision is essentially that of identifying the maxims specifying our moral obligations. If we act in conformity with these maxims, then what actually ensues is not of strictly moral concern. How, then, are maxims to be tested and distinguished? Kant’s answer is (to him at least) simple. If, as he assumes, the principles of morality are always and everywhere the same, it follows that what is a right maxim for one person must also be a right maxim for any other


81

person; it must be such that it could be, and should be, accepted and acted upon by anyone at any time in the appropriate circumstances: I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness in order to discern what I have to do in order that my volition may be morally good. . . . I only ask myself: Can I will that my maxim become a universal law? If not, it must be rejected, not because of any disadvantage accruing to myself or even to others, but because it cannot enter as a principle into a possible universal legislation.11 It is impossible, Kant is here saying, for a rational being rightly to propose to himself to act upon any principle if he cannot also will that others should act upon it. ‘There is, therefore, only one categorical imperative. It is: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’12 There are many particular maxims, Kant thinks, that command unconditionally, but these are all strictly derivative from the ‘categorical imperative’, which demands of a rational being consistency of judgement: the rules by which his own conduct is determined cannot by him be arbitrarily restricted from application to the conduct of others as well. Pareto’s response is that the categorical imperative is so vague as to make judgements of consistency (let alone consistency of judgement) near impossible. The first question that comes into one’s mind, says Pareto, as one tries to assign some definitive meaning to the terms of Kant’s formula, is whether the ‘universal law’ is dependent upon some condition, or whether it is unrestricted by any condition of any kind. In other words, can the law be stated in either of the following ways? (1) Every individual who has the traits M ought to act in a certain manner. (2) Every individual, regardless of his traits, ought to act in a certain manner. If the first form of statement is adopted, ‘the law itself means nothing’, and the problem then is to determine which traits it is permissible to consider. If the choice of traits is left to the person who is to observe the law, ‘he will always find a way to select traits that will allow him to do exactly as he chooses without violating the law’. If he wants to justify slavery, he will follow Aristotle in saying that some men are born to command (including the person who is interpreting the law) and other men are born to obey. If he wants to steal, he may very well deem it a ‘universal law’ that ‘he who has less should take from him who has more’. If he wants to kill an enemy, he will universalise the desire for revenge, and so on.13 Pareto points out that Kant’s own application of his principle seems to reject the first interpretation – the one that allows us to stipulate

82


conditions. Since, for example, Kant claims that suicide is ‘repugnant to the supreme principle of duty’ and ‘could not be upheld’ as ‘an unvaried law of nature’, it appears that he is forbidding us from drawing a distinction between those who find continued existence intolerable and those who do not.14 It must be, then, that he adheres to the second interpretation (where no distinctions or limitations in individuals are recognised). But before such an interpretation could stand, Pareto maintains, ‘the whole human race would have to constitute one homogeneous mass, without the least differentiation in the functions of individuals’. Take the case of a man who wants to spend his life studying mathematics. If distinctions are in order, then he can do so without violating the Kantian principle, since it may well be a universal law that a person possessing certain traits M should spend his life studying mathematics, and that a person not possessing those traits should otherwise employ himself. But if distinctions are not allowed, as in the case of suicide, and one refuses to divide individuals into classes, we enter the realm of absurdity. Either the man refuses to universalise his devotion to mathematics, in which case it is immoral, or he ends up proclaiming as a universal law that all men should spend their lives studying mathematics – a preposterous assertion for the very good reason that they would starve, and therefore no one could dedicate his life to such mathematical studies.15 Pareto argues that even Kant himself seems less than confident about his grand principle of morality, as – in at least one of the examples he considers – he supplements it with another principle. Kant invites us to reflect on the case of someone who is possessed of certain abilities but prefers amusement to the thankless task of cultivating those abilities, and behaves accordingly. Can this behaviour be a universal law? Kant concedes that an ‘order of things’ might continue to exist under a law enjoining men to let their talents atrophy, but he still claims that it is ‘impossible’ for anyone to will that such should become a universal law of nature, for a person must of necessity will all his faculties to become developed, ‘such being given him in order that they may subserve his various and manifold ends and purposes’ (Kant’s words). Pareto rightly observes that Kant has introduced a new (and Aristotelian) principle here: that certain things are given us (no one knows by whom) for certain ‘ends and purposes’. Although he uses the language of ‘will’, the appeal here is to the nature of man, to his designs and purposes, which must be ‘realised’. What was essential to the categorical imperative – the appeal to the will of the agent – is replaced by submission to the dictates of ‘Nature’: ‘Theologians scan the heavens for the will of God, and Kant for the will of Nature.’16


83

Pareto dismisses Kant’s arguments as ‘arbitrary assertions relating to altogether fantastic things’. Why, then, do so many people find them compelling? Pareto believes that ‘it can only be a matter of sentiments that are agreeably stimulated by that sort of metaphysical poetry’.17 The notion of ‘universality’ is ‘pleasantly coddling’ to sentiments of equality and altruism. Moreover, many people endorse Kant’s principles in order to retain their customary morality and yet be free of the necessity of having it dependent upon a personified deity.18 In fact, Kant made much of the claim that his doctrines were simply a systematic formulation of views already implicit or explicit in the shared moral consciousness of mankind. There is a lot of truth in this claim. In Christian societies, at least, there is a tendency to see obligations as absolute and unconditional. It is also common to ascribe ‘moral worth’ only to actions performed from a sense of duty, from the rational conviction that they ought to be done, irrespective of their practical consequences. It is generally assumed, furthermore, that the principles of morality are themselves unchanging and universal, however various the attitudes of individuals or societies may be in different places or periods. As Pareto observes, theoretical moralists rarely devise theorems that conflict with the ethical assumptions of their own conscience.19 The logical journey may be complex and tortuous, but the destination is usually predictable. While Kant insisted that the moral law was independent of religious belief, the moral outlook he expounded was clearly that of Protestant Christianity, the religion of his upbringing and the source of his sentiments about right and wrong. He was attempting to set out a Christian view of morality while repudiating its religious foundations. For Pareto, the indeterminacy and inconsistencies of Kant’s arguments stem from this doomed effort to substitute ‘Reason’ or ‘Nature’ for God. For logic, properly applied, can lay down no prescriptions for human behaviour; and nature, properly defined, refers only to facts about the world. To expect either to perform the functions of a personified deity is ‘to go wandering about among the clouds of metaphysics . . . where all objective reality goes by the board’.20 This brings us to Pareto’s critique of ‘natural law’, a concept entirely dependent on ‘defective reasonings’, in his view.21

Natural law According to Pareto, the idea of natural law rests on two philosophical assumptions, Platonic in origin and deeply ingrained in Western culture. The first is the belief that the universe is a rational structure, that beneath the apparent chaos there are logical patterns that determine

84 The deconstruction of political philosophy our existence and give it meaning. The second is the tendency to define things in terms of ‘essences’ rather than observable qualities. When philosophers speak of ‘man’, for example, we must not assume that they are using a convenient shorthand to designate certain aggregates of traits derived from sensation and reflection. On the contrary, the term is taken to identify an essential reality that may be hidden from the rest of mankind. The ‘man’ of the philosophers is usually an idealised abstraction, a model for universal emulation.22 Likewise many philosophers find it impossible to restrict discussions of ‘law’ to the laws that empirically exist, those passed by rulers or legislators. Such laws must be seen as pale copies of some ‘essential’ body of law that transcends experimental reality and sets the standard for all human behaviour, regardless of time or place. To Pareto, such philosophical assumptions – however misguided – reflect universal propensities in human motivation and reasoning. Under the heading of Class II residues, he included the inclination to preserve or consolidate existing social habits or beliefs. This accounts for the powerful human urge to transform commonly held sentiments into objective realities: In the minds of vast numbers of persons the concepts of certain relationships between human beings are welcomed as agreeable, whereas the concepts of certain other relationships are rejected as disagreeable. Concepts of the former type do not differ very widely from certain other concepts that are commonly designated by the adjectives ‘good’, ‘honest’, ‘just’, whereas they conflict with the concepts designated by the opposite adjectives, ‘bad’, ‘dishonest’, ‘unjust’. Now there is nothing wrong in designating that first group of concepts, vague as they are, by the expression ‘natural law’, nor in describing the situation by the statement that the concept of natural law ‘exists in the minds of men’. But from that point people go on to conclude that the thing called natural law must necessarily exist, and that the only question is to discover what it is and define it accurately. Subjective existence – the presence of the idea of natural law in human minds – is confused with objective, or real, existence.23 Once reality is ascribed to a metaphysical abstraction, those who wish to convince people to behave in one way rather than another will appeal to its ‘authority’, in much the same way that they would appeal to a personal God. But the authority of the abstraction is entirely dependent on its being able to embody widely held beliefs or sentiments, and


85

the need to objectify such beliefs or sentiments is precisely why the abstraction was deemed to be ‘real’ in the first place.24 Despite the veneer of logical argument, the ‘natural lawyers’ are doing no more than appealing to the residual substratum of attitudes and values that define the community. Of course, these metaphysicists cannot admit as much, even to themselves. What they want is something absolute, objective, logical, and ‘they invariably find it by using indeterminate words and defective reasonings’.25 Pareto’s critique of natural law displays the caustic sarcasm that made him such a formidable polemicist. Like previous critics, he laments the tendency of natural law thinkers to extract moral imperatives from arbitrary assertions. Their method, Pareto argues, is two-fold: (1) they use indefinite words, which ‘do not correspond to anything exact’, and (2) they employ circular reasoning, defining one unknown concept by another unknown concept.26 Discourses on natural law – he repeatedly tells us – are full of vague terms: nature, divine will, ‘right reason’. Even if we wished to use one or more of these terms as our guides, we could not say for certain what they require us to do. For example, metaphysicists of religious persuasion insist that natural law originates in God’s will; though we are not told whether He be the God of the Christians, the God of the Muslims, or some other God: ‘God has made a natural law common to all men, who, however, do not have the same God! It all sounds like a puzzle.’27 The concept of ‘right reason’ is also a source of bemusement, for it is never explained how the reason worthy of this exalted epithet is to be distinguished from the reason which has to go without it. As for ‘nature’, Cicero managed to use it in four different senses: (1) as the sum total of the facts of the universe, (2) as the mental and physical constitution of each individual being, (3) as the essence or perfection of each individual being, and (4) as a distinct, active force that produces and conserves the world. Pareto concludes that, as a term of discourse, nature ‘means everything – and nothing!’28 Undaunted by the imprecision of their terms, the natural lawyers proceed to define one by another. The dictates of right reason, we learn, are equivalent to the dictates of nature, for reason is inherent in human nature. If we are still baffled, we may be informed that the dictates of nature are identical to the commands of God, as the Lord of the Universe created the natural world. Those who, after scanning the heavens, remain uncertain about the content of divine will are then referred back to right reason, a gift from God, allowing us to discover the propositions of natural law. All this swaying back and forth – so typical of the metaphysical mind – betrays the fact that the conclusions do not follow from the demonstration; rather, the

86 The deconstruction of political philosophy demonstration is selected for the purpose of obtaining the conclusions.29 Pareto insists that the natural lawyers have made no progress since Cicero’s time: they continue to combine the same concepts in every conceivable way, ‘save that the God of the Christians replaces the pagan gods’, and – as in the case of Locke – ‘experience’ is occasionally ‘invited to reveal just what Milady Nature would have us do’ (though the ‘experience’ in question is akin to ‘Christian experience’, which is merely a new name for ‘introspection’).30 Pareto saw the natural law metaphysicists as classical practitioners of the class of derivations (or fallacious arguments) he referred to as ‘verbal proofs’: the use of equivocal and indefinite terms to verify propositions ‘which do not correspond to any reality’.31 Nevertheless, he does express a certain ambivalence about the idea of natural law. On the one hand, he takes delight in exposing and undermining all the abstractions before which we prostrate ourselves, and natural law, like God or ‘Humanity’, is just such an abstraction. Pareto the radical positivist wants to demonstrate that no such thing exists in an objective sense. To prove otherwise, one would have to define natural law ‘with reasonable definiteness’, and show that logical inferences from this definition are verifiable in practice. The application of such tests could only lead to the conclusion that belief in a transcendent law of nature ‘is in complete disaccord with the facts’. And yet, as a detached sociologist, determined to discover the conditions of social stability, Pareto is forced to admit that natural law does ‘exist’ in the minds of men, that it can and does affect their behaviour, and that it ‘has frequently proved beneficial to society’.32 As a secular version of divine law, it serves a similar function: it encourages people to behave in a socially responsible manner, thus providing a conducive environment for the profitable exchange of goods and services. Time and again, Pareto made the point that non-logical thought and action could have benign consequences for society. How we think, what we do – these express residues, and residues become part of the human psyche for good practical reasons. The usefulness of metaphysical concepts should become clearer as we now turn our attention to ‘natural rights’, which Pareto saw as a logical corollary of natural law.

Natural rights Pareto maintains that bogus theories of natural law spawn equally bogus theories of natural rights. Why say simply that you want something when, by devising sophistries, you can claim a ‘right’ to it?33 But from which indeterminate source do such rights derive? from nature?


87

from God? or merely from right reason? Defenders of natural rights find it difficult to make up their minds, and often contrive ingenious (and meaningless) combinations of all three concepts.34 Pareto attempts to illustrate the fallacy of affirming a natural right to property through a discussion of Bastiat’s celebrated parable on the use of a carpenter’s plane: It is a story of two imaginary carpenters, James and William by name. James makes a plane; William borrows it, and in return for such ‘service’ agrees to give James one of the boards he makes with it.35 Bastiat notes that without the plane, William would not be able to make any boards at all. Moreover, the plane is a product of James’s labour, which he could use to advantage himself alone. James, by depriving himself of the use of his own property, enables William to produce many boards. Surely it is right, then, for James to demand that the beneficiary of his property give him something in return – say, one board out of every twenty made with the borrowed tool. Bastiat concludes that interest on capital is perfectly legitimate. Uppermost in his mind is the notion that a person who renders a ‘service’ by allowing others to use his property has a natural right to remuneration. To deprive him of it is to violate some natural sense of ‘justice’. But, on Pareto’s analysis, Bastiat begs crucial questions. When he has James and William make a contract for the use of the plane, he implicitly assumes that they are free to make the contract, whereas the very question at issue is whether they should or should not have that freedom. At a deeper level, Bastiat assumes that James has a natural right to ownership of the plane; but the existence or non-existence of property rights is a matter of dispute, which cannot be resolved by mere assertion or ‘intuition’.36 According to Pareto, such question-begging and circular reasoning (deriving one ‘natural’ right from another) is typical of attempts to ‘prove’ the ‘naturalness’ of capitalist transactions – buying, selling, lending, bequeathing.37 It would be more sensible for defenders of capitalism to point to the empirical connection between private property and the growth of prosperity and civilisation. But this would not satisfy the human hunger for absolutes, for metaphysical certainty. Transferring the discussion to the field of logico-experimental science introduces a note of uncertainty in the face of changing realities.38 The right to property is deemed to be ‘natural’ in the sense of flowing logically from man’s ‘essential’ nature. Pareto regarded this as a

88


half-truth at best. He conceded that the institution of private property could be traced back to certain invariant features of the human mind – to ‘residues’, in his parlance: (a) the desire to defend, and increase the quality of, ‘one’s own’, a reflection of the instinct to preserve individual integrity; and (b) the need for continuity or persistence in social relations, which encourages resistance to radical social experiments and attachment to traditional forms of ownership. It does not follow, however, that private property is somehow inherent in the ‘natural order’, since communal property could just as easily find support in basic psychic needs – in particular, the natural human desire to value collective identity and cohesion at the expense of individual assertion. Human nature is a complex mixture of traits, from which all kinds of needs and entitlements can be deduced by clever logicians. In truth, says Pareto, rights claims – to property or whatever – are merely statements of preference and desire, unless they are backed by statute or custom. In any case, the distribution of social advantage is not based on imaginary ‘rights’ derived from nature. The lion’s share will always go to those individuals or groups who possess widely esteemed (or feared) qualities and whose claims are enshrined in existing social arrangements or prevailing belief systems. Every individual would certainly have his own principle for a division that would seem ideal to him, but ‘such a principle is nothing more than an expression of his individual sentiments and interests which he comes to conceive of as a “right” ’.39 According to Pareto’s equilibrium model of society, attempts to implement abstract rights will have no lasting effect because such ‘rights’ have no ‘real’ or organic presence in society. Equilibrium has reference to such a state that ‘if it is artificially subjected to some modification different from the modification it undergoes normally, a reaction at once takes place tending to restore it to its real, its normal, state’.40 This is rather a Burkeian argument, but Pareto acknowledges that yesterday’s abstract rights can become today’s socially recognised (‘normal’) rights because of subtle changes in society’s residual substratum of sentiment. He cites as an example the treatment of criminals. Once the needs or ‘rights’ of society were valued above those of the individual offender, who would routinely be subject to ‘cruel and unusual’ punishments – often with scant regard for his guilt or innocence. The priority was the protection of society, a priority rooted in residues of sociality and aggregate persistence. Now, however, the residue of individual integrity has become more prominent, as society increasingly comes to value individuals and their ‘rights’. Hence the decline in the severity of punishments, including the virtual elimination of corporal chastisement, not to mention the growing


89

41

emphasis on procedural ‘fairness’ in the judicial process. At all times, however, causal significance attaches not to ‘rights’ (the derivations), but to the residues that give rise to them. Believing in the ontological reality of ‘natural rights’ is like believing in the existence of fairies or hobgoblins.

Social contract theory At the heart of social contract theory is the idea that there is no such thing as ‘natural’ political authority and that legitimate government is the artificial product of the voluntary agreement of free moral agents. This idea may be seen as a product of modernity, of the post-medieval tendency to detach human beings from their defining social matrix and think of them in terms of their humanity alone. While ancient and medieval thinkers did concede that a man might be entitled by natural law to that which he was denied by every positive law, they never questioned the legitimacy of entrenched political authority and saw no need to relate discussions of natural law to questions of legitimacy. But in the seventeenth century the doctrine of natural law engendered a doctrine of natural rights, and both were directly linked to the contract theory of the state. The Reformation had clearly strengthened the element of individual choice and responsibility in moral thinking, while subordinating the role of traditional authority. It was natural enough that this ‘Protestant’ view of individual moral autonomy should spill over from theology and moral philosophy into politics, providing an intellectual basis for social contract theory. The purpose of civil society, on this way of seeing the world, is to preserve man’s ‘natural’ freedom, which means that political obligation is contingent upon the state fulfilling its part of the bargain. Pareto regarded such theorising as the most appalling nonsense. Among the many thinkers who have represented human society as originating in some pact, or contract, he reminds us, some have talked as if they were describing a historical incident: certain human beings not as yet living in society came together somewhere one fine day and organised human society, much as people in our day get together and form a business corporation. The obvious absurdity, not to mention irrelevance, of this idea persuaded later contractarians to desert the field of history. The contract came to be seen as a hypothetical device, specifying the relationships that would obtain if people could scrape away the ‘muck of ages’, clear their minds of inherited prejudices or special interests, and build a society based on pure reason. For Pareto, though, the social contract remains a ridiculous notion – whether one

90


locates it at the beginning of human society or at the end. To compare political obligation with the contractual duties of a businessman is to reveal a shocking lack of insight into the nature of the social bond. Only ‘day-dreamers’ with ‘sickly brains’ could believe that love of country stems from ‘will’ or ‘reason’. He claims, in a manner similar to Burke, that human society is held together by deeply rooted sentiments (some of which we share with the animal kingdom), by psychological needs and customary loyalties. Neither calculations of rational interest nor contractual obligations conjured up by speculative philosophy can possibly serve as a substitute. Somewhat unexpectedly, for a theorist who is often accused of atomistic individualism, Pareto insisted that ‘man is a social animal’, moulded by the values and institutions of his birthplace.42 Contract theory must neutralise empirical individuals to make them free and equal agents, capable of reaching decisions impersonally and sub specie aeternitatis. Instead of Frenchmen or Englishmen, Catholics or Jews, we have ‘man in general’, that abstract being from whom so many metaphysical ‘truths’ flow. Contracting individuals, that is to say, must be stripped of their accidental or conventional characteristics – of their personal identity. But why, asks Pareto, should these etiolated creatures, who little resemble human beings as we know them, be permitted to determine the distribution of social goods? Anyway, how can abstract individuals without personal identity or social reference points possess the linguistic and symbolic resources required for decision-making? In fact, the choices of these imaginary individuals always coincide with the convictions held by the contract theorist before he conducted his thought experiment. This is no accident, in Pareto’s opinion. One might take such inane speculation more seriously if all, or even most, of its exponents arrived at the same conclusions. But in actuality they arrive at a wide variety of contradictory conclusions, which seem to reflect extraneous cultural factors. Pareto suggests that Rousseau’s version of contract theory ‘is in vogue today because we are living in a democratic age’, but ‘Hobbes’s theory might again prevail tomorrow if a period favourable to absolutism should recur’.43

Utilitarianism Given that Pareto shared Bentham’s hostility to metaphysical arguments, and has even been accused of ‘crude utilitarian rationalism’,44 it may surprise some readers to learn that he was a fierce critic of classical utilitarianism. Seen by some as ‘the most interesting theoretical portion of his work’,45 his discussion of social utility is given


