Vilfredo Pareto

Joseph V. Femia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367603229
• eBook ISBN: 9781317001867
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection examines the work of the Italian economist and social theorist Vilfredo Pareto, highlighting the extraordinary scope of his thought, which covers a vast range of academic disciplines. The volume underlines the enduring and contemporary relevance of Pareto's ideas on a bewildering variety of topics; while illuminating his attempt to unite different disciplines, such as history and sociology, in his quest for a 'holistic' understanding of society. Bringing together the world's leading experts on Pareto, this collection will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of sociology and social psychology, monetary theory and risk analysis, philosophy and intellectual history, and political science and rhetoric.

Chapter 1
Pareto and the Elite

John Scott

Introduction

There has been considerable debate and contention over the respective contributions of Pareto and Mosca to the idea of the elite, and the two authors themselves challenged each other’s claim to priority in discovering and stating the principles of elite theory. Mosca reputedly felt that he had been denied his proper recognition as the progenitor of the theory that all societies are ruled by organised minorities. Mosca did, indeed, introduce his idea of the ruling class (classe dirigente) in his Sulla Teorica dei governi e sul governo parlamentare (Mosca 1884), some years before Pareto examined the organised groups that were active in Italian politics (Pareto 1893). Mosca himself elaborated on his basic insight in the first edition of his Elementi (Mosca 1896), in the same year in which Pareto began to explore ‘aristocracies’ (Pareto 1896–7). It was in 1901 that Pareto first set out his more systematic account focused on the concept of the political aristocracy (aristocrazia) as an analytical category (Pareto 1901). Pareto further developed his ideas in conjunction with his doctoral student Maria Kobalinska, who completed her thesis on La circulation des elites en France in 1912. Not until the publication of his Trattato di Sociologia Generale (Pareto 1916) did he set out his most systematic formulation using the new terminology of the ‘elite’, developed with Kobalinska. It was following this major work that Mosca returned to the topic and set out as more fully developed account of his ruling class model; in the Second edition of his key work (Mosca 1923).

Thus, the concept of the elite emerged in Italy with Mosca, though it emerged simultaneously with the work of other critics of the economic determinism of the orthodox Marxist account of class and class struggle (Gumplowicz 1875, 1885; Novicow 1897). Mosca was, perhaps, the most prominent of these writers, but his continuing influence owed a great deal to the interest encouraged by Pareto’s introduction of the word elite and his placing of it in a formal framework of political analysis. This difference of terminology between Pareto and Mosca – whether to refer to an elite or a ruling class – proved important in establishing Pareto’s superior reputation. The term ‘ruling class’ remained too closely tied to Marxist terminology and failed to properly mark the break with the economic concept of ‘class’. The word ‘elite’, on the other hand, carried none of this conceptual baggage and served to mark out a new and distinctive direction for political analysis.

Pareto’s introduction of his new terminology, however, did not have this distinctiveness as its principal aim. Pareto introduced many new terms and used existing words in new ways in order to produce a formal, technical language that would, he believed, allow the building of a true science of politics. His goal was to formulate precise and testable laws of politics – and of other social processes – similar to the quantitative laws and simultaneous equations that had so successfully been produced in marginalist economics. To this end, he frequently used the labels A, B, and C, etc., and gives verbal equivalents to these only reluctantly and as a matter of convenience. He therefore chose, whenever possible, those words that have only minimal existing conceptual baggage within an already established social scientific discourse. The principal examples of this strategy are his use of ‘derivation’ rather than ‘ideology’ and ‘elite’ rather than ‘ruling class’.

It is on this basis that Pareto developed his theory of elites. The central tenet of his argument is that all societies are dominated by elites, that the composition of the elite varies from one society to another, and that membership of the elite changes over time in each particular society. Structure and change in elites must, therefore, be understood in relation to structural variations and changes in recruitment, traits, and capacities in the wider societies from which elites are recruited.

The Model of the Elite

Pareto’s definitive account of the elite occurs in a relatively short section of the Trattato (Pareto 1916: 1421–32). He begins his construction of a precise and relatively neutral terminology with the argument of Kobalinska that an elite is to be defined by its ‘superiority’ and not by any merit or other quality that it may – or may not – posses. It is simply measurement on a scale of superiority and inferiority that is to be used in identifying an elite. The moral and social qualities that its members may possess are ethical or empirical matters that are of secondary importance to the purely formal definition of the term.

In its most general sense, then, an elite of individuals can be identified in relation to any trait or attribute that can be measured on