91

intellectual depth by its connection with his analysis of the capitalist exchange economy. Pareto, like all neo-classical economists, wanted to answer a question that also exercised Bentham: in what sense and in what circumstances does free competition maximise total welfare? Unlike Bentham, however, Pareto’s starting point is that there can be no objective interpersonal comparisons of utility, as the utility functions of different individuals are neither measurable nor commensurable. Social science has yet to solve the problem of comparing ‘the sensations of one man with those of another man’ and determining ‘the conditions in which the men must be placed relative to each other if we want to attain certain ends’.46 The reason is our lack of a ‘utilometer’ to make the relevant comparisons. If, for example, we assume a collectivity made up of a wolf and a sheep, how can we tell whether the happiness a wolf would derive from eating a sheep would exceed the happiness the sheep derives from not being eaten. The same applies to human interaction, according to Pareto: ‘Mankind is made up of war-like peoples and of peaceful peoples; the happiness of the first lies in conquering the second; and the happiness of the latter lies in not being conquered.’ How can we compare these agreeable, or painful, sensations, and add them? How on earth do we maximise total, aggregate happiness in this situation? Since the conditions for the happiness of each people are contradictory, it would be ‘like the problem of constructing a square triangle’. By itself, the principle of utility would not seem to be of much use. We would have to resort to ‘some other principle to rule out, for example, the happiness of the war-like peoples, to judge it less worthy than that of the peaceful peoples, which alone counts’. In that case, ‘the beautiful principle [utility] which was meant to permit the solving of moral problems is put aside and is good for nothing’.47 Pareto then proposes a hypothetical situation for our consideration. Assume, for the sake of argument, that such interpersonal comparisons can be made. Let us then ask: is slavery moral or not? If the masters are numerous and the slaves few, ‘it is possible that the agreeable sensations of the masters form a larger sum (?) than the painful sensations of the slaves’. This solution, however, would hardly be accepted by those who extol the principle of the greatest happiness of mankind, for they will argue that the masters are somehow ‘diminished’ and that the agreeable feelings they derive from exploiting others evince a ‘false’ consciousness. For Pareto, this would be a sophistic, metaphysical argument – but he too bridles at the thought that slavery could be considered ‘moral’ and reasons that there must be something wrong with a theory that allows for such a counter-intuitive outcome. After

92


all, he asks rhetorically, if we want to know whether theft is moral or not, ‘should we compare the painful sentiments of the robbed with the agreeable sentiments of the robbers, and look for those with the greater intensity?’48 Having established (to his own satisfaction) that the classical principle of utility is ‘good for nothing’, Pareto proceeds to argue that it is always implicitly combined with other, metaphysical principles, embedded in the moral intuitions of those who are doing the supposed utilitarian calculation. Even Bentham himself could not resist such eclecticism, according to Pareto. Why would the Englishman write that slave-owners ‘who have not been deprived of their good sense and humanity by personal interest readily admit the advantages of liberty over slavery’? How can these words – a direct quotation from Bentham – be squared with the principle of utility? Surely it was Bentham’s intention to banish ‘good sense’ and ‘humanity’ from moral discourse.49 In Pareto’s view, the obvious inadequacy of the pleasure/pain calculus inevitably leads to sophisms, such as the refusal to accept that happiness is a mere sensation, a primitive fact, the existence of which cannot be deduced by reasoning. Otherwise intelligent people resort to fallacious logic on a grand scale, as we are told that ‘happiness’ signifies the state resulting from the observance of certain principles: ‘That much granted, it is evident that if the happy man is the man who observes certain principles, the man who observes those principles is the happy man.’50 We are reminded here of J.S. Mill’s qualitative distinction between ‘higher’ (noble, spiritual) and ‘lower’ (sensual) pleasures – the latter supposedly delivering less happiness. Pareto finds such distinctions preposterous. If a man feels happy, ‘it is absolutely ridiculous’ to describe him as unhappy, or vice versa.51 Pareto concludes that the everyday understanding of utility (in terms of pleasure or happiness) is of no use in sorting out the problem of collective welfare and its relationship to free competition. From the point of view of economics, we do not need to delve into the psychology of individuals or speculate about what makes them happy, or deliver Olympian judgements about whether pleasure equates to ‘real’ happiness. We need only attend to their wants, which are revealed through their market behaviour: Morphine is not useful, in the ordinary sense of the word, since it is harmful to the morphine addict; on the other hand it is economically useful to him, even though it is unhealthful, because it satisfies one of his wants.52


93

Pareto coined the clumsy term ophelimity to designate the idea of purely economic utility. Because of the price mechanism, which makes heterogeneous goods such as guns and butter exchangeable, utility in this sense can be quantified in the absence of any knowledge of people’s mental states. Nor is it necessary to engage in philosophical debates about the propriety or otherwise of their desires. While Pareto thought it appropriate to express opinions about the morality or aesthetic value of people’s tastes, he regarded such opinions as irrelevant to a scientific political economy. Analysis of market behaviour, according to Pareto, supports the proposition that under certain carefully defined conditions the pursuit by each individual of his own economic preferences (that is, his attempt to maximise the means to satisfaction of his own ends) will lead to the maximum possible satisfaction of all other individuals in the same collectivity. The principal conditions are: rationality of action, mobility of resources, competition, and substantial equivalence in exchange possible only through the elimination of force and fraud. Interestingly, Pareto thinks it unnecessary to include the customary egoistic assumption that ‘man will be guided in his choice exclusively by consideration of his own advantage’. Without detracting from Pareto’s system, we could just as readily assume people to be altruistic, since the goal is maximisation of satisfaction rather than naked self-interest.53 Starting from this point, Pareto wants to examine what the laws of economics tell us about social utility. In political economy, he claims, we can define a state of equilibrium such that each individual obtains a maximum of ophelimity. This equilibrium will be possible at an infinity of different points. At a given point Q in a process of change, it may be possible for an exchange to proceed with an increase in ophelimity to each member of the collectivity involved in the exchange, and no decrease in ophelimity for anyone else. Such an exchange can be justified on purely economic grounds since it occurs naturally in a free-market setting and raises no question of ‘trading off’ one person’s ophelimity against that of another. On the other hand, the level of collective welfare brought about by mutually beneficial exchanges will eventually reach a point P beyond which any further change would increase the ophelimity of some but at the expense of others. This is the Pareto-optimal point of equilibrium. Further changes from the status quo, where some gain at the expense of others, will not occur in a free market because the potential losers will oppose them. Such changes from P must be decided by ‘considerations foreign to economics’, by those of ethics or politics. This is where the redistributive policies of

94 The deconstruction of political philosophy the state come in. One group is taxed and the proceeds are distributed to another group; some social interests are furthered while others are sacrificed. Pareto is not saying that this type of change is harmful or undesirable – only that pure economic theory cannot judge its validity. The concept of Pareto-optimality was the scalpel which enabled him to separate problems of efficiency from problems of equity. Point P is where you have a maximum of ophelimity for a community – that is, for the members of the collectivity taken distributively. Economic analysis is concerned only with the processes of acquisition and allocation of means to given individual ends. Where social decisions need to be made, where it is felt necessary to adjust market outcomes, to compare the ophelimities of different individuals to arrive at a judgement of net effect, extra-economic considerations must be invoked. This is the realm of social utility.54 Pareto goes on to differentiate between two different types of social utility: utility of and for a community. In pure economics, he reminds us, ‘a community cannot be regarded as a person’, since the focus is on autonomous individuals. In sociology, however, ‘it can be considered if not as a person, at least as a unit’. While there is no such thing as the ophelimity of an entire community, ‘a community utility can roughly be assumed’, and we must guard against confusing it with the utility for a community. What is the difference? Pareto tries to explain with reference to the issue of population increase: If we think of the utility of the community as regards prestige and military power, we will find it advisable to increase population to the fairly high limit beyond which the nation would be impoverished and its stock decay. But if we think of the maximum of utility for the community, we find a limit that is much lower. Then we have to see in what proportions the various social classes profit by the increase in prestige and military power, and in what different proportion they pay for it with their particular sacrifices.55 In other words, utility for the collectivity is bound up with the problem of distribution; it is a matter of settling the conflicting claims of different individuals and groups within the community to scarce goods. The community is seen not as a phylogenetic reality but as an aggregate of competing units. How, then, does this differ from the distributive aspect of economics? Economic theory has to do with determining the rational allocation of purchasable means. The utility for a community differs from the corresponding ophelimity in that it involves not merely the distribution of material benefits but also of power. Questions of


95

influence and access become relevant. By way of further clarification, Pareto invites us to ‘imagine a community so situated that a strict choice has to be made between a very wealthy community with large inequalities in income among its members and a poor community with approximately equal incomes’. A policy of maximum utility of the community ‘may lead to the first state, a policy of maximum utility for the community to the second’. Pareto uses the word ‘may’ advisedly, because results will depend on the coefficients that are used in making the heterogeneous utilities of the various social classes homogeneous: The admirer of the ‘superman’ will assign a coefficient of approximately zero to the utility of the lower classes, and get a point of equilibrium very close to a state where large inequalities prevail. The lover of equality will assign a high coefficient to the utility of the lower classes and get a point of equilibrium very close to the equalitarian condition. There is no criterion save sentiment for choosing between the one and the other.56 The assessment of social utility, in either sense, requires the selection of norms – norms distinct from utility itself – with which to compare or weigh interpersonal utilities, to decide which individuals to benefit, which to sacrifice – but there is no objective procedure or criterion for choosing such norms. Nevertheless, a choice must be made. Parsons points out that Pareto’s concept of utility of a community, his willingness to consider a community ‘if not as a person, at least as a unit’, is a version of the ‘sociologistic theorem’, that society is a reality sui generis, possessed of ‘properties not derivable from those of its constituent units by direct generalization’.57 A society, to be a society, presupposes a common end (or system of ends), which cannot be deduced from logico-experimental reasoning. While, in Pareto’s estimation, Bentham was right to expose metaphysical nonsense along with imprecise moralistic language, he drew the wrong conclusions. He ‘tries to make all conduct logical’ and so ‘loses touch with reality’.58 In the real world, where non-logical behaviour will always prevail, people need metaphysical or theological postulates as a source of motivation and orientation. Bentham’s mechanistic view of human nature underlies his absurd (to Pareto) attempt to devise a science of morality, as if ‘ought’ propositions could be derived from empirical analysis. His simplistic understanding of what impels human beings to action caused him to underestimate the complexities of the utilitarian calculus. For Pareto, as we have seen,

96


there are several different types of utility, often in manifest opposition to one another. The utility of the community, for example, is not that of the thief. Utility functions, moreover, are often heterogeneous. How can you compare the utilities of a banker with those of an ascetic? Such is the diversity that social utility can only arbitrarily be defined as a common measure of individual utilities. If value-coefficients are given to the activities of a banker, an ascetic, and so on, then social utility is indeed defined. But there may be as many definitions as there are definers. There can be no impartial standard of social utility. In classical economics, there is a single norm – satisfaction of wants; so economic utility, or ‘ophelimity’, can be defined objectively. This norm, however, is not necessarily applicable in the social or political sphere, where the rationality of actual wants is a legitimate subject for debate.

The sceptic’s dilemma This chapter has demonstrated how Pareto was scornful of the idea – inherent in the Enlightenment project – that logical or empirical analysis could provide substantive answers to questions about ultimate value and the good life. His attack on the universalism and rationalism of normative political theory was not founded on the communitarianism or nihilistic relativism that inspires more recent critics of Enlightenment hubris. Rather, he focuses on logical or technical deficiencies: fallacious reasoning and, in particular, the imprecision of terms. Where you have ‘reasoning by accord of sentiments’, he contends, it is ‘more effective’ in proportion as its terms are ‘vague and indefinite’.59 This accounts for the abundant use of words such as ‘nature’, ‘right reason’, and ‘happiness’, each of which can mean any number of things. Indeterminacy allows for all manner of bogus equivalences and dubious deductions, as when the metaphysicist, Vattel, informs us that natural law is ‘necessary to the common happiness of men’ – a statement devoid of experimental reality.60 Such ‘arguments’, says Pareto, notably exemplify the defective logic of Class IV derivations, where proof is purely a function of verbal equivocation: The more indefinite the concepts corresponding to a, X, b, the easier it is to establish, by way of sentiments, the accord between the concept a and the concept X, between the concept X and the concept b. If X is the concept ‘perfect’, it is so indeterminate that it can be easily made to agree with the concepts A, B, determinate or indeterminate as these may be. ‘The motion of celestial bodies is


97

perfect.’ And why not? Sentiment suggests no conflict between the two concepts.61 But the metaphysicists have another powerful weapon in their armoury. Because political philosophy is grounded in commonly held sentiments, anyone who doubts the logic of a particular argument can be silenced by appeals to some imagined universal consensus. It is typically claimed that ‘all men’ – or perhaps all ‘wise’ or ‘respectable’ men – would give their assent to the proposition in question. The popularity of this rhetorical ploy, Pareto observes, is not diminished by the irrefutable empirical fact that many generally accepted beliefs have been mistaken.62 Without question, Pareto uncovered several logical flaws and unwarranted or unstated assumptions in the standard theories of morality and politics. While some of his arguments may seem familiar, they were not necessarily familiar when he constructed them. Still, he is not himself immune to challenge. First of all, it might be argued that his contempt for metaphysical dogma was itself a metaphysical dogma. Even if we grant, for example, that natural rights have no objective existence in the order of things, that they are a product of sentiment, a human creation, it surely does not follow that theories defending such rights must be arbitrary or of ‘no objective value’.63 Natural, or human, rights are usually justified with reference to perfectly plausible intuitions about what the human condition requires. One of these is Kant’s idea that human beings are to be treated as ‘ends in themselves’ rather than merely as ‘means’. This is sometimes expressed in the formula ‘respect for persons’, which places constraints on how one person may treat another. One contemporary theorist, Alan Gewirth, justifies human rights by grounding them in the conditions of human agency – the assumption being that we cannot pursue our purposes if we lack the basic ingredients of human well-being.64 While such intuitions are resistant to ‘proof’ by logico-experimental methods, they certainly have some basis in observable reality; and it should be possible to build theories upon them without doing too much violence to the rules of logic. To dismiss such theories as having ‘no logical value’65 simply because they cannot aspire to the certainty of 2 + 2 = 4 seems to be plain silly. However – and here is the paradox – Pareto cannot make up his mind whether ‘metaphysical’ theories should be consigned to the dustbin of history or cherished as a necessary source of human action. A consequence of his analysis is that there can be no such thing as a logico-experimental morality, since morality by definition contains

98


‘ought’ propositions, which are doomed to fail his ‘reality check’. Yet no human association could exist without a morality of some sort. Furthermore, given his acknowledgement that non-logical behaviour is the predominant form, he accepts that ideals and myths, not reason, hold society together and inspire men to great deeds.66 He goes so far as to claim that transparency is normally bad for society: Speaking, then, in general and very roughly, disregarding possible and in fact numerous exceptions, one may say that it is advantageous to a society that, at least in the minds of the majority of individuals not belonging to the ruling class, . . . facts should be viewed not as they are in reality, but as they are transfigured in the light of ideals.67 Society functions best, in other words, when the facts of reality – the brute struggle for advantage in a world of finite resources – are hidden by elaborate veils of euphemism: it is advantageous to society that individuals not of the ruling classes should spontaneously accept, observe, respect, revere, love, the precepts current in their society, prominent among them the precepts called . . . precepts of ‘morality’ and precepts of ‘religion’ . . . . Hence the great power and the great effectiveness of the two forces, morality and religion, for the good of society; so much so that one may say that no society can exist without them, and that a decadence in morals and religion ordinarily coincides with a decadence of society.68 The conclusion is inescapable: doctrines that are ‘experimentally unsound’ nevertheless have ‘great social utility’.69 For this reason, Pareto declares, debates about ethics, while inevitable in a free society, are highly corrosive, ‘forever shaking the foundations of the social order’.70 Pareto wears many hats. As a philosopher, he is sceptical about moral theories, denying them any existence independent of human awareness; as a sociologist, he recognises their functional value as instruments of social integration. He faces a dilemma very similar to that of Machiavelli, who also wanted ‘to represent things as they are in real truth, rather than as they are imagined’.71 Is it possible to demystify prevailing ideas without undermining the norms and the narratives that bind society together? Both Machiavelli and Pareto were ‘conservative’ in the sense that neither harboured any desire to challenge existing structures of power or to pursue some transcendent


99

notion of the ‘Good’. Yet their contempt for hypocrisy, their common determination to ‘unmask’ the dominant modes of thought, to expose their origins in shallow sentiments and grubby interests, transformed them (despite themselves) into subversives. In the case of Pareto, his subversion took the form of a hectoring moralism, an unrelenting resolution to lay bare lies and evasions, especially evident in his critique of democracy and the (to his mind) ‘socialist’ values underpinning it. His stated intention was to develop a purely scientific theory, free of anything ‘that sounds like counsel, admonition, or preaching, or is designed to encourage this or that practical conduct’.72 He did not succeed. As we shall now see, sustained criticism of ‘what is’ amounts to a disquisition on ‘what ought to be’.

5


Intellectual context Cynicism about the pretensions of liberal democracy did not of course originate with Pareto. It was a commonplace of Marxism, for example, that power followed property, and that the conditions of electoral competition in parliamentary ‘democracies’ were fundamentally distorted by bourgeois ownership of the media and meeting places, and by the role of money in political campaigns. Parliaments, in any case, were dismissed as mere ‘talking shops’, with real power residing in the boardrooms of the big banks and capitalist enterprises. Whatever the constitutional niceties, liberal democracy was, as Lenin inimitably put it, ‘a dictatorship of the filthy and self-seeking exploiters who are sucking the blood of the people’.1 But it was thinkers on the right of the political spectrum who first denounced the alleged fraudulence of emergent democratic institutions. Indeed, some of them tried to demystify mass democracy even before it arose. Frightened by the radical ambitions of the French Revolution, conservatives such as Burke, de Maistre, and (later) Hegel argued that universal suffrage would inevitably bring about rule by a tiny elite of demagogues, adept at manipulating the apathy and ignorance of the people. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, essentially a liberal who was sympathetic to democratic aspirations, warned of a similarly perverse outcome – though he thought that the tyranny of an unbridled majority was more likely than the tyranny of a demagogic few. Democracy, he wrote, forces us to contemplate ‘a new physiognomy of servitude’, scarcely less oppressive than the absolute monarchies of the past.2 With the gradual expansion of the franchise, anti-democratic thinkers intensified their onslaught, combining fear of the newly empowered masses with a firm conviction that these same masses would – as if driven by an iron law – submit to a dictatorial elite of panderers and


101

confidence tricksters, who would be the real rulers in our so-called democracies.3 Pessimism about the democratic revolution sometimes took hysterical form, but it was also expressed in the calm and measured tones of Gaetano Mosca, who articulated the ‘classical elitist’ critique of democracy around the same time as Pareto – much to the latter’s irritation. Notwithstanding this distinction, Mosca suffers by comparison with his more cosmopolitan and intellectually ambitious rival. Unlike Pareto, who wanted to construct a unified theory of society, he was content to focus on problems of political organisation – mere details when measured against the lofty generalities of the Paretian system. A Sicilian by birth, Mosca was deeply disillusioned by the corrupt electoral practices of his native region, reminiscent as they were of the political gangsterism of Renaissance Florence, which was so brilliantly exposed by Machiavelli. In common with Pareto, Mosca shared the Machiavellian desire to penetrate beneath constitutional forms and pious political rhetoric in order to discover the underlying reality – the endless struggle for power. They also followed Machiavelli in thinking that this struggle could be reduced to certain repetitive patterns, from which rules or maxims of effective political behaviour could be derived. One of the ‘truths’ uncovered by political science, according to this Machiavellian analysis, is that elite rule is inevitable, but that it must be sanctioned by some sort of universal justification (a ‘derivation’ in Pareto’s parlance, a ‘political formula’ in Mosca’s). Democracy, or ‘the will of the people’, is simply one of the ‘great superstitions’ – like divine right of kings or common ownership of the means of production – that conceal the brute facts of power and thereby serve to unify nations and civilisations.4 Although Pareto studiously ignored the ideas of the saturnine Sicilian, they are worth exploring, if only to indicate that the elitist thesis came in varied guises. Mosca claimed that major political philosophers from Aristotle to Montesquieu had mistaken appearances for reality when they made their distinctions between diverse forms of government. Monarchies and republics, aristocracies and democracies – all of these types were shown to be subject to the far more fundamental dichotomy of rulers and ruled. Regardless of constitutional or historical forms, societies are always ruled by minorities, by oligarchies. A true science of politics would therefore ignore institutional structure and adopt a behavioural approach, which would focus on how the ‘ruling class’ (classe dirigente or classe politica) recruits ‘new blood’, maintains itself in power, and legitimates its dominant position. The term ‘elite’ is not found in Mosca’s writings, but this is merely a semantic

102


distinction between himself and Pareto. Both thinkers present the same theme – the inevitability of oligarchy – though with a different variation. As we have seen, Pareto relied almost exclusively upon psychological variables in accounting for elites. Mosca’s explanation, however, stresses structural and organisational factors. In a famous passage, Mosca gave a clear and concise statement of the general elitist position: Among the constant facts and tendencies that are to be found in all political organisms, one is so obvious that it is apparent to the most casual eye. In all societies . . . two classes of people appear – a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolises power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first in a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent.5 Popular sovereignty is therefore a myth, a ‘political formula’ whose objective function is to bind the ruled to their rulers. Whatever democratic mechanisms are employed, a small minority will wield exclusive power and the greater majority will be ‘directed and controlled’. We must, in other words, distinguish between de jure authority and de facto authority – between formal political structure and informal political power. The key to elite control lay, according to Mosca, in a minority’s capacity for organisation: A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one. Meanwhile, it will be easier for the former to act in concert and have a mutual understanding simply because they are a hundred and not a thousand. The minority will weld itself into a cohesive and active force, while a majority will remain a large aggregation of individuals – apathetic, inward-looking, devoid of common purpose.6 The composition of the ruling class will be determined by the possession of qualities – material, intellectual, or even moral – which are widely esteemed in society. It is often sufficient, however, to be the heir of an individual who displayed such qualities. In primitive societies, military valour is the attribute that most readily opens access to the ruling class. At a


103

later stage of social development, status in a religious hierarchy may carry more prestige. In mature societies, wealth seems to be valued above all else: ‘when fighting with the mailed fist is prohibited whereas fighting with pounds and pence is sanctioned, the better posts are inevitably won by those who are better supplied with pounds and pence.’7 Wealth produces political power just as political power produces wealth. Note here that Mosca is making a kind of concession to Pareto’s way of looking at things. The members of the ruling class are likely to be more clever, more enterprising, more holy, more publicspirited, or more courageous than the mass of the governed. But what enables the ‘superior’ few to control the many is the fact that they are organised, presenting a common front to the rest of society. The explanation is primarily structural. Mosca was adamant that free elections could not alter the universal reality of domination and submission, and he took special pains to explain why: When we say that the voters ‘choose’ their representatives, we are using a language that is very inexact. The truth is that the representative has himself elected by the voters, and, if that phrase should seem too inflexible and too harsh to fit some cases, we might qualify it by saying that his friends have him elected. His ‘friends’ are the party bosses who, assisted by their minions, choose candidates, direct campaigns, manipulate public opinion, and therefore control the parliamentary process. Mosca points out that the sheer size of the electorate gives disproportionate power to this tiny clique: The political mandate has been likened to the power of attorney that is familiar in private law. But in private relationships, delegations of powers and capacities always presuppose that the principal has the broadest freedom in choosing his representative. Now in practice, in popular elections, that freedom of choice, though complete theoretically, necessarily becomes null, not to say ludicrous. If each voter gave his vote to the candidate of his heart, we may be sure that in almost all cases the only result would be a wide scattering of votes. When very many wills are involved, choice is determined by the most various criteria, almost all of them subjective, and if such wills were not coordinated and organised it would be virtually impossible for them to coincide in the spontaneous choice of one individual. If his vote is to have any efficacy at all, therefore, each voter is forced to limit his choice to a very narrow

104

The critique of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ field, in other words to a choice among the two or three persons who have some chance of succeeding; and the only ones who have any chance of succeeding are those whose candidacies are championed by . . . organised minorities.8

Mosca here identifies a flaw in democratic theory and rhetoric, one that is now widely recognised. For all the talk about the voice of the people being sacrosanct and so on, the people in question are invariably forced to choose from the very small number of candidates or parties that have a realistic chance of success. From the viewpoint of the individual elector, none of these options may be entirely satisfactory. A may get his vote in spite of his disagreement with much of what A proposes – for the simple reason that he regards A as the least bad alternative. If, as is likely, such ambivalence is widespread within the electorate, it becomes difficult to ascertain, at the level of specifics, precisely what they have ‘mandated’. Elections are not effective mechanisms for translating voter preferences into particular policies. This ambiguity gives elected leaders considerable leeway, allowing them to impose policies that may actually be unpopular. Moreover, Mosca’s reference to organised minorities highlights an important point. Mosca acknowledges that the ruling class in a parliamentary system will normally be divided into two or more parties competing with one another for popular support at the polls. James Meisel has argued that the defining characteristics of a ruling elite are the ‘three C’s’ – cohesion, consciousness, conspiracy.9 It is clear that, in a liberal setting, these characteristics cannot be attributed to Mosca’s ruling class as such but only to the various groupings that comprise it. Neither does Mosca seek to deny that elections have an effect (albeit an indirect one) on the policy-making process: The great majority of voters are passive . . . in the sense that they have not so much freedom to choose their representatives as a limited right to exercise an option among a number of candidates. Nevertheless, limited as it may be, that capacity has the effect of obliging candidates to try to win a weight of votes that will serve to tip the scales in their direction, so that they make every effort to flatter, wheedle and obtain the good will of the voters. In this way certain sentiments and passions of the ‘common herd’ come to have their influence on the mental attitudes of the representatives themselves, and echoes of a widely disseminated opinion, or of any serious discontent, easily come to be heard in the highest spheres of government.10


105

He even maintains that, if the electorate could be limited to intelligent and educated people, then one of the chief assumptions of the liberal system – ‘namely, that those who represent shall be responsible to the represented’ – could be rendered ‘not wholly illusory’.11 Even in its least prepossessing forms, the parliamentary process ‘provides a way for many different social forces [interest groups] to participate in the political system’ and influence public policy to some degree.12 Still, Mosca never deviated from his view that the ‘sovereign people’ are a fiction, that we can never attain more than ‘apparent democracy’, and that a minority, however divided internally, will always retain ‘actual and effective control of the state’.13 But his analysis is so nuanced, so restricted by qualifications, that some commentators wonder if his elitism amounts to anything more than the truism that in political affairs a minority give orders and the rest of the people obey them.14 Where free elections exist, and where ‘echoes of a widely disseminated opinion, or of any serious discontent, easily come to be heard in the highest spheres of government’, what is wrong with describing the system as democratic? As we shall now see, Pareto’s critique of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ is open to the same objection.

The critique As we saw in Chapter 3, Pareto’s typology of political regimes was two-fold: some are dominated by ‘foxes’ (men of cunning and invention) and others by ‘lions’ (men of integrity, courage, and belligerence). Central to Pareto’s historical analysis is the paradox – highlighted by Machiavelli – that virtues become vices when circumstances change. The former type of elite is eventually brought low by its lack of steadfastness and by its reluctance to use violence as a means of preserving order; the latter type by its deficiency in imagination and hostility to strategic compromise. History is therefore a repetitive and cyclical process, tracing the rise and fall of two different kinds of oligarchy. In his dissection of liberal democracy (which he dubbed ‘demagogic plutocracy’) Pareto wanted to demonstrate that the vulpine arts of the governing class were proving disastrous, that we were approaching the end of a historical cycle, which would see a successful uprising by a new leonine (communist or fascist/nationalist) elite. By the time he composed his Trattato, Pareto’s attitude to the parliamentary system was far more negative than that of Mosca, who at least regarded it as an effective mechanism for satisfying the variety of social interests. But in his youth Pareto was an intransigent democrat in the mould of his hero, Mazzini. As an admirer of the British political

106


system, he had no doubt that the principles of individual liberty and universal suffrage were essential to the good working of civil society. This is not all. Although he enthusiastically supported free markets, he also defended the rights of workers to combine and strike to improve their conditions. By the turn of the century, however, extension of the franchise and the rise of organised labour had caused his opinions to change. The cynicism he had once directed against the ‘reactionaries’ was now turned against the workers and their ‘phoney’ champions in the educated classes. Instead of democracy, he complained, we were witnessing a new mode of oppression, where a gang of plutocrats had formed an unholy alliance with organised labour to despoil the rest of the population. It will become clear that Pareto transgressed the boundaries of ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ description. His attack on existing parliamentary democracies was normative as well as empirical. Not only – in his estimation – were their claims to express the popular will false and vacuous; their modus operandi was inherently exploitative and destructive. Small wonder that critical commentators, such as Richard Bellamy, maintain that he ‘merely endowed his own ideological leanings with a spurious scientific status’.15 Let us now look at Pareto’s arguments in some detail. For Pareto, the essence of modern ‘democracies’ was the patron– client relationship, a relationship based for the most part on material interests. His paradigm was the Italian consorteria of parties that ruled in his day, but he thought that this analysis applied to all parliamentary systems. What he had in mind was a network of ‘patrons’, each of which has clienteles consisting of sub-patrons and so on. The system is pluralistic, comprising a vast number of mutually dependent hubs of influence and patronage. These power centres are forever quarrelling and competing with one another but nevertheless display sufficient cohesion to warrant calling them a class or an elite. Such cohesion, however, is not to be confused with conspiratorial or tight organisation. The idea that the ruling class is a ‘concrete unity’ or a metaphorical person is, in Pareto’s view, a Marxist fairy story.16 For one thing, this class embraces the leaders of all the constitutional parties – those of the left and those of the right. Nor does it rule by deliberate and concerted stratagem. The road it follows is, instead, ‘the resultant of an infinitude of minor acts’, each occasioned by particular circumstances, leading collectively to consequences that no one foresees. Society is a reality sui genesis. The chief determinant of what happens is ‘the order, or system, not the conscious will of individuals, who indeed may in certain cases be carried by the system to points where they would never have gone of deliberate choice’.17 Such


107

cohesion as exists within the ruling elite is a systemic requirement. Since all its members are actuated by economic self-interest and a desire to retain influence, they naturally tend to act in a common direction without any preconceived design. Though a governing class does not have a single will, it does contain ‘a smaller, choicer class’, which ‘practically exercises control’. In parliamentary regimes, this inner governing body will include the political ‘bosses’ of the main parties, whose task is to aggregate the demands of the various clienteles.18 In pursuit of electoral success, leaders of the different parliamentary parties will compete with one another in this aggregative endeavour. Promises can be made, in the knowledge that government provides a vast panoply of means to fulfil them: tariffs, public works, tax policy, devaluation of the currency, government contracts and subsidies, social welfare benefits, minimum wage guarantees, closed-shop rules, legal immunities for trade unions – all help to keep the various clienteles happy. Corruption, either by ‘honours’ or illicit payments, usually plays a lesser role than these ‘legitimate’ forms of bribery, though it attracts disproportionate opprobrium.19 Who exactly comprises the governing class? In a dazzling leap of imagination, Pareto sees it as a tacit alliance of dynamic bourgeois elements and organised working people against the fixed income groups of the community. Although businessmen and labourers do not always share common interests,20 these apparently antagonistic ‘classes’ actually live in symbiosis, agreeing inflationary wage settlements and jointly demanding subsidies and tariffs, which must be paid for by the rest of the population through higher taxes and prices. Plutocrats may rule, but only through demagogic appeals to the interests and sentiments of trade unionists. Pareto expands on this point by distinguishing between two ‘classes’ of his own invention: ‘speculators’ and ‘rentiers’. The former are chiefly entrepreneurs or financial traders – adventurous risk-takers, rich in combination instincts. They are adept at winning concessions from fox-like politicians, who see them as soulmates. Confusingly, Pareto includes in this ‘S’ category not only the risk-takers themselves but all persons depending upon them – lawyers, engineers, workers, politicians, union leaders – and deriving advantage from their operations. In other words, he lumps together all individuals whose incomes are variable and reliant upon ingenuity and political connections.21 Ill-chosen though it may be, the word ‘speculators’ describes Pareto’s governing class. Arrayed against the ‘speculators’ are the ‘rentiers’, another promiscuously inclusive term, comprising all those who live on fixed or near-fixed incomes:

108

The critique of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ In this category, roughly, will be found persons who have savings and have deposited them in savings-banks or invested them in lifeannuities; then people living on income from government bonds . . . or other securities with fixed interest rates; then owners of real estate and land where there is no speculation; then farmers, working people, clerks, depending upon such persons and in no way depending upon speculators.22

A poor old-age pensioner, for example, will have an economic interest resembling that of members of the ‘capitalist’ class who live on fixed incomes in the shape of returns on debentures and rents. The same pensioner will find, on the other hand, that his or her interests conflict with those of unionised workers in a protected industry. This group of workers can secure high wage increases from their employers because these are in a position to pass on such increases to the consumer (e.g. the pensioner) in the form of higher prices. Indeed, inflation may even be to the advantage of the tariff-protected businessman, as it depresses real interest rates and – certainly in the short term – raises profits.23 For the pensioner, however, the effect is similar to being set upon by armed bandits. Without the ‘downtrodden’ rentiers, the economy would grind to a halt. It is they who supply the savings and the tax revenues to support the money-making schemes of the speculators. And yet, as dull, unimaginative types, replete with instincts of group persistence, rentiers lack the manipulative and rhetorical skills to win concessions from the political elite. The ‘pork-barrel’ remains more or less closed to them, as the trade unions and employer organisations jointly manipulate the state to exact tribute from everyone else. While Pareto, unlike the Marxists of his day, did not underestimate the power of politicians, he believed that the public authorities were increasingly acting as mere ratifying bodies for the exploitative policies of the ‘producer’ groups. He also remarked upon the frequent willingness of the victims to cooperate in their own ‘spoliation’ (his word for ‘exploitation’). Short of vulpine shrewdness, they allowed their vision to be ‘clouded by sentiments’ favourable to the speculating class.24 Psychological explanations for the passivity of the rentiers did not, it seems, fully satisfy Pareto. He thus offered what might appear to be a contradictory argument, one that foreshadowed the ‘rational choice’ explanations of modern political scientists.25 The intensity of human activity, he reminded us, is not proportional in the same degree to losses as to gains:


109

if, in a nation of thirty million, it is proposed to levy one franc per annum on each citizen and to distribute the total to thirty individuals, these latter will work night and day for the success of this proposal, while it will be difficult to get the others to bestir themselves sufficiently to oppose the proposal, because, after all, it is only one franc! Furthermore, the thirty individuals who benefit from this largesse will do so because they form an identifiable group. And for a group to form, let alone apply effective pressure, it ‘must not be too widely dispersed’ and ‘must have an easily recognisable common characteristic, such as the same race, the same religion, the same occupation, and so forth’. This is why consumers, for example, ‘can scarcely ever organise themselves successfully to resist the producer combines’.26 To organise scattered and diverse individuals with low-intensity preferences is virtually impossible. But in a demagogic plutocracy, those who have no organisational power have no bargaining power. By virtue of their social and geographic dispersal, they neither occupy a strategic position within the system nor possess the potential to cause serious conflict or disruption. They can be, and are, effectively ignored by the leading politicians. Policy emerges out of a complex network of visible and invisible exchanges between the various bargaining agents who represent vested interests in the particular policy area. This segmented decisional process has dire consequences. Not only does it alienate ‘the silent majority’, it also produces short-sighted and incoherent policy. The repeated surrender to sectional interests leads to a paralysing disproportion between current expenditure and long-term investment. Pareto regards this system as a form of socialism, since it involves government action to redistribute wealth. He defines socialism broadly, as any system that imposes constraints on private ownership of land and capital and on the free exchange of goods and services. On this definition, for example, ‘protectionism’, by giving to some what it takes from others, is just an aspect of socialism, albeit the ‘socialism of the entrepreneurs and the capitalists’.27 On Pareto’s reading of history, spoliation rarely meets with truly effective resistance from the despoiled. What brings an end to a particular form of exploitation is the destruction of wealth consequent upon it. ‘History shows us’, he writes, ‘that more than once spoliation has finished by killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.’28 Demagogic plutocracy administers daily doses of poison to the capitalist goose. Too much attention is paid to allocating wealth rather than creating it. Instead of concentrating all their efforts on improving efficiency,

110 The critique of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ capitalists devote precious energy and resources to lobbying for protective duties and other gifts from the public. The competition which favours initiative and economic expansion gives way to bureaucratic dependency.29 Unions, for their part, use legal immunities to preserve outmoded jobs or to prevent non-union workers from working at non-inflationary wage levels.30 Other citizens are bought off with public employment, communal facilities, and income maintenance programmes.31 In general, political needs take priority over economic needs. The cumulative effect of controlled markets and uncontrolled public expenditure is macroeconomic distortion. Massive public debts accumulate and these are inevitably accompanied by higher prices and interest rates. Worse, rising taxes exhaust the incomes of ordinary, non-speculating investors.32 Creative accounting, along with the printing of new money, can disguise the appalling state of public finances for a while, but eventually the consequences of profligacy must be faced. The funds available for investment begin to dry up.33 In Paretian analysis, hyperactive, interventionist government also has a corrosive effect on public morale. When so much of the population depends on state handouts, an ethic of greedy discontent takes root, since most people can always point to someone or some group who enjoys more influence or more patronage or simply bigger handouts than they. The idea that one should earn one’s benefits or privileges is gradually consigned to history. Moreover, the constant bestowal of government favours, by undermining the work ethic, stimulates a debilitating and hedonistic egoism. People increasingly indulge their tastes for immediate gratification: they squander savings and incur debts. Eventually, they will be forced to use their earnings to retire debt, and consumption will decline. This will exacerbate the problems caused by the shortage of funds for investment.34 Pareto is contemptuous of the ‘universal truths’ that serve to justify the redistribution of income by a meddlesome state. For him, concepts like ‘justice’, ‘solidarity’, and ‘morality’ are mere platitudes, inherently contestable and devoid of any logico-experimental grounding; they ‘have no precise objective reality, being only the product of our mind’.35 Their meanings are intrinsically ‘indeterminate and transitory’. Such concepts are normally defined in accord with ‘the sentiments of some collectivity at a given point in time’. When times, and sentiments, change, so do the definitions.36 Pareto is especially amused by the transformation in the meaning of ‘liberty’. Once it stood for the reduction of state restrictions which deprived the individual of the power to dispose of his person and property as he wished. Now, Pareto


111

claims, it signifies precisely the opposite. Coercion for purposes of ‘efficiency’ or ‘social justice’ is christened with the name of ‘liberty’.37 Pareto’s view of demagogic plutocracy is not entirely negative. A nation without speculators would, after all, be a poor nation. They alone have the initiative and energy to carve out economic opportunities. Even their tendency to demand favours from the government is not necessarily detrimental to wealth creation. For at certain stages in economic development, government subventions and protective tariffs are positively conducive to industrial growth, since they afford time to effect the necessary accumulation of capital in order to enable national industry to compete in world markets. While tariffs, in particular, entail a significant transfer of wealth, Pareto accepts that such transfers can be beneficial in the long run if they favour the more dynamic elements in the population: A forward step along the scientific path was taken when the theories of mathematical economics supplied a proof that, in general, the direct effect of protection is a destruction of wealth. If one were to go on and add an axiom, which is implicitly taken for granted by many economists, that any destruction of wealth is an ‘evil’, one could logically conclude that protection is an ‘evil’. But before such a proposition can be granted the indirect economic effects . . . of protection have to be known . . . we find that protection transfers a certain amount of wealth from a part, A, of the population to a part B, through the destruction of a certain amount of wealth, q, the amount representing the costs of the operation. If, as a result of this new distribution of wealth, the production of wealth . . . increases by a quantity greater than q, the operation is economically beneficial. [This] . . . case is not to be barred a priori.38 In addition, fox-led governments, for all their chicanery, might reasonably be given credit for maximising the utilities of individual citizens – at least in the short run. Net beneficiaries of state indulgence are many, and their benefits are often great. Here we can make use of Pareto’s antithesis between utility of and utility for a community. Maximum utility for a collectivity – that is, the greatest benefit for the greatest number of individuals – is a matter of satisfying the individual needs and desires of as many people as possible. Private and immediate interests will prevail. But the maximum utility of a collectivity will depend on the health or well-being of that collectivity understood as an organic whole. This might require individuals to sacrifice their

112 The critique of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ private interests (e.g. inflationary wage increase) to communal needs. Pareto had little time for those followers of Bentham and Rousseau who, while arguing from opposite perspectives, nevertheless agreed that there was no real contradiction between the collective good and the individual good.39 The capitalist class, too, often conflates these different types of utility when it wants the labouring class to make sacrifices for the (alleged) public good. Such losses, it is said, become gains when one takes into account the indirect utility that accrues to individuals living in a prosperous/strong/orderly society. But, argues Pareto, it is not always the case that indirect advantages outweigh direct sacrifices. From the viewpoint of the organised worker, for example, the indirect harm he suffers because of his inflationary wage settlements may be quantitatively smaller than the direct benefit he derives from his ‘selfish’ actions.40 If we pursue this line of reasoning, we can grasp how demagogic plutocracy may maximise utility for the community even when destroying the utility of the community. Both types of utility, however, will diminish when the economy falls into depression or deep recession. At this point, the counterproductive nature of the demagogic strategy will become obvious. It is all very well to ‘conquer by gold, not by steel’, but what happens when the gold runs out? Previously contented clients become disenchanted, as their expectations are dashed. The authority of the state, based as it is on bribery, begins to evaporate. By squalidly buying off potential adversaries, the top politicians sacrifice the mysterious aura, the ‘dignity and respect’ that evoke the sentiment of deference in the masses.41 The emergent ‘legitimisation crisis’ poses a knotty problem for the ruling elite, because foxes are unwilling or unable to use force in the required measure. Such pacifism, Pareto believes, is misguided, for all laws and institutions must be sustained by a judicious blend of force and consent. Where one or the other is forgone, the result will be either incipient anarchy or naked despotism. Pareto saw the former as a real danger in modern society: ‘the bourgeois state is tottering and the power of central authority is being eroded.’42 Centrifugal forces were beginning to prevail. He illustrated this point by reference to trade unions, for which he developed an obsessive hatred. They were, in his opinion, a law unto themselves. Dissatisfied with their official legal immunities, the unions proceed to demand (and receive) unofficial ones. In Italy, trade union members destroy the property of their employers and beat up blacklegs under the benevolent paternal gaze of the public authorities, who do nothing to stop such outrages. Pareto compares the situation to the rise of feudalism: the de facto authority of kings disappeared, to be


113

replaced by an elaborate system of immunities and special privileges. The trade union bosses are the new barons, paying ritual obeisance to the ideal central authority, while ignoring it in practice. In the face of union power, the duly constituted political authorities have shown themselves to be ‘cowardly’, according to Pareto.43 Their plight filled him with a mixture of pity and contempt. He was fond of quoting an old Italian saying: ‘Play the sheep and you will meet the butcher.’ The butcher, in this case, might be the ‘silent majority’. Weak demagogic governments parcel out operating autonomy to power blocs, vested interests, and supposedly subordinate organisational units. Once central authority disintegrates in this way, the silent majority find that they are no longer protected by the ‘sovereign’ power. Increasingly, they fear less for their pocketbooks than for their safety and peace, as crime and trade union ‘justice’ become harder to avoid. Writing in 1920, Pareto alerted his readers to the authoritarian movements (Bolshevik and nationalist) waiting in the wings. The rentiers, the non-union workers – all those who have had to pay the price for the pluto-democratic system ‘will eventually rebel’, though their rebellion would be fruitless unless orchestrated by an alternative elite.44 Ever the sceptic, he was reluctant to predict the timing or the exact magnitude or even the effectiveness of this rebellion. After the march on Rome, however, he saw Mussolini’s rise to power as conclusive proof of his theory’s correctness.

The critique assessed However uncongenial this analysis of the liberal state may be, it would be difficult to deny its perspicacity. Pareto pioneered propositions and ideas which have since become widely influential or commonly accepted. One can mention his pluralistic model of the policy process, his masterly analysis of why ‘diffused interests’ are ignored, and (most interesting of all) his emphasis on vertical as well as horizontal divisions in society. He was explicitly critical of Marx’s bipolar view of society, since it failed, from his perspective, to capture the complexity of the modern social order, where exploitation occurs within the classes identified by Marx, and not just between them.45 Organised proletarians use their collective solidarity as a weapon to create inflationary wage pressures; the subsequent rise in consumer prices amounts to the robbery of non-union workers, who lack the bargaining power to inflate their own wages. Likewise, the state subsidies enjoyed by some capitalists mean higher taxes for those capitalists who do not benefit from such political favours. Surveying this complicated web of selfishness

114


and irresponsibility, Pareto detects the curious phenomenon of ‘mutual spoliation’, whereby groups in society that despoil other groups are often themselves despoiled in turn. ‘One could draw up a sort of balance sheet for each group’, he remarks with tongue firmly planted in cheek.46 What is more, these groups need not be economically defined. He comments on the oppression of women, especially among primitive peoples. Nationality is another factor that underlies conflict over scarce resources: ‘In our own day the struggle of the Czechs and Germans in Bohemia is more intense than that of the proletariat and the capitalists in England.’ Nor, says Pareto, should we ignore the social cleavages stemming from race and religion. The American subjugation of blacks, to take an obvious example, fits uneasily into the rigid categories of Marxist dogma. Capital, he concludes, is a means of exploitation, not the means of exploitation.47 Although he borrows the Marxist view of society as an inherently conflictual system based on exploitation, on the use of power to benefit from the labour or property of others, his analysis is altogether more subtle. On the one hand, he accepts – in contradistinction to Marx – that power in modern society is relatively dispersed; on the other, he recognises the systematic disadvantages inflicted on those outside the unofficial constellation of power, which bypasses the formal circuits of representation. What is problematic, however, is the connection between his description of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ and his contention that ‘it is always an oligarchy that governs’.48 In modern liberal systems, Pareto tells us, the elite is remarkably inclusive, comprising trade union ‘barons’ as well as employers, social democratic party leaders as well as their conservative counterparts. Members of this supposed power elite ‘hold no meetings where they congregate to plot common designs, nor have they any other devices for reaching a common accord’.49 The governing class, moreover, appropriates other people’s property ‘not only for its own use, but also to share with such members of the subject class as defend it and safeguard its rule’ – a patron–client relationship.50 Pareto concurs with Marx that the state is always ‘an instrument for spoliation’, but, in the case of demagogic plutocracy, the spoils of ‘class war’ are rather widely distributed.51 Finally, although in an objective sense the governing elite ‘defrauds’ or ‘gulls’ the rentiers and their allies, this is not necessarily how it appears to the elite itself or to the ‘despoiled’ either. In most cases, states Pareto, the governing elite sincerely identify their own gains and advantages ‘with the best interests of their country’, with ‘honesty, morality, and the public welfare’; and the majority of their compatriots, who support the system with their votes, evidently agree.52


115

It is patently clear that Pareto’s ruling elite (like Mosca’s) falls short of embodying Meisel’s ‘three C’s’ – cohesion, consciousness and conspiracy. So in what sense is Pareto (or Mosca for that matter) talking about a ruling elite? Is he not simply saying that in all societies a minority makes the major decisions and the majority obeys? But this is a truism, which is not normally thought to be incompatible with democracy. That Pareto may not be going beyond this truism is suggested by the way he conceptualises the governing elite. It consists of people who enjoy a high degree of ‘influence and political and social power’, though a later formulation restricts it to those ‘who directly or indirectly play some considerable part in government’.53 On either formulation, it is impossible not to find a governing elite. Only an anarchist could imagine a functioning society where some people do not have more influence or power than most other people. Of interest to democrats is whether (a) this ‘elite’ is open to the lower orders (Pareto concedes that it is), and (b) the elite is accountable to the governed (he assumes that it is not). His challenge to democracy therefore turns on point (b). Since Pareto nowhere denies that elections held in liberal systems are technically ‘free’, he must believe that the ruling elite (or, more accurately, its inner core) has achieved its ascendancy by ‘bribing’ or ‘bamboozling’ the great majority of the ‘ruled’. Peter is robbed to pay Paul, but Peter is comforted by reassurances that his generosity, enforced by the tax authorities, serves the interests of ‘justice’ or ‘morality’ or even ‘freedom’ – elastic terms which correspond to ‘nothing real’.54 As for Paul, he either does not understand or does not care that his handouts are destroying the fabric of society. To him, they are both necessary and ‘just’ in the given circumstances. To repeat, Pareto is not accusing all politicians of cynicism, or deliberate exploitation. For the most part, they are genuinely self-deluded and consider it a happy coincidence that their own advantage is perfectly congruent with ‘the public interest’. Although they deliberately manipulate the voters’ sentiments, they do not, as a rule, feel that they are harming the voters’ interests. The system rests on self-aggrandisement and self-deception in equal measure. Essential to Pareto’s analysis, then, is the conviction that the endless cycle of bribery and manipulation is not in the public interest, which he thought could best be achieved in a libertarian, free-market society. Pareto, one presumes, is here thinking mainly of the utility of the community, understood in terms of prosperity and security. His critique of the interventionist state appears to save his elite theory from vacuousness. The elite is not accountable to the masses because the

116 The critique of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ latter are systematically deluded as to the true nature of their (at least long-term) interests. The argument would seem to rest on the idea of ‘false consciousness’. But what if Pareto is wrong about this? Public expenditure and provision in his day was as nothing compared with the present, and yet the general quality of life in Western democracies has risen exponentially. With hindsight, it would be absurd to deny that the majority have benefited from the ‘demagogic’ system. Without the support of his gloomy economic analysis, Pareto’s attempt to demystify existing ‘democracy’ would look much weaker. It would depend on the apparently obvious fact that there is no autonomous will of the people, that the masses are largely apathetic and (politically) ignorant, and therefore vulnerable to manipulation by those seeking their vote. But – as Schumpeter later observed – if the voters are given a choice, if debate is unfettered by legal restrictions, and if the popular interest is, by and large, served, then we could still call the system a democracy. While the people would not ‘rule’ in any meaningful sense, they would at least control or limit their rulers. This accepted, our quarrel would be with the traditional conception of democracy, which expects too much from the masses by assuming that political initiative will flow from them rather than their leaders. That is to say, the ‘classical’ doctrine of democracy would be unrealistic, or futile, not democracy itself.55 Alas, this way of approaching the matter is not entirely satisfactory. If, as Schumpeter admits, the democratic will is ‘largely not a genuine but a manufactured will’, if most voters are ‘infantile’ and ‘yield to irrational prejudice and impulse’, can we really say that those who prey upon their weaknesses are being held to account?56 I think not. Pareto’s concept of a power elite, while lacking empirical specificity, can plausibly be defended against the charge of vacuousness, whether or not we accept his free-market analysis. Of course, Pareto may still be wrong about the existence of such an elite. The voters may be shrewder than either he or Schumpeter allows. If one starts out with some notion of an ideal democratic citizen, it is easy to exaggerate the shortcomings of actual citizens. Although they may be deficient in detailed political knowledge, not to mention sophisticated reasoning powers, voters will generally have a good idea of the values and interests embodied in the various candidates and parties. To this extent they can exercise a kind of control over their governors. Pareto, I suppose, would respond to this point by arguing that we have set the standard of democratic control, or accountability, too low. The problem is that he (like Mosca, incidentally) never bothered to analyse the meaning or conditions of democratic accountability. How would we recognise it in


117

practice? Pareto pitched his theory at a very high level of generality. For all his scientific pretensions, his identification of a power elite is empirically unfalsifiable – and this criticism applies to Mosca as well. It is difficult to determine whether Pareto was right or wrong if we cannot first determine the precise nature of his claims. But even if he was right about the fictional quality of modern ‘democracy’, this would not necessarily mean that he was right about the futility of democratic reform. To show that a power elite exists is not equivalent to showing that it must always and everywhere exist. Additional arguments are required. For Pareto, it is the permanent substratum of human psychology that renders democracy impossible. There will always be a minority of people who are power hungry and adept at deploying one or other method of social control: force or fraud. Conversely, the mass of people will always be dull, gullible, and politically inert – ‘an army without commanders’.57 Everything, it seems, hinges on the validity of Pareto’s assumption that human thought is, at root, a product of instinctive mechanisms. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, Pareto was more ambivalent about psychological explanations of social phenomena than is often supposed. While he saw human psychology as the principal factor in social life, it was only primus inter pares.58 Nor could it be divorced from the social context. Sentiments, he believed, were both innate and socially acquired. In various passages he made it clear that social practices themselves encourage the diffusion of sentiments appropriate to their continued functioning.59 Moreover, as we saw in his discussion of how a power elite operates in a demagogic plutocracy, Pareto acknowledged that individuals are often swept along by the logic of the social roles they occupy. He saw society as a system of mutually interdependent phenomena, moving from one state of equilibrium to another. According to this mechanical model, the ‘form of society is determined by all the elements acting upon it and it, in turn, reacts upon them. We may therefore say that a reciprocal determination arises.’60 Unfortunately for Pareto, though, his insistence on ‘reciprocal determination’ generates difficulties for his case against democracy. If the distribution of residues/sentiments, along with the opportunities for their manifestation, are socially conditioned, then this surely leaves open the possibility that changing circumstances can create new patterns of thought and behaviour. Let us pursue the logic of Pareto’s assertion that the ‘acts in which sentiments express themselves reinforce such sentiments and may even arouse them in individuals who were without them’.61 A natural inference from this statement is

118 The critique of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ that the extension of democratic practices and institutions could foster Class I residues in the hitherto sluggish masses, making them capable of self-government. It appears that Pareto, in attempting to evade the charge of psychological reductionism, lapsed into incoherence. It is hard to escape the conclusion that his analysis works best as a description of modern ‘democracy’; it is less successful as a prediction about the possibilities for democracy in the future. But doubts about its scientific credibility cannot really explain the surprising neglect of Pareto’s analysis within the academic community. After all, Marxist theory, despite its inconsistencies and predictive deficiencies, has inspired scholarly commentary on an industrial scale. Why, in contrast, has the concept of demagogic plutocracy not generated anything remotely approaching the same level of interest? The answer, I think, lies in Pareto’s reputation as an advocate or, at least, a ‘precursor’ of fascism.62 Do we really want to be instructed on the nature of the liberal state by a man whose theory could have been formulated by Il Duce himself? By way of reply, it might be asked why we should judge the value of a theory by facile consideration of the personal merits of its author. Is this not the ‘genetic fallacy’? But the issue is more complex, for the interpretation of Pareto as a proto-fascist depends upon a defective understanding of his theory.

Pareto and fascism Prima facie, Pareto would seem to have a case to answer. Mussolini did hail him as his inspirer and teacher, and insisted on making him (against his wishes) a senator for life. There is no doubt that Pareto’s contempt for the humanitarian approach to politics, along with his exposé of democratic ideals such as ‘justice’ and ‘liberty’, meshed with Mussolini’s world view. Pareto and the fascists had enemies in common – speculators, Marxists, trade unionists, progressive politicians – and used almost identical language in championing the interests of ‘savers’, those sturdy pillars of social order. But these overlapping likes and dislikes should not be allowed to conceal a profound divergence in underlying philosophy. Fascism’s attack on the liberal state was fuelled by a totalitarian hatred of individualism, as that concept was conceived by classical liberals. Rampant egoism, Mussolini declaimed, was destroying the organic solidarity of the nation. By contrast, Pareto’s critique of demagogic plutocracy stemmed from a desire to safeguard liberal individualism against the encroachments of the leviathan state. His primary interest was to strip all governments, whatever their complexion, of as many powers as possible.63 To uncritical lovers of


119

democracy, he pointed out, as did Tocqueville before him, that the threat to freedom came from the extent, not the source, of state power. Collectivism was his principal dread, and – let us be clear – he denounced all forms of collectivism by name. Though socialism was his main target, he also inveighed against racism, nationalism and anti-Semitism. These were ‘blind revulsions with no more reason in them than in the action of a child belabouring the inanimate object it has stumbled against’.64 Considering such evidence, Sidney Hook, himself a leading anti-fascist, dismissed all talk about Pareto being the prophetic defender of fascism as ‘sheer poppycock’.65 But if Pareto was such a good liberal, why do commentators denounce his ‘glorification of force’66 and his ‘apology for the will to power’?67 Here we encounter a straightforward, if widespread, misreading of those passages in the Treatise where he pronounced on the necessity of using public power to preserve liberty and constitutional procedures. While he certainly believed that it is ‘by force that social institutions are established’ and ‘by force that they are maintained’,68 he always made it clear that force should be used sparingly – and only against illegal opposition, not legal dissent.69 To be sure Pareto was a consistent and outspoken supporter of freedom of expression, a value he pointedly defended in a number of articles written after Mussolini’s ascent to power.70 Indeed, Pareto did not simply defend the right of individuals to say what they like; he thought that they should also be allowed to act on their opinions, and that a plurality of social and religious outlooks could fruitfully coexist within the same society: But seriously harmful . . . is the error of identifying morality and religion with some special morality and some special religion . . . whenever the champions of such theories have had a clear field that particular error has led to enormous wastage of energies in efforts to achieve results of little or no consequence, and has occasioned untold and altogether futile sufferings for many many human beings. . . . If a given group-persistence, Q, which is beneficial to society, finds expression in the derivations A, B, C, D . . . it is usually detrimental to a society to try to enforce a specific derivation, A, to the exclusion of the others, B, C . . . whereas it is beneficial to a society that individuals should adopt the derivations most acceptable to them.71 Perhaps, though, there is an implicit connection between fascism and the often virulent tone of Pareto’s attack on demagogic plutocracy. Borkenau expresses a typical standpoint when he describes this attack

120


as ‘a violent manifesto against democracy’.72 If democracy is a sham, a disguised form of repression and exploitation, then why bother to defend it against the fascist assault? According to Luigi Montini, Pareto thought that the ‘majoritarian fetish’ was destroying bourgeois freedoms and standards. This is why he welcomed fascism as the only possible saviour of values he held dear – sound money, public probity, market discipline, personal responsibility. Pareto thus became a fascist by default.73 This argument is not easily dismissed. In the early months of the Fascist regime, he was definitely more inclined towards adherence than towards aversion – though the same can be said for other liberals, including Benedetto Croce, who were later to become stern opponents of Mussolini’s rule.74 The totalitarian nature of fascism was not self-evident in those embryonic stages. And one can assume that, had he lived beyond 1923, Pareto too would have become a vociferous critic of the regime. For, contrary to received opinion, he did not regard fascism as the only acceptable alternative to communism or demagogic plutocracy. The forbidding complexity of the Treatise, which tempts even the most diligent reader to skip bits, may explain why hardly anyone notices a footnote where he actually set forth his personal preference concerning political systems: The best government now in existence, and also better than countless others that have so far been observable in history, is the government of Switzerland, especially in the forms it takes on in the small cantons – forms of direct democracy. It is a democratic government, but it has nothing but the name in common with the governments, also called democratic, of other countries such as France or the United States.75 From this passage we may infer that Pareto favoured devolved and minimal government, where the ‘fiction’ of representation is replaced as much as possible by direct consultation with the people. Whether the Swiss model could have been transplanted into large countries like Italy is debatable; and how he managed to reconcile his praise for this model with his customary cynicism about popular rule remains less than clear. But it is unfair to say that he presented ‘a violent manifesto against democracy’ as such. To the contrary, he harboured a lingering admiration for the democratic ideal and clearly believed that a virtuous (bourgeois?) people like the Swiss could make it work in appropriate circumstances. For Richard Bellamy, however, Pareto is not so easily exonerated. While acknowledging that he never explicitly forsook the ‘liberal belief


121

in the rights of the individual against all forms of authority’, Bellamy focuses on the dangers implicit in Pareto’s relativistic approach to political values. Since no political goal could be regarded as more rational than any other, ‘social utility was the only standard by which [Pareto] could judge a particular regime’. He consequently deprived himself of any objective grounds for isolating what was or was not an abuse of power. In other words, his liberalism rested on insubstantial metaphysical foundations.76 This is a subtle but inconclusive argument. The question whether moral relativism favours despotism or tolerance is difficult to resolve.77 But, on the face of it, the view of values as subjective preferences would seem to be more naturally linked with individual autonomy than with the imposition of collective purposes. Certainly, Pareto thought so. In an article published just before his death, he cautioned the Fascists as follows: ‘Not persecuting any religion, not wanting to impose any, seems the best and wisest procedure for governments.’78 (Pareto was, as usual, using ‘religion’ in the broad sense, to include ideologies.) A relativistic despotism is hard to imagine in modern circumstances. All recent dictatorships, whether theocratic or secular, have tried to mobilise the masses by appealing to some moral absolute; in the case of fascism, it was the ‘essence’ of the nation or race which provided the ultimate standard of value. At any rate, Pareto may simply be right when he claims that concepts such as ‘justice’ or ‘liberty’ are essentially contestable. There is not now, nor is there ever likely to be, an intersubjective consensus on what these concepts mean in practical terms. But this is hardly an argument for nihilistic indifference to abuses of power. Those who doubt the ontological existence of a natural moral order, discoverable through reason, are not thereby precluded from expressing moral preferences or from supporting these preferences with logical and empirical analysis. In my opinion, Pareto’s evident satisfaction following the victory of fascism was inspired by intellectual vanity rather than theoretical affinity. He delighted in telling friends that Mussolini’s triumph validated the forecasts of his theory.79 And this theory, as an explanation (not justification) of fascism’s popular appeal, surely deserves more attention than it has hitherto enjoyed.

Concluding remarks The appropriate criticism to level at Pareto, I think, is not that his relativism was dangerous but that it was inconsistent. It is a common observation that the anti-metaphysical doctrines of ‘scientific’ thinkers such as Comte and Marx usually contain unconscious metaphysical

122


elements. Pareto was no exception. As a kind of positivist, he always declared his firm opposition to ‘essentialism’. Why should one conception of the ‘human essence’ be superior to any other? Why, in particular, should socialists proclaim that the human need for association is ‘essential’, while the pursuit of self-interest is ‘unnatural’? A good question – but by reversing the terms, we could direct it at Pareto himself. For his theory of spoliation assumes that state intervention, in order to tame or rationalise market forces, destroys some natural order of things based on free and voluntary transactions. While criticising the idea of a natural right to property, he nevertheless denounced deviations from free-market principles as ‘theft’, ‘spoliation’, ‘robbery’, ‘exploitation’ – all words that presuppose a moral entitlement to goods or property.80 Much like Marx, Pareto pretended to be a pure scientist, who refrained from making evaluative judgements about the objects of his analysis.81 This self-description was hardly tenable. His condemnations of state intervention and trade union activities exuded moral outrage; he assumed that every strike, every subsidy, every protective tariff involved a seizure or destruction of rightly acquired wealth. Thus, when curbs on imports lead to higher prices, the consumers have been ‘robbed’; when social legislation causes higher taxes, the taxpayers have been ‘fleeced’ – and so on. In those passages where Pareto theorises about free trade in the abstract, his scientific objectivity shines through – as when he concedes that protective tariffs, while destroying the wealth of some, could – under certain conditions – have long-term wealth-creating benefits for all. But mostly he evinces an attachment to laissez-faire that is visceral and emotional, as if state intervention were somehow an affront to nature. The free market itself, however, necessarily depends upon state action to protect the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. Pareto should have reflected more deeply on the words of his mentor, Adam Smith: The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want and prompted by envy to invade their possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property . . . can sleep a single night in security.82 To want to exclude government from participating in the distribution of wealth, when the present distribution exists precisely because of it, is to reveal a measure of confusion. What is more, the operation of the market presupposes an historically defined ethical context, regulating economic interchange and attaching various degrees of value to


123

different types of activity. State protection of property could only be effective within the framework of such a consensus, since – as Pareto himself informs us – force by itself is inadequate as a method of social control. The free market, we must conclude, is not the automatic and spontaneous expression of human cooperation; it is an elaborate artefact, a human contrivance, conditioned by time and place. It therefore cannot furnish an independent or ‘natural’ standard by which to judge liberal democratic regimes. Pareto himself, when in abstract philosophical mode, recognised that no system of distribution could be described as ‘natural’.83 But such was his contempt for politically motivated transfers of wealth that his philosophical detachment disappeared whenever he considered actual mechanisms of distribution. His implicitly ‘metaphysical’ commitment to laissez-faire capitalism explains the apparent irrationality of his invective against trade unions. For example, he was outraged when workers reacted to industrial disputes by withdrawing their labour power; yet he was equally outraged by legal restrictions on the exportation of capital. It was unacceptable for workers to deprive the national economy of their ‘property’ (i.e. labour), but perfectly acceptable for capitalists to do likewise with their property (i.e. capital).84 For this and similar reasons, I cannot agree with Carlo Mongardini when he characterises Pareto’s writings as an extended ‘critique of power’.85 Pareto had a blind spot: he could not see that huge concentrations of property were every bit as oppressive as huge concentrations of state power. A consistent libertarian would wish to tackle both. In conclusion, I can only repeat a point made in previous chapters: that there were several Paretos. In the critique of demagogic plutocracy, Pareto the neutral scientist and Pareto the ethical relativist were not much in evidence. Pareto the citizen, the partisan advocate of a particular set of values, was very much in the foreground. The existence of these differing personae does raise the question whether rejection of ‘universalism’ is compatible with engagement in constructive political theory. From where does the Paretian sceptic derive his values?

6


A tradition defined Given his defence of free markets and free expression, his view of society as a juxtaposition of individuals, pursuing their self-interest, his avowed fear that social dynamism could be crushed by too much conformity,1 and his recognition that social systems are ‘constantly changing in form’,2 Pareto is perhaps best categorised as a classical liberal. Unlike many liberals, however, he sought to discredit the prevailing conviction that moral judgements could be given a rational basis. Being sceptical rather than deontological, his liberalism originated in doubt, not in the certainties of natural law and social contract – doctrines he despised. In this sense, Pareto was heir to the anti-metaphysical tradition whose modern progenitor was Machiavelli.3 Before the great Renaissance thinker put pen to paper, the idea of a cosmic purpose or order was an unchallenged axiom of Western culture. But he made no reference to any ideal order or structure of the universe, to man’s place in the ‘great chain of being’, or to any notion of human development in pursuit of ends ordained by God or by nature. To Machiavelli, such metaphysical speculation reflected the human hunger for constants, for an illusory world of gods and demons. In explaining political and historical events, he attributed success or failure to the personality traits of the participants, as if their role in the great cosmic story of good vs. evil was of no relevance. Because he was keen to separate factual from normative analysis, description from evaluation, Machiavelli is seen as a founder (possibly the founder) of modern social science. Emulating the natural sciences, he was convinced that the results of social and historical observation could be formulated as law-like generalisations. What his observations taught him was that society was not, as Aristotle would have it, a natural unity but a locus of conflicting social forces, in perpetual


125

danger of splitting apart. Yet Machiavelli thought that this struggle between competing interests, apart from being natural in a world devoid of inherent purpose, was (potentially) rather healthy, since it could – if tempered by patriotism – inspire creativity and undermine complacency. As he rejected the idea of a motionless polity, Machiavelli ignored questions of legitimate authority and confined his gaze to questions of power – the ability to control an unstable complex of shifting forces. It was pointless to judge rulers in terms of their adherence to imaginary truths when verifiable results were all that mattered in practice. Politics, on this model, could have no transformative character; it was simply a method of managing conflict.4 The parallels between Pareto and Machiavelli are obvious. Most striking was their shared contempt for normative political philosophy, as epitomised by Plato, who fruitlessly ‘strains all his intellectual capacities to discover what ought to be’ and thus ‘rise to the sublime heights of creation’.5 Rather than searching for knowledge of ‘the absolute’, Pareto settles for a ‘prudent scepticism’ (his words), which acknowledges that we can make no definite statements about metaphysical phenomena.6 If ideal patterns of real things, and especially types of conduct, exist independently of and prior to their embodiment in the world of the concrete, we have no way of knowing what they are. He therefore agreed with Machiavelli that the foundation for knowledge, apart from mathematical and logical relationships, was experience; and that, furthermore, no amount of experience, of objective observation, could enable us to apprehend moral truths. The fact/ value distinction, both thinkers insisted, must be rigorously maintained. In any case, Pareto endorsed the Machiavellian assumption that values or ideals are mainly the result rather than the source of human action. As we have seen, he did not approve of Marx’s monocausal analysis of human behaviour, which privileged economic interest above all else. Pareto saw society as a system comprised of a number of ‘dimensions’ which are not articulated in any strict hierarchy of causality. Interest is certainly, to him, a motivating force of human action, as is – to a lesser extent – society’s dominant belief system. But once due allowance is made for the interaction of different social factors, we must remember that, ultimately, his theory of society is psychological, since it reduces human thought to underlying psychic forces, or as he calls them, ‘sentiments’. Although Pareto never said as much, this ‘deconstruction’ of human thought patterns would seem to rule out the possibility of any metaphysical system being the truth. For if all human beliefs or values, in their infinite variety, are expressions of deeper psychological needs, how can one ever distinguish those that

126


are ‘right’ from those that are ‘wrong’? Their purpose is not to mirror nature or reality but to serve a particular function. Take morality. Its purpose, on his understanding, is to reconcile personal and social utility. In animals, he tells us, this conciliation is effected by instinct. With human beings, on the other hand, ‘their hunger for ratiocination prevents them from stopping at purely instinctive acts and leads them into the spacious field of derivations’.7 Almost always, the goal of moral doctrines is ‘to persuade individuals to aim at an objective that yields an advantage to other individuals or to society’.8 Morality is therefore a social necessity, but its content will vary in accordance with prevailing sentiments or cultural propensities. While all societies must, for example, define what counts as theft or illicit sexual behaviour, there is no reason why the definitions should be the same. Our social instincts, our natural desire for social unity, can be satisfied in a number of ways. To Pareto, the Enlightenment style of thought was in a sense preMachiavellian, since it echoed the medieval assumption of an ordered universe, governed by truths accessible to the human mind through a process of contemplation. Although Enlightenment thinkers posed as enemies of superstition, they elevated ‘Reason’ or ‘Science’ into ersatz deities. ‘In the theology of Progress’, Pareto writes, ‘the history of humanity is chiefly, and perhaps exclusively, the history of a struggle between a principle of “evil”, called “superstition”, and a principle of “good”, called “Science”.’ The Manichaean conflict between God and the Devil is here cast in rational form, but the underlying premise – that the ‘angels of light’ must confront the forces of darkness in order to ‘defend and preserve our wretched humanity from the wiles of such demons’ – remains identical.9 From Pareto’s viewpoint, the Enlightenment exaltation of reason itself rests on a false premise. Individuals do not adopt philosophical or moral positions as a result of rational choice. Our perspective on the world is shaped by ideological categories and images, which in turn reflect sentiments and interests. The absence of a knowable moral or political truth means that conflict between competing value systems will never be resolved by the spread of rationality. A further corollary is that politics is about practicality, about balancing values and claims, not about the pursuit of truth. On this Pareto was in complete accord with Machiavelli. Conflict and diversity are inherent in the human condition, which negates the possibility of what followers of Habermas would call a ‘rational consensus’.10 Pareto categorically denies the Enlightenment assumption that all political and moral deficiencies are based on logical or factual errors. In the eyes of the philosophes and their later disciples, ‘every blessing doth from “reason” flow, every ill from “superstition” ’.11


127

One could say that, like the philosophes, Pareto was preoccupied with the contradiction between the spirit of science and the spirit of superstition. But, for him, the latter was not the work of churches and priests but an unchanging expression of the human need to cherish myths. To wish to eliminate those myths – whether theological or secular – is like wanting to abolish the weather. Human beings, according to Pareto, will always have recourse to them – for consolation, to give meaning to life, to explain the unexpected or the unusual, to make sense of the ‘totality’. In the case of Pareto, ethical (or, more accurately, metaethical) relativism gave rise to a tolerance of ‘difference’, as the current jargon would have it. This is yet another reason for describing him as a ‘liberal’, though nowadays classical liberals such as Pareto, who decry ‘the dogmas of the humanitarian religion’, are often deemed to be ‘conservative’.12 These labels are applied with a considerable degree of subjectivity and latitude. Nevertheless, I think it may be illuminating to locate Pareto in a tradition of thought, stretching back to Machiavelli, which we may designate as ‘sceptical liberalism’. Such liberals are ‘modernists’ in the sense that they reject traditional or ‘holistic’ conceptions of society and deny the existence of a naturally highest good for human beings. Their attitude towards the actions of established authorities tends to be one of suspicion. While they see government as a necessary source of authority and order, they are likely to share the view of Adam Smith that governments mostly exploit the public in favour of the strongest interests. Their pessimism and anti-utopianism is underpinned by individualism rather than traditional loyalties. Human beings are too wayward, too diverse to abide by the rational schemes devised by intellectuals. But the sceptical liberal is himself a bit of a rationalist to the degree that he wants society to reflect scientific principles (the laws of economics, the laws of politics) and methods. He may accept old habits and traditions, but only if empirical observation vindicates their continuing practical value as sources of stability and prosperity. The alternative form of liberalism is what we might call ‘deontological liberalism’, which assumes that human reason can gain access to absolute truths about how we should live. The deontological liberal typically believes in a ‘natural’ law of human conduct or morality, supposed to be inherent in human nature, as distinguished from law based on divine revelation or human decision. Flowing from this ‘law of nature’ are a series of universal human rights, which are said to attach to human individuals as such, regardless of historical or cultural context. Pareto views the deontological liberal as the sort of person

128


who sees ‘logic’ as the key to human progress. This makes him optimistic. Once logic banishes superstition to the margins of society, the perfectibility of ‘man’ and the attenuation of conflict become real possibilities. This type of liberal, because he is preoccupied with ‘man’ in the abstract, detached from any social roles, tends to be hostile in principle to ancient social practices, preferring what is ‘rational’ to what is tried and tested. What names, then, can we associate with the Machiavellian tradition of sceptical liberalism? Let us start with Thomas Hobbes, who, like Machiavelli, rejected essentialism in all its forms. Society, on this understanding, is not a means for the achievement of any ‘purpose’ or ‘telos’ inherent in human nature. Man as such has no purpose; only individuals have purposes, and these are all related to survival. ‘Men’ are purely material beings programmed to maximise their personal utility; and in conditions of scarcity, this propensity will naturally lead them into conflict with their fellow men. Government therefore exists for purely instrumental reasons: to allow individuals to pursue their ambitions in relative safety. Turning his back on the organic, medieval conception of society, Hobbes deduces his absolute state (the Leviathan) from the imagined needs of isolated individuals dwelling in a hypothetical state of nature, a condition he describes as the ‘war of all against all’. God as conventionally understood plays little role in this system of deductive logic. Hobbes’s attitude to religion is quintessentially Machiavellian, inasmuch as he wants it to be controlled by the sovereign in the interests of social peace. And while ‘laws of nature’ are central to his analysis, he regards them as little more than maxims of prudence or ‘convenient articles of peace’.13 When it comes to moral principles, Hobbes is a nominalist: But whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good: and the object of his hate and aversion, evil; and of his contempt, vile and inconsiderable. For these words of good, evil, and contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.14 If society is to function smoothly, it is up to the sovereign power to decide what is just and unjust, good and bad. Traditionalists were appalled by Hobbes’s sceptical attitude to the Holy Scriptures. Denounced as a cynic and a secularist, as a purveyor of moral chaos, he seemed to trample on all the assumptions of medieval society. Yet


129

not everyone is happy to see him as a liberal, or even as a precursor of liberal ideas. Norberto Bobbio, a leading expert on Hobbes, insists that he ‘was a conservative’, since his priority was order, and since his entire system is founded on a mistrust of liberty. ‘Civil society does not arise so as to save the liberty of the individual, but rather to save the individual from liberty.’ Such liberty as citizens enjoy is a concession by the sovereign, and it can be greater or lesser depending on the will of the person or persons who hold power.15 However, Bobbio is forced to concede the existence of ‘some features typical of liberalism in Hobbes’s thought’: Hobbes upholds the right of rebellion in extreme cases (when individuals feel that their own lives are threatened by the sovereign’s actions), he prefers limited government and moderate economic liberty, and he puts forward a ‘negative’ conception of liberty, thus avoiding the illiberal implications of identifying freedom with ‘necessity’ (Engels) or with obedience to the laws (Hegel).16 Like his use of contract theory, these are all manifestations of Hobbes’s individualism, of his understanding of human beings as autonomous rational agents, able to act for universal reasons not determined by their particular social referents. But what really earned him the opprobrium of the traditionalists, as Bobbio admits, was his ‘atheistical’ materialism and his apparent disregard for the truths of Divine Revelation – characteristics he shared with progressive thinkers. Another candidate for inclusion in this tradition is the great Scottish philosopher, David Hume, who also sought to dispute the conventional view that moral judgements could be provided with a rational foundation. Given his contempt for a priori philosophising, for standard conceptions of natural law and social contract, one might suppose that he was an influence on Pareto – were it not for the mysterious absence of any reference to the Scotsman in Pareto’s published writings. Like Pareto, Hume was an empiricist who claimed that all knowledge originated in sense experience. Reason, by itself, is not a source of ideas; it can trace the logical relations between ideas (or numbers) and establish the connections between matters of fact, but only experience and observation can yield substantive knowledge of the world. This is why deduction from first principles is unable to deliver absolute moral truths. But neither can such truths be based on experience, for Hume maintains a rigid distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘value’. We cannot deduce the desirability or otherwise of an object or action from a simple description of its empirical properties. In a manner similar to Pareto, he says that moral judgements derive from our sentiments or passions, not from our reason. Doctrines such as natural law or natural

130


rights, which treat value preferences as ontological facts, therefore fall foul of the is/ought fallacy. Hume’s prose sometimes exhibits the derisive tone of Pareto’s diatribes against the ‘metaphysicists’. Witness the conclusion to Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding: If we take in our hands any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.17 Hume had no time for what he called the pernicious nonsense of religion and superstition and inveighed against grand statements defended on the supposed ground of absolute obviousness. Despite this radicalism, many would feel uncomfortable about depicting him as a liberal, since his political attitudes were broadly conservative. But appearances can be deceptive. If he defended the oligarchic regime in Britain, it was because this regime enjoyed popular allegiance, and because ‘rationalist’ arguments for change were philosophically unsound. His commitment to the status quo was born of scepticism, not of abstract principle. It was conditional rather than absolute. Along with Machiavelli (and Hobbes), he was less interested in who was morally entitled to rule than in who was likely to rule well, and with popular consent. Another eminent philosopher who furthered the cause of ‘sceptical liberalism’ was Jeremy Bentham. In this case, few would cavil at the appellation ‘liberal’. But was he ‘sceptical’? Did not Pareto criticise him precisely for his attempts to construct a science of morality, rooted in the ‘felicific calculus’? True, but Pareto approved of Bentham’s destruction of metaphysics – and probably wished that he had himself invented the jibe about natural rights being ‘nonsense on stilts’. Both men were empiricists who saw reason as a purely instrumental or formal activity, not as a source of ethical truth. Both men wanted to dissipate the prevalent notion that words such as ‘duty’, ‘obligation’, and ‘right’ were real entities as opposed to logical fictions. For them, to say that a man has an obligation, legal or moral, is simply to say that he is likely, in the event of his doing or failing to do an action, to incur the sanction of official punishment or popular disapproval. Natural law was also a fiction, as law could be understood only in terms of the commands of an identifiable sovereign, supported by the threat of punishment. Bentham’s psychological hedonism made him suspicious


131

of politicians and revolutionaries who professed a desire to transform the human condition, as they – like everyone else – were programmed to maximise their own utilities. His belief in the inevitability of selfinterested behaviour made him a Machiavellian realist with respect to government. Neither rulers nor citizens were entirely to be trusted. An effective political system could improve human beings but never in a million years turn them into saints or angels. A refusal to find metaphysical or theological grounding for moral judgements of course leaves one open to the charge of nihilism – of promoting a cold, godless, and spiritually empty world in which anything goes. Note, however, that the three British philosophers I have located in the tradition of sceptical liberalism could all, in their different ways, rebut this charge. For Hobbes, ethical disagreement could be rationally overcome, for all men would acknowledge that each of them was justified in defending himself. This enabled Hobbes to claim that there was one fundamental right of nature – self-defence – and one equally fundamental law: that ‘every man, ought to endeavour Peace, as farre as he has hope of obtaining it’.18 Upon this foundation, Hobbes erected a structure of prudential rules (‘natural laws’, as he called them) supposedly conducive to the peaceful cohabitation of self-seeking human beings. However, these ‘laws’, being prudential rather than categorical, are binding only when all, or almost all, persons in the group observe them. This condition will not obtain in the state of nature, where the supreme end is victory rather than peace. Until such time as human beings surrender their natural freedom to the irresistible power of the state, which can enforce the laws of nature, these laws are binding in foro interno (in conscience) but not in foro externo (in outward behaviour). Still, the gist of the argument is that reason, in the sense of identifying appropriate means to desired ends, can provide us with an objective code of behaviour which will enable us to live together in peace. But the code obliges us to act in certain ways only when doing so helps us to achieve our personal goals. It specifies hypothetical norms of the kind: ‘If you want A, you must do B.’ Neither A nor B is intrinsically good, in the sense of flowing from some human ‘essence’ or divine plan. This Hobbesian solution was a ‘non-starter’ from Pareto’s perspective, since he thought that human behaviour was mainly ‘non-logical’ (i.e. impervious to instrumental rationality) and that our moral judgements stemmed from non-rational psychological imperatives. Hobbes’s philosophical anthropology was too simplistic for Pareto’s tastes. In any event, because the very point of morality, according to Pareto, was to encourage us to adjust our behaviour to suit the needs of others, it

132


could not plausibly be built on a foundation of self-interest. It had to appeal to our residues of sociality – our need to conform, our repugnance to the suffering of others, our impulse to make sacrifices for the good of the group. In the opinion of Hume as well, our values are determined by our sympathies and passions, not by the dictates of reason. In morality, he says, we are concerned primarily with judgements of praise or blame. When we experience an example of suffering, our non-rational nature leads us to feel the pain of sympathy for that person, and this impels us to apportion blame where relevant. When we witness actions that are benign or helpful to others, we experience pleasure, and that explains the judgement of praise. Feelings of pleasure and pain are not used, à la Bentham, to give meaning to or justify moral judgements – only to explain them. Superficially, Pareto’s position may seem identical to that of Hume. For the latter thinker, however, uniformities in the human mind and in the human condition mean that moral beliefs tend to converge, creating the appearance of objectivity or universality. Pareto was much more sensitive to cultural and historical differences: the same sentiments could and would take diverse ideological forms in diverse settings.19 Moreover, sentiments, Pareto pointed out, are many and various. While prevailing moral beliefs will always reflect underlying sentiments, the balance of sentiments in any given society will depend to a degree on cultural and economic variables. For example, a dynamic society where instincts of combination are widespread will tend to have a tolerant attitude towards sexual licentiousness, whereas a static society with powerful sentiments of aggregate persistence is likely to be repressive in its moral outlook. Hume avoided moral indeterminacy by highlighting the essential sameness of human feeling, but Pareto’s interactive model of society, where human psychology is itself conditioned by other factors, precluded any such solution. In the case of Bentham, he thought – as we have already seen in Chapter 4 – that an objective morality could be founded on the ‘greatest happiness’ principle, where ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is the measure of right and wrong, and where happiness is understood as a preponderance of pleasure over pain. Pareto – as we have also seen – maintained that calculations of aggregate happiness were intrinsically inconclusive, mainly because neither ‘happiness’ nor its supposed determinant ‘pleasure’ could be defined with precision or finality. Utilitarians, he felt, surreptitiously inserted their own subjective values into what were meant to be objective calculations. It appears that Pareto, unlike other thinkers in this sceptical liberal tradition, had no intellectual resources to combat the charge of


133

nihilism. He is open to the objection that his demolition of Enlightenment philosophical discourse logically entails a total withdrawal from the activity of political philosophy and – indeed – from any kind of constructive engagement with the real world. If there are no moral or political truths, then how can we condemn (or even identify) social dysfunctions and examples of inhumanity? Is our disdain for Nazism merely a matter of taste? Of course, this type of criticism has also been levelled at postmodernists, who rather resemble Pareto in their hostility to the Enlightenment faith in reason. Exploring the similarities and differences between him and them may help us to arrive at some conclusions about his contribution to political theory.

Pareto and postmodernism Perhaps the best short description of postmodernism is that provided by Jean-François Lyotard: ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’.20 By metanarratives, or ‘master narratives’, he means those foundational interpretative schemes (Plato’s theory of forms, Hegel’s dialectic of spirit, Marx’s theory of class struggle, etc.) that have constituted the ultimate sources for the justification of scientific-technological and political projects in the modern world. Such narratives, focusing on God, nature, progress, and emancipation, offer a ‘totalising’ outlook on life, imposing an order or ‘logic’ on the infinite variety of human ideas and activities, and telling a coherent story from which we can derive what is ‘true’ and what is ‘false’, what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’. The assumption behind these grand narratives is that moral and political prescriptions can be reduced to descriptions of reality. For believers in natural law, to take one example, the search for truth parallels the search for justice – or, to put it another way, statements containing cognitive value are confused with statements containing prescriptive value. Postmodernists are especially critical of narratives of ‘progress’ and ‘emancipation’ that underpin the ‘project’ of modernity. In particular, doubts are expressed about the values and assumptions of the Enlightenment (e.g. ‘progress by reason’, ‘faith in science’). The conventional wisdom of modernity encourages us to imitate the methods and attitudes of science in our quest for social and political ‘truth’, to see history as the progressive unfolding of rationality, and to dismiss traditional narrative knowledge as a farrago of ignorance and obscurantism. According to Lyotard, what the sophists of Plato’s time have to teach us is that there is no knowledge in ethics or politics, only opinion. Normative statements cannot be deduced from factual statements.

134 The sceptical liberal He opposes the ‘totalising’ idea of reason, which denies a plurality of rationalities, each with its own conception of goodness and truth. Modernity’s worship of ‘Reason’ leads to cultural imperialism, an inexorable will-to-power, imposing the scientific version of rationality on every sphere of human endeavour. Lyotard makes a great deal of the notion of ‘language games’ which was put into philosophical currency by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. These language games are irreducible to one another, and none is to be justified in terms of anything else. Objectivity is internal to the linguistic context, and there is no context-free standpoint from which we can evaluate the world and social practices. Lyotard, in common with other postmodernists, renounces any claim to adjudicate in questions of truth and right. Statements are only ‘judged to be “good” ’, we are told, ‘because they conform to the relevant criterion . . . accepted in the social circle of the “knower’s” interlocuters’.21 Conversely, a ‘wrong results from the fact that the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres of discourse’.22 What we have here is not so much a new theory of truth as a denial that there is anything to be a theory of. ‘True’, according to Richard Rorty, is simply a word each of us uses to ‘commend . . . those beliefs which he or she finds good to believe’.23 The natural sciences are not exempt from this rejection of truth as correspondence with reality. Lyotard describes them as so many ‘games’, the rules of which cannot be used to legitimate other ‘games’, while Rorty vehemently denies that a world of things and events exists prior to and independently of our own cognitive processes. For him, as for postmodernists in general, there are no ‘transcendent’ standards of truth or rationality, only statements and methods that our culture happens to commend as ‘true’ and ‘rational’. In its dissolution of all cognitive and evaluative norms, postmodernism does tend towards nihilism. Bear in mind, however, that Pareto was less radical than the postmodernists. He did of course share their view that no form of the Platonic search for an ethics and politics that are rational – that is to say, founded securely on reasons rather than consisting of unjustified and unjustifiable opinions – is really possible. Identifying desirable and undesirable patterns of behaviour is a matter of subjective value judgement, not knowledge or truth. But postmodernists also scorn the idea that social theory can, or should, represent a social reality existing ‘out there’, a reality that is constituted separately from, or irrespective of, theory. Pareto, as we know, opposed any notion that social phenomena were merely symbolic or theoretical constructions. He never doubted that, by an appropriate


135

exercise of our minds and our sensory apparatus, we could get to know about a world of things and events that exists prior to and independently of ourselves. Pareto’s rejection of cognitive relativism, I submit, lessens his vulnerability to a common criticism of postmodernism: that it has no way of assessing the comparative value of human actions or institutions and gives us no reason to prefer one state of affairs to another. One of the sterner critics has been Jürgen Habermas, who repeats the familiar claim that practical reason requires a secure philosophical basis: If philosophical ethics and political theory can know nothing more than what is anyhow contained in the everyday norm of consciousness of different populations, and if it cannot know this in a different way, it cannot distinguish legitimate from illegitimate domination. . . . If, on the other hand, philosophical ethics and political theory are supposed to disclose the moral core of the general consciousness and to reconstruct it as a normative concept of the moral, then they must specify criteria and provide reasons; they must that is produce theoretical knowledge.24 According to Habermas, we could never have challenged national socialism unless we possessed some external standard of right and wrong – and the task of philosophy is the cognitive validation of such an external standpoint. Relativism makes transculturally binding judgements impossible. It seems to me that Pareto’s recognition of objective cognitive norms allows him to provide some rational grounding for accepting or rejecting different conceptions of the good – and to do so without violating the fact/value distinction. While is it true that prescriptions do not follow as a matter of strict deductive logic from descriptive statements, the suitability or desirability of prescriptions is not unrelated to their logical coherence and empirical implications. Are their expected consequences compatible with one another? Beneficial to the material or psychological well-being of the individuals affected by them? Historical accounts of the origins of different ideas or concepts may also influence our normative preferences. For example, tracing a particular conception of justice to a particular class interest may not constitute a refutation of the conception in question, but our judgement of its worth may be adversely affected. Beliefs which are dignified by the honorific title ‘true’ will be far less compelling if their causal story unearths less than noble origins. Needless to say, the Paretian would always remain a sceptic with

136 The sceptical liberal regard to different conceptions of the good: he could never assert that one is objectively ‘right’ and another objectively ‘wrong’, since, in the final analysis, ‘ought’ propositions are undetermined by factual reality. But, unlike the postmodernists, the Paretian would be able to support his practical judgements with reasons that are not simply internal to his own ‘language game’. Implicitly at least, Pareto himself recognised as much, for he did express normative preferences and he did give reasons for them. When explicitly formulating his theory of human action, however, he indicates that whatever reasons we might come up with are merely ‘derivations’ manifesting underlying psychic drives. Seeing political ideas as nothing more than theoretical weapons in the struggle between conflicting sets of prejudices amounts to the total demystification of political theory. But when Pareto deploys formal logic and empirical evidence to destroy fallacious ‘proofs’ and uncorroborated assertions, he is (indirectly) conceding that rigorous argument is possible ‘for’ and ‘against’ normative propositions. Even on his own assumptions, then, analysis of the ‘ought-to-be’ need not be left to the psychologists. Although Pareto criticised the prophets of ‘Progress’ for their arrogance and their absurd faith in human reason, it was no part of his argument that all cultural practices, no matter how barbaric, no matter how fantastic in their factual assumptions, were equally valid because equally grounded in psychic needs. Nor – as we have seen – did he have any sympathy for the irrational prejudices that fuelled racism and nationalism. Perhaps in contradistinction to his more reflective judgements about the origins of human thought processes, Pareto’s writings adumbrate a positive role for political theory – and a solution to the dilemma posed by scepticism. Even for a Paretian, it may after all be possible rationally to justify adherence to a particular moral or political vision while still dismissing all attempts to validate that vision as a universal truth.

Final reflections Let us not forget. though, that Pareto’s primary purpose was to demonstrate the inadequacy, from a logico-experimental standpoint, of moral and political philosophy, not to salvage something from the intellectual wreckage. Because value judgements cannot be tested empirically through the use of scientific techniques, they typically win acceptance, or suffer rejection, in virtue of sentiment, and nothing else. Nevertheless, he readily acknowledges the limitations of the scientific method. There is an interesting passage in the Treatise where Pareto compares the progress of ethics with that of the natural sciences. He


137

points out that moralists have been speculating about ethical norms for more than two thousand years – and yet they have not succeeded in finding a theory ‘that squares with the facts’ or ‘is definite in form and exclusively made up of terms designating experimental entities’. The inherent vagueness of their quest condemns them to keep repeating the same things over and over again. There is no progression. ‘A theory is demolished, then bobs up again, to be demolished a second time, and so things go on unendingly.’ The aspiration to discover moral truths through the exercise of reason has been an abject failure. What we get instead are arbitrary conclusions drawn from ‘premises that are left unstated and therefore uncertain, impalpable, nebulous’. Moral disputes are, at bottom, ‘mere wars of words’. The natural sciences, by way of contrast, have made tremendous progress, though only in the past few hundred years. Until the sixteenth century, they ‘marched pari passu with ethics’, using the same theological or metaphysical method. When they parted company with ethics and began to use the experimental method, they enjoyed rapid advance. No longer were their practitioners shackled by outmoded cosmologies or persecuted as heretics for the slightest deviations. But whereas natural scientists are now allowed to let their minds roam freely, moral thinkers who depart from the accepted consensus continue to suffer the opprobrium of public opinion, and sometimes the less than benign attentions of the public authorities. Such thinkers still behave like medieval scientists, deducing ‘facts’ from first principles and generally tailoring their ‘researches’ or speculations to the requirements of Holy Writ.25 Why this distinction between science and ethics? Pareto notes that the use of the experimental method in physics or chemistry has useful social consequences, while such methods applied to ethics usually prove ‘harmful’ by ‘shaking the foundations of the social order’. Here experimental truth and social utility diverge. Subjecting moral or political axioms to the harsh light of reason could upset the tacit and delicate understandings that underlie social routines.26 Pareto is implicitly admitting that his own scepticism, his own laser-like rationality, if it became widespread, would lead to the disintegration of society. True, the conceptual structure that forms the conscious surface of the social and political process is devoid of logico-experimental validity. Entities such as ‘liberty’, ‘democracy’, ‘humanity’ are as imaginary as were the gods and goddesses who fought for and against Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad, and are connected by reasonings that habitually violate the rules of logic. Yet such ‘derivations’ contribute to effective human organisation and action. No civilisation can do without its myths and deities, according to Pareto. If we want a healthy or even a

138


functioning society, his advice is to cherish and protect them. Nevertheless, the whole thrust of his residues/derivations analysis is to expose the beliefs that hold society together as pathetic delusions. Whilst there is no logical contradiction here, so long as the analysis is accepted, the advice must be ineffective. Again we encounter Pareto in his different guises. The philosophical relativist, debunking our sacred concepts, sits uneasily alongside the political scientist, searching for the sources of social stability. The truth is that Pareto somehow managed to be subversive and conservative at one and the same time. This duality pervades his work. Consider his critique of demagogic plutocracy. In his determination to ‘unmask’ the hypocritical elitism and tawdry self-seeking of liberal ‘democracy’, he was a match for any left-wing firebrand. Yet his attack on trade unions and social spending was inherently reactionary. The same ‘unity of opposites’ is evident in his sceptical assault on the standard assumptions of political and moral philosophy. On the one hand, it could help to preserve the status quo by undermining the alternatives. On the other, it could serve to destroy the status quo by undermining its theoretical foundations. Pareto’s scepticism may not have been nihilistic, but it was politically indeterminate. It did not ask us to abandon the search for truth or the use of reason, but it did urge us to be wary of those – whatever their political affiliations – who would impose their prescriptions in the name of truth or reason. To Pareto, it is worth repeating, the absence of empirical referents means that we can reach no definitive verdict on normative theories. Values are not facts, out there to be discovered in the way scientists discover new substances or particles. All value systems are simply human interpretations; all are equally subjective and hence lacking in authority. As they defy empirical controls, their creation and dissemination will mainly depend on a combination of material interests and underlying psychic dispositions. The overt rationality of normative theories is just a façade, hiding more primitive motivations. Pareto’s critique of rationalism and universalism, whether or not one agrees with it, is an important (if hitherto neglected) contribution to political theory. Certainly no one could doubt its continued relevance. Two of the most influential political philosophers of recent times – John Rawls and Robert Nozick – are testament to the enduring attractions of Enlightenment philosophy, with its prescriptive logic and elaborate thought experiments. In a revival of social contract theory,27 Rawls argued that we could discover universal principles of justice by imagining an ‘original position’ where hypothetical individuals who know nothing of their tastes, talents, ambitions, convictions, and


139

future status in society gather together to decide on the allocation of benefits and burdens. Pareto would have found it entirely predictable that these abstract ‘choosers’ should arrive at conclusions congenial to a Harvard professor of liberal or social democratic inclinations. Nozick, for his part, was partial to the natural rights tradition, positing the inviolable freedom of the person and the absolute right to property in the self and its possessions. Were he alive, Pareto would doubtless have explained to us how Nozick’s rejection of ‘patterned’ theories of justice was already implicit in his individualistic (and essentially arbitrary) premises. It is indeed one of Pareto’s complaints against normative moral and political philosophy that the premises of the logical demonstration are always selected to deliver the desired outcome. A closer look at Rawls and Nozick would seem to support this criticism. At various points in his magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, Rawls lays it down that the distribution of natural abilities is a ‘collective asset’, as individuals do not actually deserve the talents that nature has bestowed upon them. An obvious reply is that natural endowments are worthless unless cultivated, and that those who are industrious and responsible surely do deserve the fruits of their labour. Rawls will have none of this, because, in his eyes, a person’s ‘character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit’. Therefore, no one deserves to benefit from his talents and endeavours. This, Rawls adds, ‘is one of the fixed points of our moral judgements’.28 Really? One might query the use of the word ‘our’ here. Pareto makes the point that it is a staple of metaphysical argument to appeal to the universal consensus of mankind.29 When it is protested that many people disagree with this supposed consensus, the response seems to be that it is a consensus of the good and the wise only. At any rate, Rawls deduces, logically enough, that the resources generated by our collective efforts are themselves common assets available for redistribution. As Alan Ryan comments: ‘The thought that we come into the world with natural rights in ourselves and our capacities is not argued against, so much as ruled out by the startingpoint.’30 The ‘starting-point’ is Rawls’s notion of a pure self, totally detached from its attributes. On this conception, nobody owns his or her empirical characteristics (talents, skills, etc.) because they are randomly distributed products of nature rather than essential constituents of the self. (A distinction is being made here between ownership and mere possession.) But natural proprietorship of one’s physical and mental endowments lies at the very heart of the rights-based theory of justice. Nozick finds Rawls’s distinction between a person and his

140


characteristics unsustainable, since by removing the empirically given features of the personality and categorising them as contingent, we are in effect reducing the self to an abstract consciousness, an empty shell.31 Rejecting the Rawlsian idea of a radically disembodied self allows Nozick to claim that each person is sovereign over himself and his material possessions, always assuming that he has acquired them in a legitimate way. Resources in society are therefore not available for redistribution in accordance with some guiding principle – desert, needs, or whatever might be dreamed up by hypothetical contractors. Hence Nozick’s opposition to ‘patterned’ or ‘end-state’ conceptions of justice. Both Rawls and Nozick have created magnificent logical edifices, each of which captures something of what people mean when they talk about ‘justice’. If you share either man’s basic perceptions, then you may be convinced by his demonstration of the logical implications. But ‘if’ is the operative word here, for there is no rational way to resolve the dispute between Rawls and Nozick on the nature of the self. They simply have differing interpretations of the way reality ultimately is, and we have no logically or empirically compelling reason to accept one rather than the other. We are dealing here with metaphysical axioms, whose standard of truth lies outside objective experience. Both thinkers implicitly admit this, for they appeal only to ‘our’ intuitions – and reach precisely opposite conclusions. Had he bothered to mention it, Pareto would have regarded Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical proclamation that ‘God is dead’ as itself a metaphysical statement, beyond observation and experience. But Pareto would have added that even if God is very much alive, the interpretation of ‘his’ wishes remains an intractable source of division and controversy. God is therefore as good as dead, inasmuch as he can provide no objective foundation for our understanding of reality. The absence of any ultimate or absolute structure of value, so the thought goes, equates to the effective ‘demise’ of God – a void at the core of the universe. Yet even philosophers who embrace atheism refuse to acknowledge the death of God in this sense. To Pareto, thoroughly secular accounts of the meaning of life or of ‘the good’ or of ‘justice’, when they invoke an ultimate foundation in reality, are nonetheless theological. The desire to align one’s existence with some universal truth, to find significance in what would otherwise be chaos and randomness, is of course a powerful human emotion, as Pareto realised. While modernity itself may be responsible for the idea of a Godless universe, many people resist the implications and invent new objects of religious devotion: the ‘People’, ‘Progress’, ‘Humanity’, and so on.32 In


141

devaluing all our values, Pareto’s scepticism could be seen as a recipe for despair. But the ‘death of God’ may have its compensations as well. For if we believe that there are no absolutely authorised values, only interpretations, then we are surely forced to recognise the inherent plurality of interpretations and to endorse a way of living that recognises the inevitability of ‘difference’. People who think of their own values as cultural constructs, rooted in historical circumstances, are likely to embody tolerance, humility, and the spirit of compromise. These are qualities Pareto associated with the Class I mentality – his own mentality – and he generally found them admirable, since they encouraged social dynamism and personal fulfilment. He was subtle enough, however, to realise that even desirable qualities might be double-edged. Can a civilisation of immense liberality and forbearance find the psychological resources to defend itself against those who are less likely to countenance the idea of a meaningless existence? Ever mindful of historical impermanence, Pareto was far from optimistic.

Notes

1 Introduction and preview 1 J. Freund, Pareto: la teoria dell’equilibrio, Bari: Laterza, 1976, p. 1. 2 A. Sica, Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988, p. 80. 3 G.H. Bousquet, Pareto: le savant et l’homme, Lausanne: Payot, 1960, p. 149. 4 Sica, Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order, p. 249. 5 Freund, Pareto, p. 11. 6 T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937, p. 293. 7 V. Pareto, Trattato di sociologia generale (Treatise of General Sociology), translated into English by A. Bongiorno and A. Livingston under the title, The Mind and Society, London: Jonathan Cape, 1935, para. 2206. 8 J.W. Vander Zanden, ‘Pareto and Fascism Reconsidered’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 19 July 1960, vol. 19, p. 408. 9 Pareto, Mind and Society (henceforth MS), para. 5. 10 Ibid., para. 1429. 11 Ibid., para. 86. Had such an unlikely situation ever materialised, it would have contradicted his conviction that human beings en masse are impervious to logical argument. On this occasion Pareto ‘forgets’ his thesis that human thought processes are mostly ‘non-logical’. 12 Ibid., paras. 86–7. 13 G. Busino, ‘Prefazione’ to M.L. Maniscalco, La sociologia di Vilfredo Pareto e il senso della modernità, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994, p. 10. 14 MS, para. 1429. 15 Ibid., para. 1513. 16 This is especially the case in the English-speaking world. David Held, for example, managed to write a 321-page textbook called Models of Democracy without once mentioning Pareto’s name (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). In addition, see Andrew Vincent’s highly regarded Theories of the State (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), which mentions Pareto once in passing. For an honourable exception, see S.E. Finer, ‘Pareto and Pluto-democracy: The Retreat to Galapagos’, American Political Science Review, 1968, vol. 62, pp. 440–50. 17 At this stage of his life, he was a champion of universal suffrage. For

Notes

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

143

example, in an article he wrote for Gazzetta del Popolo (12 November 1872), he attacked those who held universal suffrage in Italy to be unrealisable owing to the large number of illiterates. In order to uphold the voting rights ‘which legitimately belong to every citizen’, he demanded ‘compulsory education for all’, rather than the select few who had hitherto enjoyed this privilege. Reprinted in The Other Pareto, trans. P. and G. Bucolo and ed. P. Bucolo, London: Scolar Press, 1980, pp. 20–3. S.E. Finer, ‘Introduction’ to V. Pareto, Sociological Writings, trans. D. Mirfin and ed. S.E. Finer, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966, p. 16. Cours d’economie politique (1896), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 115. Ibid., pp. 117–18. V. Pareto, ‘An Application of Sociological Theories’, in Bucolo (ed.), The Other Pareto, pp. 132–3. Originally published in Rivista italiana di sociologia in July 1900. Ibid., pp. 130–1. Les systèmes socialistes (1902), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 141. V. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, trans. A.S. Schwier, London: Macmillan, 1971, p. 29 (ch. II, para. 2). Ibid., p. 180 (ch. III, para. 227). For an illuminating, if highly technical, analysis of Pareto’s contribution to welfare economics, see M. McLure, Pareto, Economics and Society: The Mechanical Analogy, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, ch. 5.

2 Metaphysics vs. the logico-experimental method 1 V. Pareto, The Mind and Society (henceforth MS), trans. A. Bongiorno and A. Livingston, London: Jonathan Cape, 1935, para. 108 plus 108 n. l. See para. 2340 as well. 2 Ibid., para. 108. 3 Ibid., para. 42. 4 Ibid., paras. 13, 16, 42. 5 Ibid., para. 16. 6 Pareto sometimes refers to the general principles of the ‘metaphysicists’ as ‘imaginary facts’, which supposedly account for real facts. For example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘life force’ became the ‘explanation’ for ‘an infinite number of biological facts’. V. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, trans. A.S. Schwier, London: Macmillan, 1971, p. 35 (ch. II, para. 13). 7 MS, paras. 19, 24, 29, 51. 8 Ibid., paras. 19, 20. 9 Ibid., para. 19. 10 Ibid., para. 6. Pareto’s translator points out that in Italian the word esperienza contains the meaning of ‘experiment’ as well as ‘experience’. 11 Ibid., para. 55. See also para. 145: ‘We are following the inductive method. We have no preconceptions, no a priori notions.’ 12 Ibid., para. 28. 13 Ibid., para. 275 n. l. 14 Ibid., para. 99. 15 Ibid., paras. 99–101; Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, pp. 11–12 (ch. I, paras. 20–1).

144

Notes

16 A. Pizzorno, ‘Vilfredo Pareto and the Crisis in Nineteenth-Century Science’, Social Science Quarterly, 1973, vol. 54, pp. 480–2. 17 See R. Carnap’s preface to the second edition of his The Logical Structure of the World, second edition, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. 18 MS, paras. 6, 613, 616. 19 Ibid., para. 112. 20 Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, pp. 45–7 (ch. II, paras. 29–31). 21 MS, paras. 286–8. 22 Ibid., para. 616. 23 Ibid., paras. 616, 304. 24 Ibid., para. 516. 25 Ibid., para. 518. 26 Ibid., paras. 69, 365. 27 Ibid., para. 2024 (my emphasis). 28 Ibid., paras. 1890–1, 452–3, 46, 1567 n. l. 29 Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, pp. 19 (ch. I, paras. 36–7), 24 (ch. I, para. 46); MS, paras. 46–7. 30 V. Pareto, ‘La questione religiosa’, in Ouevres Complètes, Tome XXII, Ecrites Sociologiques Mineurs, ed. G. Busino, Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1980, pp. 322–3. First published in 1907. 31 MS, paras. 72, 1679. 32 Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 17 (ch. I, para. 33). 33 V. Pareto, ‘Reply to Benedetto Croce’, in J.C. Wood and M. McLure (eds), Vilfredo Pareto: Critical Assessments of Leading Economists, 4 vols, London: Routledge, 1999, vol. I, pp. 269–74. First published in English in International Economic Papers (1953). The Italian publication date was 1900. 34 Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 46 (ch. II, para. 31). See, also, MS, para. 365 where he says: ‘It is not the function of theory to create beliefs, but to explain existing ones and discover their uniformities.’ 35 MS, paras. 69, 97. 36 Ibid., para. 67. 37 Ibid., paras. 528, 540. 38 Ibid., paras. 131–2. 39 Ibid., paras. 52, 69. 40 Ibid., para. 2400; Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 8 (ch. I, para. 11). 41 Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, pp. 5–6 (ch. I, para. 7). 42 V. Pareto, ‘I problemi della sociologia’, in Ouevres Complètes, Tome XXII, Ecrites Sociologiques Mineurs, pp. 168–9. First published in 1899. 43 The main limit being that the resultant theory must not be contradicted by the empirical facts. 44 Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, pp. 12–13 (ch. I, paras. 20–4). 45 Ibid., p. 8 (ch. I, para. 11). 46 For a useful discussion of Pareto’s ‘synthetic tendency’, see C. Federici, ‘Pareto e i meccanismi sociali: l’approccio metodologico-scientifico nella sua sociologia’, Revue Européenne des Sciences Sociales, 1999, vol. 37, 209–22. 47 Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, pp. 8–9 (ch. I, paras. 11–14); MS, para. 69.

Notes

145

48 MS, para. 69. 49 D. Fiorot, ‘I problemi del metodo di Pareto’, in E. Rutigliano (ed.), La Ragione e i sentimenti: Vilfredo Pareto e la sociologia, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994, p. 69. 50 M. Millikan, ‘Pareto’s Sociology’, in Wood and McLure (eds), Vilfredo Pareto: Critical Assessments, vol. 3, p. 3. First published in Econometrica in 1936. 51 MS, para. 145. 52 Millikan, pp. 3–15. 53 See, for example, an almost contemporaneous review article (of the Trattato) by Ellsworth Faris, who describes Pareto’s theory of knowledge as ‘naive’ since it assumes ‘a correspondence between the idea and some visible or tangible object’. ‘An Estimate of Pareto’, in E. Faris, The Nature of Human Nature and Other Essays in Social Psychology, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937, ch. 16. 54 MS, para. 69 n. 3. 55 Ibid., paras. 488, 12. 56 Ibid., para. 617. 57 T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962. 58 P. Feyerabend, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. xiii, 4. 59 MS, para. 95. 60 R. Trigg, Understanding Social Science: A Philosophical Introduction to the Social Sciences, second edition, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, p. 20. 61 C.B. Macpherson, ‘Pareto’s General Sociology: The Problem of Method in the Social Sciences’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 1937, vol. 3, pp 458–71. 62 MS, paras. 142–3. 63 B. Croce, ‘On the Economic Principle: A Reply to Professor V. Pareto’, in Wood and McLure (eds), Vilfredo Pareto: Critical Assessments, vol. 1, pp. 263–4. First published in English in International Economic Papers (1953). The Italian publication date was 1900. 64 L. Amoroso, ‘Vilfredo Pareto’, Econometrica, 1938, vol. 6, pp. 19–21. 65 P. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958, p. 88. 66 Ibid., pp. 86–94. 67 Ibid., pp. 107–11. 68 Ibid., p. 103. 69 Ibid., pp. 100, 102. 70 A.J. Baker, ‘The Philosophical “Refutation” of Pareto’, Mind, 1960, vol. 69, pp. 240–1. 3 The science of politics 1 G. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920, pp. 26–7, 36, 201. First English translation in 1896. 2 V. Pareto, The Mind and Society (henceforth MS), trans. A. Bongiorno and A. Livingston, London: Jonathan Cape, 1935, paras. 149–50.

146

Notes

3 Ibid., paras. 151–60. 4 ‘The facts of phonetics and syntax certainly did not have their origin in certain preexisting grammatical rules; on the contrary, the latter were derived from the former.’ V. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, trans. A.S. Schwier, London: Macmillan, 1971, p. 76 (ch. II, para. 90). 5 ‘Vilfredo Pareto’, in I.M. Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968, pp. 170, 179. 6 MS, para. 150. 7 Ibid., paras. 72, 249, 843. 8 Ibid., para. 157. 9 Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 42 (ch. II, para. 22). 10 MS, paras. 2009–10. 11 Zeitlin, ‘Vilfredo Pareto’, pp. 172–3. 12 Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 30 (ch. II, para. 3). 13 MS, paras. 163–4. 14 Ibid., para 161. 15 Ibid., para. 850. 16 Ibid., para. 1695. 17 Ibid., paras. 863, 845. 18 Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 95 (ch. II, para. 108). 19 MS, para. 875. 20 C.H. Powers, Vilfredo Pareto, Beverley Hills, CA: Sage, 1987, pp. 41, 57, 72, 73, 96. 21 MS, paras. 870, 1690. 22 Ibid., paras. 515, 442; Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, pp. 38–9 (ch. II, paras. 18–19). 23 MS, paras. 253–4. 24 Ibid., paras. 199, 209, 217. 25 Ibid., paras. 889, 974. 26 Ibid., para. 891. 27 Ibid., para. 992. 28 Ibid., paras. 1065, 1073. 29 Ibid., para. 1096. 30 Ibid., para. 1130. 31 Ibid., para. 2415. 32 Ibid., para. 1207. 33 Ibid., paras. 1208–9. 34 Ibid., para. 1210. 35 Ibid., paras. 1213, 1216. 36 Ibid., para. 852. 37 Ibid., paras. 1325, 1344. 38 Ibid., paras. 1325, 1329. 39 Ibid., paras. 1400–01. 40 Ibid., para. 1416. 41 Ibid., para. 1399. 42 Ibid., para. 1430. 43 Ibid., paras. 1425–6. 44 Ibid., paras. 1458, 1462. 45 Ibid., paras. 1465, 1468–9, 1476. 46 Ibid., para. 1471 n. 1.

Notes 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71

147

Ibid., para. 1501. Ibid., para. 1543. Ibid., para. 1546. Ibid., para. 1551. Ibid., paras. 1553–4. Ibid., para. 1555. Ibid., para. 1614. Ibid., para. 1616. Ibid., para. 1417. Ibid., para. 1772. Ibid. Ibid., para. 843. See also para. 1682 where Pareto writes: ‘The accord of a doctrine, or theory, with fact is one thing; and the social importance of that doctrine, or theory, quite another. The former may amount to zero, the latter be very great.’ Ibid., para. 1874. Ibid., para. 2159. Ibid., paras. 1868, 1871 (my emphasis). Ibid., paras. 2073, 2079. Ibid., paras. 2067–68; Cours d’economie politique (1896), in V. Pareto, Sociological Writings, trans. D. Mirfin and ed. S.E. Finer, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966, p. 104. D’Alembert was an eighteenth-century French mathematician who contributed to Newtonian physics. His ‘principle’ enabled dynamics to be reduced in abstract fashion to a problem of statics. Cours d’economie politique, in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 104. MS, paras. 2069, 2072. Cours d’economie politique, in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 104. MS, para. 2089. Ibid., para. 2068. Ibid., para. 2067 and p. 1925 of the Appendix (vol. IV). Elsewhere in the Treatise, however, Pareto derides the tendency for philosophers to distinguish what is ‘natural’ from what is ‘artificial’. In what looks, oddly, like an exercise in self-criticism, he writes: ‘Those terms are all so vague that oftentimes not even the person who uses them knows just what meaning he is trying to convey. In his daily life the human being encounters many things that are inimical to him, either doing him harm or causing mere annoyance through certain circumstances which he considers artificial. . . . If all such circumstances are eliminated, we are left with a nucleus that we call “natural”, as opposed to the “artificial” things we have discarded; and it must necessarily be good, nay, perfect, since we have thrown out everything that was bad in it. That, in fact, is the reasoning of all metaphysicists or theologians. . . . What they do is to start with a present state, eliminate from it everything they dislike, and then foist the term “natural” on what is left’ (para. 1602). Pareto, in my opinion, is right here, and (therefore) wrong when he posits his distinction between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ (or ‘normal’) changes to the social system. In practice, the distinction will be essentially arbitrary and determined (as the above passage asserts) by the observer’s likes and dislikes. Zeitlin, ‘Vilfredo Pareto’, p. 183.

148 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

106 107 108 109 110 111

Notes MS, para. 2195. Ibid., para. 2340. Ibid., para. 2191. Ibid., paras. 2096 n. 1; 2417. Ibid., para. 2096 n. 1. Ibid., paras. 1008–9. Ibid., para. 1695. Ibid., para. 1210. Ibid., paras. 2207, 1864. Ibid., para. 2340; Trasformazione della democrazia (1921), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 299. See, for example, A. Pizzorno, ‘Vilfredo Pareto and the Crisis in Nineteenth-Century Science’, Social Science Quarterly, 1973, vol. 54, pp. 480– 90. Cours d’economie politique, in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 104. MS, para. 2060. Ibid., para. 2207. Ibid., para. 1732. L.J. Henderson, Pareto’s General Sociology: A Physiologist’s Interpretation, New York: Russell and Russell, 1935, pp. 28–9. MS, para. 1690. Ibid., para. 875 (my emphasis). F. Borkenau, Pareto, London: Chapman and Hall, 1936, pp. 89–90. MS, para. 1735. Ibid., para. 1747. Ibid., para. 2210. Ibid., paras. 1866, 1868. Ibid., para. 1869 ff. Ibid., para. 1091 (my emphasis). Ibid., para. 2021. Ibid., para. 2009. Les systèmes socialistes (1902), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 141. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, pp. 377–9 (ch. IX, paras. 62–5). MS, paras. 1014, 2003. Ibid., paras. 2351, 2354, 2357. Ibid., para. 2097. Zeitlin, ‘Vilfredo Pareto’, p. 180. W. Stark, ‘In Search of the True Pareto’, British Journal of Sociology, 1963, vol. 14, 111–12; M. Ginsberg, ‘The Sociology of Pareto’, in J.H. Meisel (ed.), Pareto and Mosca, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965, p. 96; N.S. Timasheff, Sociological Theory, New York: Random House, 1957, pp. 159–66; and Borkenau, Pareto, ch. 3. MS, para. 875. Ibid., para. 1690; see paras. 155, 1145–6 as well. Ibid., para. 877. T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937, chs. V, VI. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, pp. 39, 42 (ch. II, paras. 18, 22). S.E. Finer, ‘Introduction’ to Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 36.

Notes

149

112 Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 29 (ch. II, para. 1); MS, paras. 870, 1690, 2078 n. 1. 113 A. Lombardo, Teorie del potere politico: Mosca e Pareto, Bologna: Massimiliano Boni Editore, n.d., p. 110. 114 R. Linton, The Cultural Background of Personality, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1947, p. 54. 115 H.J. Eysenck, The Psychology of Politics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954, p. 265. 116 Ibid., ch. 4. 117 Ibid., pp. 152–3, 225. 118 Linton, The Cultural Background of Personality, p. 82. 119 Ibid., p. 97. 120 Finer, ‘Introduction’ to Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 73. 121 C.M. Perry, ‘Pareto’s Contribution to Social Science’, in J.C. Wood and M. McLure (eds), Vilfredo Pareto: Critical Assessments of Leading Economists, 4 vols, London: Routledge, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 278–82. First published in the International Journal of Ethics in 1935. 122 ‘An Estimate of Pareto’ in E. Faris, The Nature of Human Nature and Other Essays in Social Psychology, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937, p. 199. 123 Ibid., p. 198. 124 ‘The Nature of Human Nature’, in Faris, The Nature of Human Nature, p. 17. 125 S. Lukes, Individualism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973, pp. 114–15. 126 J.S. Mill, A System of Logic, ninth edition, London, 1875, vol. II, p. 469. 127 See, for example, Lukes, Individualism, pp. 112, 120. 128 Ibid., pp. 118–19. 129 MS, para. 2133. 130 Ibid., para. 2254. 131 Ibid. 132 S. Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, London: Allen Lane–Penguin, 2002, p. 6. 133 T.W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harper and Row, 1950. Adorno tried to show, through survey investigation, that the conservative attitude in politics is linked to a certain type of psychological structure. The ‘authoritarian personality’ is defined by rigorous conformity, blind submission to prescribed value-systems, unquestioning obedience to authority, and a simplified vision of the social and moral universe divided into clear-cut categories of good and bad, right and wrong. 134 G.W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1937. 135 See Pinker, The Blank Slate, Pt. I, ch. 3 for a masterly summary of these developments. 136 Although modern political theorists tend to ignore human psychology, a distinguished exception is Jon Elster. Without acknowledging Pareto, he offers a kind of alternative list of residues. Elster argues that human beliefs and desires – the immediate sources of behaviour – are formed, at least in part, by unconscious cognitive and motivational mechanisms, including: wishful thinking (believing the world is as we would like it to

150

137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160

161 162 163 164 165 166

Notes be); the compulsion to conform to the needs and tastes of others; the urge to reduce cognitive dissonance, to adjust desires to beliefs (or vice versa); the need to find justice in the universe, which results in the tendency to translate random misfortune into blame and guilt; and the need to have sufficient reasons for what we do – hence the attraction of ideologies and religions. See J. Elster, Political Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 1–34 in particular. MS, paras. 1680–1, 2341. Ibid., para. 2410. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, pp. 89–90 (ch. II, paras. 101–2). Ibid., p. 90 (ch. II, para. 102). Ibid., p. 90 (ch. II, para. 103). MS, paras. 2031–4. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 91 (ch. II, para. 103). MS, para. 2183. Les systèmes socialistes, in Pareto, Sociological Writings, pp. 130–1. MS, paras. 889–90, 2538. Ibid., paras. 991–2, 2346. Ibid., paras. 1930, 2244, 2253, 2183–4. Ibid., para. 2053. Ibid., paras. 2054–6. Ibid., para. 2056. Ibid., paras. 2178–9, 2227, 2059. Ibid., para. 1858. Ibid., para. 2191. Ibid., para. 2275. Ibid., para. 2274. Fatti e Teorie, in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 292. MS, para. 2227 n. 1. Ibid., paras. 2539–609. Just one example of Pareto’s sensitivity to detail may suffice here. After highlighting the error of assuming that ‘the same name indicates the same thing at different moments in history’, he points out that ‘the names “Senate” and “People” remain all through Roman history. The things they designate change altogether from moment to moment.’ Ibid., para. 2542. B. Croce, Review of Trattato, in La Critica, 1924, vol. 22, pp. 172–3; reprinted in B. Croce, Conversazioni critiche, 4th serie, Bari: Laterza, 1932, pp. 167–9. D Fiorot, Politica e scienza in Vilfredo Pareto, Milano: Edizioni di Comunità, 1975, p. 224. MS, para. 2543. Ibid., para. 2410. Ibid., para. 2544. Ibid., para. 2331.

4 The deconstruction of political philosophy 1 V. Pareto, ‘The Ethical State’, in The Other Pareto, trans. P. and G. Bucolo and ed. P. Bucolo, London: Scolar Press, 1980, p. 75. Article first published in 1894.

Notes

151

2 V. Pareto, The Mind and Society (henceforth MS), trans. A. Bongiorno and A. Livingston, London: Jonathan Cape, 1935, para. 28. 3 Ibid., para. 300. 4 Ibid., para. 65. 5 Ibid., para. 1651. 6 Ibid., para. 1551. 7 Ibid., paras. 46–7, 69. See, also, V. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, trans. A.S. Schwier, London: Macmillan, 1971, p. 19 (ch. I, paras. 36–7). 8 MS, para. 488. 9 Ibid., paras. 445, 463. 10 Ibid., para. 1514. 11 I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, ed. and trans. L.W. Beck, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1949, p. 64. 12 Ibid., p. 80. 13 MS, paras. 1514–16. 14 Ibid., para. 1517 n. 1. 15 Ibid., para. 1518. 16 Ibid., paras. 1519, 1521. 17 Ibid., para. 1521. 18 Ibid., para. 1514. 19 Ibid., para. 1893. 20 Ibid., para. 399. 21 Ibid., para. 408. 22 Ibid., paras. 335, 471. 23 Ibid., para. 1689. 24 Ibid., para. 335. 25 Ibid., para. 408. 26 Ibid., para. 442; Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 47 (ch. II, paras. 32–3). 27 MS, para. 430. 28 Ibid., para. 1603. 29 Ibid., para. 412. 30 Ibid., paras. 417, 431, 602. 31 Ibid., para. 1543. 32 Ibid., para. 1689. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., paras. 405, 417, 1509. 35 Ibid., para. 2147. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., para. 448. 39 Ibid., para. 1509. 40 Ibid., para. 2068. 41 Ibid., para. 1716. 42 Pareto implies that the individualism of contract theory, by seeing human beings as isolated monads, is at odds with the basic truths of the natural world. Reflect, for example, on the following passage, where he discusses the relationship between individual things and classes of things: ‘The fact that we deal with individua by no means implies that a number of

152

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Notes

individua taken together are to be considered a simple sum. They form compounds which, like chemical compounds, may have properties that are not the sum of the properties of their components’ (ibid., para. 66). Ibid., paras. 1146, 1504–7. R. Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, p. 26. T. Parsons, The Stucture of Social Action, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937, p. 241. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 106 (ch. III, para. 12); see also MS, para. 2127. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, pp. 47–8 (ch. II, paras. 34–6). Ibid., pp. 48–9 (ch. II, para. 37). MS, para. 1490. Ibid., para. 1904. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 44 (ch. II, paras. 28–9). Ibid., p. 111 (ch. III, para. 30). Ibid., p. 105 (ch. III, para. 11). MS, paras. 2128–9. Ibid., paras. 2133–4. Ibid., para. 2135. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, p. 248. MS., para. 1491. Ibid., para. 515. Ibid., para. 441. Ibid., para. 515. Ibid., paras. 1474–6. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 50 (ch. II, para. 40). A. Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 46 (ch. II, para. 31). MS, paras. 1868–9. Ibid., para. 1932. Ibid. Ibid., para. 2002. Pareto does not himself specify the norms by which he chooses to determine utility, but the context indicates that he is equating utility with social stability, and that – moreover – he is referring to the utility of the collectivity. One commentator, Gabriele Pollini, argues that the logic of Pareto’s analysis is similar to that of Weber, for whom the specific content of ideals or belief systems determined their positive or negative impact (e.g. the worldly asceticism of puritanical Protestantism had positive economic consequences; the other-worldly mysticism of Buddhism had negative economic consequences). While admitting that Pareto’s usual position was to describe derivations (in the sense of beliefs or ideas) as ‘imaginary’ and the constellation of residues as the ‘real’ determinants of utility, Pollini nevertheless maintains that, for Pareto, residues could exert a practical effect only through the mediation of derivations, whose content would then determine ‘the positivity or else negativity’ of that effect. This argument is problematic since Pareto actually decried the ‘error of identifying morality and religion with some special morality and some special religion, and so giving to derivations an

Notes

153

emphasis that belongs only to residues’ (ibid., para. 1932). Pareto, it seems to me, wanted to stress the essential similarity of the various types of religious and moral beliefs, arising as they do from the same residual foundations (e.g. the psychic need for group persistence). Such beliefs are therefore socially useful irrespective of their specific content (G. Pollini, ‘Residui ed utilità sociale. Elementi di teoria dell’azione nella sociologia di Vilfredo Pareto’, in E. Rutigliano (ed.), La Ragione e i sentimenti: Vilfredo Pareto e la sociologia, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994, pp. 210–11). 70 MS, para. 2002. 71 N. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. G. Bull, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, ch. XV, pp. 90–1. 72 MS, para. 2024. 5 The critique of ‘demagogic plutocracy’ 1 V.I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, London: Martin Lawrence, 1935, p. 55. 2 A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (2 vols), ed. P. Bradley, New York: Vintage Books, 1945, vol. 2, p. 13. 3 For a discussion of anti-democratic thought in the nineteenth century, see J.V. Femia, Against the Masses: Varieties of Anti-Democratic Thought Since the French Revolution, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, especially chapter 2. 4 G. Mosca, The Ruling Class, trans. H.D. Kahn, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939, pp. 70–1. 5 Ibid., p. 50. 6 Ibid., p. 53. 7 Ibid., p. 57. 8 Ibid., p. 154. 9 J. Meisel, The Myth of the Ruling Class, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1958, p. 16. 10 Mosca, The Ruling Class, p. 155. 11 Ibid., p. 413. 12 Ibid., p. 258. 13 Ibid., pp. 335, 331. 14 T. Bottomore, Elites and Society, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1966, p. 115; C.W. Cassinelli, ‘The Law of Oligarchy’, American Political Science Review, 1953, vol. 47, pp. 781–2. 15 R. Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, p. 27. 16 But it is a fairy story whose authorship is often attributed to Pareto! Tom Bottomore, for example, in his influential Elites and Society, complains that Pareto (unlike Mosca) was blind to the ‘heterogeneity’ of the elite (p. 12). 17 V. Pareto, The Mind and Society (henceforth MS), trans. A. Bongiorno and A. Livingston, London: Jonathan Cape, 1935, para. 2254. Again, we see how misleading it is to accuse Pareto of atomistic individualism. Indeed, the position he adopts in this paragraph bears some resemblance to the structural determinism of Marxists like Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas – though their ‘problematic of the subject’, as they would put it,

154

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Notes

was very different from his own. Poulantzas, who famously criticised Ralph Miliband for reducing the ruling class to ‘interpersonal relations’ and for understanding its behaviour in terms of individual motivation, described ‘social classes and the State as objective structures, and their relations as an objective system of regular connections, a structure and a system whose agents, men, are in the words of Marx, “bearers” of it – träger’ (‘The Problem of the Capitalist State’, in R. Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science, London: Fontana/Collins, 1972, p. 242). Of course, for Pareto, the deterministic system is the unintended result of ‘an infinitude of minor acts’ by individual social actors, whereas the structuralist Marxists saw the human subject as the passive plaything of hypostasised social forces. In both cases, however, the system is seen to have its own imperative logic. MS, para. 2254. Ibid., paras. 2265, 2257. Ibid., para. 2231. Ibid, para. 2233. It may seem absurd of Pareto to include organised workers themselves, and not just their union officials, in the governing class. How much influence, let alone power, can an individual worker exert – even if he is a member of the ‘labour aristocracy’? Pareto never deals with this objection. It must be remembered, however, that his governing class includes a ‘smaller, choicer class’ from which the workers would certainly be excluded – though the composition of this inner core is not definitively spelled out. Ibid., para. 2234. Ibid., para. 2231. Ibid., para. 2250. See, in particular, M. Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Les systèmes socialistes (1902), in V. Pareto, Sociological Writings, trans. D. Mirfin and ed. S.E. Finer, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966, pp. 141–2. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 142. Cours d’économie politique (1896), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 119. V. Pareto, The Transformation of Democracy, trans. R. Girola and ed. C.H. Powers, London: Transaction Books, 1984, pp. 43–6, 66. Originally published in 1921 under the title Trasformazione della democrazia. MS, paras. 2228, 2255, 2309. Pareto, The Transformation of Democracy, p. 60. MS, paras. 2306–7. Pareto, The Transformation of Democracy, pp. 65–7. V. Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, trans. A.S. Schwier, London: Macmillan, 1971, p. 39 (ch. II, para. 19). Translation amended by J.V.F. Pareto, The Transformation of Democracy, pp. 25, 31; MS, para. 401. MS, para. 1554. Ibid., para. 2208. Ibid., paras. 1486–92, 1608–9. Ibid., para. 2134. Ibid., paras. 2228, 2307, 2309, 2059. Pareto, The Transformation of Democracy, p. 71.

Notes

155

43 Ibid., pp. 43–6, 66. 44 Ibid., p. 47. 45 Borkenau finds it odd that Pareto, having accused Marx of simplifying a complex reality by dividing society into ‘capitalists’ and ‘proletariat’, should commit precisely the same error with his division between ‘speculators’ and ‘rentiers’ (F. Borkenau, Pareto, London: Chapman and Hall, 1936, p. 141). The criticism is a fair one, though Pareto does acknowledge that the dividing line between the two ‘classes’ is blurred (MS, para. 2235). 46 Les systèmes socialistes (1902), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 141. 47 Ibid., p. 140; Cours d’économie politique (1896), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 120. 48 MS, para. 2183. 49 Ibid., para. 2254. 50 Ibid., para. 2267. 51 Cours d’économie politique (1896), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 117. 52 MS, para. 2267. 53 Les systèmes socialistes (1902), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 131; MS, para. 2032. 54 MS, para. 1501. 55 J.A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, third edition, New York: Harper and Row, 1950, ch. 21. 56 Ibid., pp. 262–3. 57 Les systèmes socialistes (1902), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 134. 58 MS, para. 870. 59 Les systèmes socialistes (1902), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 124; Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, p. 39 (ch. II, para. 18); MS, paras. 1091, 1690. 60 MS, para. 2060. 61 Ibid., para. 1091 (my emphasis). 62 Borkenau, Pareto, p. 174. 63 MS, para. 2267. 64 Cours d’économie politique (1896), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 121. See also MS, paras. 1050, 2390. 65 S. Hook, ‘Pareto’s Sociological System’, The Nation, 26 June 1935, vol. 140, p. 747. 66 J.W. Vander Zanden, ‘Pareto and Fascism Reconsidered’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 19 July 1960, vol. 19, p. 408. 67 R. Aron, Le Machiavelisme, doctrine des tyrannies modernes, cited in G. Busino, Gli studi su Vilfredo Pareto oggi, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974, p. 77. 68 Les systèmes socialistes (1902), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 136. 69 MS, paras. 1050, 2175, 2246. 70 For references, see J. Lopreato and R.C. Ness, ‘Vilfredo Pareto: Sociologist or Ideologist’, Sociological Quarterly, 1966, p. 36. 71 MS, para. 1932 (my emphasis). 72 Borkenau, Pareto, p. 136. 73 L. Montini, Vilfredo Pareto e il fascismo, Rome: Volpe, 1974, pp. 15, 216 in particular. 74 Fascism’s temporary hold on the liberal imagination extended beyond Italy. Many American liberals also welcomed the fascist takeover. Unlike Pareto, however, they tended to be ‘new liberals’, disillusioned with the

156

75 76 77 78 79 80

81

82 83 84 85

Notes

atomistic, contractual approach of the Lockean tradition and drawn towards a quasi-Hegelian collectivism. See J.P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972, pp. 220–39. MS, para. 2240 n. 1. Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory, pp. 22, 33. For an excellent analysis of the philosophical issues, see M. Ginsberg, On the Diversity of Morals, London: Heinemann, 1962, ch. 3. V. Pareto, in Il Secolo, 17 May 1923; quoted in D. Fiorot, Politica e scienza in Vilfredo Pareto, Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1975, p. 214. Fiorot, Politica e scienza in Vilfredo Pareto, p. 212. MS, paras. 2231, 2255, 2313, 2316; Cours d’économie politique (1896), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, pp. 117, 119–20; Les systèmes socialistes (1902), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, pp. 140–1; and Trasformazione della democrazia (1921), in Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 315. ‘[M]y wish is to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, chemistry’ (MS, para. 20). See also paras. 5, 6, and 69. In Trasformazione della democrazia (1921), his last major work and a withering attack on liberal ‘democracy’, he emphatically denied having a moral or political agenda: ‘we abstain entirely from making judgements about the facts we are expounding, from awarding praise or blame’ (Pareto, Sociological Writings, p. 324). A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Representative Selections, ed. B. Mazlish, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961, p. 252. V. Pareto, I Sistemi socialisti [Les systèmes socialistes], Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1974, pp. 562–3. Pareto, The Transformation of Democracy, pp. 45–8. C. Mongardini, La sociologia di Vilfredo Pareto fra otto e novecento, Genoa: ECIG, 1984, p. 60.

6 The sceptical liberal 1 V. Pareto, The Mind and Society (henceforth MS), trans. A. Bongiorno and A. Livingston, London: Jonathan Cape, 1935, para. 2171. 2 Ibid., para. 2067. Recall that his model of society focused on shifting equilibrium, not on coexistential properties in a static system. 3 It should be said that Pareto, when explicitly setting out his theories, rarely if ever mentions Machiavelli. In the Treatise, for example, references to the Florentine are sporadic, though always favourable. Pareto was a Machiavellian by implication rather than by direct attribution. Typical is the passage where he expresses contempt for the ‘moralists’ who respond to Machiavelli’s penetrating analyses ‘with a mass of ethical and sentimental chatter that has no scientific status whatever’ (MS, para. 1975). See also ibid., paras. 1158, 1704, 2166, 2262, 2410, 2532, and 2535. 4 J. V. Femia, Machiavelli Revisited, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004. 5 MS, para. 279. 6 Ibid., para. 488. 7 Ibid., para. 1877. 8 Ibid., para. 1883.

Notes 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

157

Ibid., paras. 1890–1. Ibid., paras. 1864–8. Ibid., para. 303. Ibid. T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. Plamenatz, London: The Fontana Library, 1962, p. 145. Ibid., p. 90. N. Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, trans. D. Gobetti, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 69–70. Ibid., p. 70. D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902, section XII, part III, p. 165. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 14. ‘Great social currents often produce general changes in derivations, leaving residues unaffected’ (MS, para. 2007). J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, p. xxiv. Ibid., p. 19. J.-F. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. van der Abbeele, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988, p. 13. R. Rorty, ‘Science as Solidarity’, in H. Lawson and L. Appignanesi (eds), Dismantling Truth: Reality in the Postmodern World, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989, p. 11. J. Habermas, ‘Legitimation Problems in the Modern State’, in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. T. McCarthy, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979, pp. 202–3. MS, para. 2002. Ibid. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Ibid., pp. 12, 15, 101–4, 179, 310–13. MS, para. 402. ‘Introduction’ to A. Ryan (ed.), Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 14. R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974, p. 228. MS, para. 1712.

References

Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswick, E., Levinson, D.J. and Sanford, R.N., The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harper and Row, 1950. Allport, G.W., Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1937. Amoroso, L., ‘Vilfredo Pareto’, Econometrica, vol. 6 (1938). Baker, A.J., ‘The Philosophical “Refutation” of Pareto’, Mind, vol. 69 (1960). Bellamy, R., Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987. Bobbio, N., Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, trans. D. Gobetti, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Borkenau, F., Pareto, London: Chapman and Hall, 1936. Bottomore, T., Elites and Society, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1966. Bousquet, G.H., Pareto: le savant et l’homme, Lausanne: Payot, 1960. Busino, G., Gli studi su Vilfredo Pareto oggi, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. —— ‘Prefazione’, to M.L. Maniscalco, La sociologia di Vilfredo Pareto e il senso della modernità, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994. Carnap, R., The Logical Structure of the World (second edition), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. Cassinelli, C.W., ‘The Law of Oligarchy’, American Political Science Review, vol. 47 (1953). Croce, B., Conversazioni critiche (4th serie), Bari: Laterza, 1932. —— ‘On the Economic Principle: A Reply to Professor V. Pareto’, trans. C.M. Meredith, International Economic Papers, vol. 3 (1953); reprinted in J.C. Wood and M. McLure (eds), Vilfredo Pareto: Critical Assessments of Leading Economists, vol. 1, London: Routledge, 1999. Diggins, J.P., Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972. Elster, J., Political Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Eysenck, H.J., The Psychology of Politics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954. Faris, E., ‘An Estimate of Pareto’ in The Nature of Human Nature and Other Essays in Social Psychology, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937.

References

159

—— ‘The Nature of Human Nature’, in The Nature of Human Nature and Other Essays in Social Psychology, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937. Federici, C., ‘Pareto e i meccanismi sociali: l’approccio metodologicoscientifico nella sua sociologia’, Revue Européenne des Sciences Sociales, vol. 37 (1999). Femia, J.V., ‘Pareto’s Concept of Demagogic Plutocracy’, Government and Opposition, vol. 30 (1995). —— ‘Pareto and the Critique of Justice’, in D. Boucher and P. Kelly (eds), Social Justice: From Hume to Walzer, London and New York: Routledge, 1998. —— Against the Masses: Varieties of Anti-democratic Thought since the French Revolution, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. —— Machiavelli Revisited, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004. Feyerabend, P., Philosphical Papers, vol. 1, Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Finer, S.E., ‘Introduction’, to V. Pareto, Sociological Writings, trans. D. Mirfin and ed. S.E. Finer, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966. —— ‘Pareto and Pluto-democracy: The Retreat to Galapagos’, American Political Science Review, vol. 62 (1968). Fiorot, D., Politica e scienza in Vilfredo Pareto, Milano: Edizioni di Comunità, 1975. —— ‘I problemi del metodo di Pareto’, in E. Rutigliano (ed.), La Ragione e i sentimenti: Vilfredo Pareto e la sociologia, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994. Freund, J., Pareto: la teoria dell’ equilibrio, Bari: Laterza, 1976. Gewirth, A., Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Ginsberg, M., On the Diversity of Morals, London: Heinemann, 1962. —— ‘The Sociology of Pareto’, in J.H. Meisel (ed.), Pareto and Mosca, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965. Habermas, J., ‘Legitimation Problems in the Modern State’, in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. T. McCarthy, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979. Held, D., Models of Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987. Henderson, L.J., Pareto’s General Sociology: A Physiologist’s Interpretation, New York: Russell and Russell, 1935. Hobbes, T., Leviathan, ed. J. Plamenatz, London: The Fontana Library, 1962. Hook, S., ‘Pareto’s Sociological System’, The Nation, vol. 140 (26 June 1935). Hume, D., Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902. Kant, I., Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, ed. and trans. L.W. Beck, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Kuhn, T.S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

160

References

Le Bon, G., The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920. Lenin, V.I., The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, London: Martin Lawrence, 1935. Linton, R., The Cultural Background of Personality, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1947. Lombardo, A., Teorie del potere politico: Mosca e Pareto, Bologna: Massimiliano Boni Editore, n.d. Lopreato, J. and Ness, R.C., ‘Vilfredo Pareto: Sociologist or Ideologist’, Sociological Quarterly (1966). Lukes, S., Individualism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973. Lyotard, J.-F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. —— The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. van der Abbeele, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Machiavelli, N., The Prince, trans. G. Bull, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. McLure, M., Pareto, Economics and Society: The Mechanical Analogy, London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Macpherson, C.B., ‘Pareto’s General Sociology: The Problem of Method in the Social Sciences’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol. 3 (1937). Meisel, J., The Myth of the Ruling Class, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1958. —— (ed.), Pareto and Mosca, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965. Mill, J.S., A System of Logic (ninth edition), vol. II, London, 1875. Millikan, M., ‘Pareto’s Sociology’, in J.C. Wood and M. McLure (eds), Vilfredo Pareto: Critical Assessments of Leading Economists, vol. 3, London: Routledge, 1999. Mongardini, C., La sociologia di Vilfredo Pareto fra otto e novecento, Genoa: ECIG, 1984. Montini, L., Vilfredo Pareto e il fascismo, Rome: Volpe, 1974. Mosca, G., The Ruling Class, trans. H.D. Kahn, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939. Nozick, R., Anarchy, State and Utopia, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974. Olson, M., The Logic of Collective Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Pareto, V., The Mind and Society [Trattato di sociologia generale] (4 vols), trans. A. Bongiorno and A. Livingston, London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. —— ‘Reply to Benedetto Croce’, trans. F. Priuli, International Economic Papers, vol. 3 (1953); reprinted in J.C. Wood and M. McLure (eds), Vilfredo Pareto: Critical Assessments of Leading Economists, vol. 1, London: Routledge, 1999. —— Sociological Writings, trans. D. Mirfin and ed. S.E. Finer, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966.

References

161

—— Manual of Political Economy, trans. A.S. Schweir, London: Macmillan, 1971. —— I Sistemi socialisti, Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1974. —— Oeuvres Complètes, Tome XXII, Ecrites Sociologiques Mineurs, ed. G. Busino, Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1980. —— The Other Pareto, trans. P. and G. Bucolo and ed. P. Bucolo, London: Scolar Press, 1980. —— The Transformation of Democracy [Trasformazione della democrazia], trans. R. Girola and ed. C.H. Powers, London: Transaction Books, 1984. Parsons, T., The Structure of Social Action, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937. Perry, C.M., ‘Pareto’s Contribution to Social Science’, International Journal of Ethics, vol. 46 (1935); reprinted in J.C. Wood and M. McLure (eds), Vilfredo Pareto: Critical Assessments of Leading Economists, vol. 1, London: Routledge, 1999. Pinker, S., The Blank State: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, London: Allen Lane–Penguin, 2002. Pizzorno, A., ‘Vilfredo Pareto and the Crisis in Nineteenth-century Science’, Social Science Quarterly, vol. 54 (1973). Pollini, G., ‘Residui ed utilità sociale. Elementi di teoria dell’azione nella sociologia di Vilfredo Pareto’, in E. Rutigliano (ed.), La Ragione e i sentimenti: Vilfredo Pareto e la sociologia, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994. Poulantzas, N., ‘The Problem of the Capitalist State’, in R. Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science, London: Fontana/Collins, 1972. Powers, C.H., Vilfredo Pareto, Beverley Hills, CA: Sage, 1987. Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Rorty, R., ‘Science as Solidarity’, in H. Lawson and L. Appignanesi (eds), Dismantling Truth: Reality in the Postmodern World, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989. Ryan, A. (ed.), Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Schumpeter, J.A., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (third edition), New York: Harper and Row, 1950. Sica, A., Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Smith, A., The Wealth of Nations: Representative Selections, ed. B. Mazlish, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961. Stark, W., ‘In Search of the True Pareto’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 14 (1963). Timasheff, N.S., Sociological Theory, New York: Random House, 1957. Tocqueville, A. de, Democracy in America (2 vols), ed. P. Bradley, New York: Vintage Books, 1945. Trigg, R., Understanding Social Science: A Philosophical Introduction to the Social Sciences (second edition), Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Vander Zanden, J.W., ‘Pareto and Fascism Reconsidered’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 19 (19 July 1960).

162

References

Vincent, A., Theories of the State, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Winch, P., The Idea of a Social Science, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. Zeitlin, I.M., ‘Vilfredo Pareto’, in Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.

Index

Adorno, T. 66, 149n133 Althusser, L. 153–4n17 Aristotle 81, 82, 124 Bacon, F. 16, 24 Baker, A.J. 29 Bastiat, F. 87 Bellamy, R. 106, 120–1 Bentham, J. 4–5, 90–2, 95, 112, 130–1, 132 Bobbio, N. 129 Borkenau, F. 55, 119–20, 155n45 Bottomore, T. 153n16 Burke, E. 90, 100 Carnap, R. 17 Chomsky, N. 67 Cicero 85 composition 48 Comte, A. 6, 17–19, 121–2 Coulter, T. 60 Croce, B. 26–7, 74, 120 D’Alembert’s principle 50, 147n64 demagogic plutocracy 5, 71, 105–18, 138 democracy 5, 11–12, 37, 71, 100–5, 115–18, 120; see also demagogic plutocracy derivations 4, 11, 35–7, 41–7, 48, 55, 56, 63, 96–7, 101, 152–3n69, 157n19; typology of 42–7 Durkheim, E. 1, 6, 65 elites 1, 68–75, 106–7, 115–18; Mosca’s theory of 101–5

Elster, J. 149–50n136 Engels, F. 129 Enlightenment 31, 33, 96, 126, 133 equilibrium: in economic theory 49, 93; model of society 49–58, 88, 117, 156n2; social 3, 40, 72, 73 essentialism 14, 77, 84, 122 Eysenck, H. 60 Faris, E. 63, 145n53 fascism 2, 5, 11–12, 66, 118–21 Feyerabend, P. 25 Finer, S.E. 8, 61 Fiorot, D. 23, 74 ‘foxes’ and ‘lions’ 60, 62, 66, 70–5, 105, 111, 112; see also residues; personality types freedom/liberty 46, 110–11, 119, 121, 129 French Revolution 52, 72, 100 Freud, S. 6, 31, 41, 57, 66 Freund, J. 2 Gewirth, A. 97 Habermas, J. 126, 135 Hegel, Hegelian 2, 13, 14, 65, 67–8, 129, 133, 155–6n74 Held, D. 142n16 Henderson, L.J. 55 history, Pareto’s theory of 67–76, 105 Hobbes, T. 66, 90, 128–9, 130, 131 holism 64–5 Homans, G. 1 homo economicus 8, 22, 34, 55

164

Index

Hook, S. 119 human nature 3, 64–7, 87–8, 128 Hume, D. 129–30, 132 individualism/atomism 64–5, 90, 127, 151–2n42, 153–4n17 interests 33–4, 40, 57, 125, 126 James, W. 60 justice 2, 5, 40, 46, 79, 110, 121, 138–40 Kant, I. 80–3, 97 Kuhn, T. 25 laissez-faire 122–3 Le Bon, G. 31–2 Lenin, V.I. 100 liberalism 8, 78, 124, 129, 155–6n74; deontological 124, 127–8; sceptical 5, 124, 127–33 Linton, R. 59, 61 Locke, J. 16, 86 logical/non-logical behaviour 3–4, 11, 31–8; definitions of 32–3 logico-experimental method 37, 75–6; critics of 23–30; definition of 14–15; limitations of 19–23, 79; and metaphysics 14; and positivism 16–19 Lombardo, A. 59 Lyotard, J.-F. 133–4; see also postmodernism, postmodernists Machiavelli, N. 3, 5, 20, 60, 68, 98, 101, 105, 124–5, 126, 127, 128, 131, 156n3 Macpherson, C.B. 26 Maistre, J. de 100 marginal utility, theory of 10 Marx, Marxism 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 20, 21, 22, 37, 56–7, 62–3, 65, 67–8, 70, 76, 78, 106, 108, 113–14, 121–2, 125, 133, 153–4n17 Mazzini, G. 105 mechanical analogy 49–50, 117; see also equilibrium: model of society Meisel, J. 104, 115 metaphysical reasoning 3, 14, 77, 83–6, 97, 143n6, 147n70

Miliband, R. 154n17 Mill, J.S. 48, 64, 92 Millikan, M. 24–5, 26 Mongardini, C. 123 Montini, L. 120 morality 5, 44, 79, 97–8, 110, 119, 121, 126, 131–2, 152–3n69; and science 137; see also Hume; Kant Mosca, G. 101–5, 116–17, 153n16 Mussolini, B. 2, 5, 11–12, 113, 118, 119, 120, 121 natural law 83–6, 89, 127, 129–30, 131, 133 natural rights 86–9, 97, 127, 129–30, 139 neo-classical economics 7–8, 10, 49 Newton, I. 16, 75 Nietzsche, F. 2, 31, 140 nominalism 79, 128 Nozick, R. 138–40 ophelimity 8, 10, 93–4 Pantalconi, M. 7–8 Pareto’s law (of income distribution) 8, 69 Pareto-optimality 10, 65, 93–4 Parsons, T. 1, 2, 58, 95 Perry, C.M. 63 personality types 59–63, 149n133; and history 68–75; see also psychology (of politics) Pinker, S. 66 Pizzorno, A. 16, 54 Plato 47, 77, 83–4, 125, 133 Pollini, G. 152–3n69 positivism 2, 16–19, 23, 62, 122 postmodernism, postmodernists 5–6, 62–3, 78, 133–6; and Pareto 134–6 Poulantzas, N. 153–4n17 Powers, C.H. 36 psychological reductionism 49, 57, 118 psychology (of politics) 3, 59–67, 117, 125, 132, 149–50n136 Rawls, J. 138–40 ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ movement 49–51,

Index 53–4; see also equilibrium: model of society reciprocal determination 53–5, 117; see also equilibrium: model of society Reformation 89 relativism 25, 37–8; cognitive 5, 135; moral/ethical 5, 121, 127, 138; of postmodernists 133–4 religion 18, 20–1, 30, 79–80, 98, 119, 121, 128, 152–3n69 rentiers 5, 107–8, 113, 155n45 residues 11, 35–42, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60–3, 66–7, 70–5, 84, 86, 88, 117–18, 132, 141, 152–3n69, 157n19; class I and class II residues 38–9, 60–2, 70–5; typology of 38–41 Rome (ancient) 74, 150n160 Rorty, R. 78, 134 Rousseau, J.-J. 90, 112 Ryan, A. 139 Schumpeter, J.A. 116 scientific laws 15, 21–3 sentiments 36, 40, 58–9, 83, 117, 125, 126, 132; see also residues Smith, Adam 122, 127 social contract 44, 89–90, 138–9, 151–2n42

165

socialism 9, 109, 122 Sorel, G. 48, 56 speculators 5, 73–4, 107–8, 111, 118, 155n45 Spencer, H. 6, 17–18 spoliation 8, 109, 114, 122 Strindberg, A. 31 Tocqueville A. de 100 Tolstoy, L. 44 Trigg, R. 25 utilitarianism 10, 90–6, 132; see also Bentham; utility utility 8, 10, 48, 91–6, 98, 152n69; distinction between utility of and utility for the collective 94–5, 111–12 Vattel, E. 96 Vincent, A. 143n16 Walras, L. 7–8, 49 Weber, M. 1, 6, 15, 152n69 welfare economics 10 Winch, P. 27–30 Wittgenstein, L. 27, 28, 134 Zeitlin, I. 33–4, 51–2, 57

Pareto and Political Theory (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, 24)

Durkheim and Representations (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Ignorance and Liberty (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Tocqueville's Political and Moral Thought: New Liberalism (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Cicero's Social and Political Thought

The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell: A Reassessment (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Political Reconciliation (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Political Power and Social Theory

Political Power and Social Theory

Conflicts in Social Science (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Contemporary Political Theory)

Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought: New Theories of the Political (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola

Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought New Theories of the Political (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought

Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

The Politics and Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Political Theory of Global Citizenship (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Adorno, Habermas and the Search for a Rational Society (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

The Mythological State and its Empire (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Hayek and After: Hayekian Liberalism as a Research Programme (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

The Political Thought of Sayyid Qutb: The Theory of Jahiliyyah (Routledge Studies in Political Islam)

Goffman and Social Organisation: Studies in a Sociological Legacy (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, Vol 17)

Democracy and Pluralism: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

The Politics, Culture and Social Theory of Gramsci: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

The Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, 9)

Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Pareto and Political Theory (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, 24)

Durkheim and Representations (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Ignorance and Liberty (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Tocqueville's Political and Moral Thought: New Liberalism (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Cicero's Social and Political Thought

The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell: A Reassessment (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Political Reconciliation (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Political Power and Social Theory

Political Power and Social Theory

Conflicts in Social Science (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Contemporary Political Theory)

Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought: New Theories of the Political (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola

Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought New Theories of the Political (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought

Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

The Politics and Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Political Theory of Global Citizenship (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Adorno, Habermas and the Search for a Rational Society (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

The Mythological State and its Empire (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Hayek and After: Hayekian Liberalism as a Research Programme (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

The Political Thought of Sayyid Qutb: The Theory of Jahiliyyah (Routledge Studies in Political Islam)

Goffman and Social Organisation: Studies in a Sociological Legacy (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, Vol 17)

Democracy and Pluralism: The Political Thought of William E. Connolly (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

The Politics, Culture and Social Theory of Gramsci: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

The Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, 9)

Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Recommend Documents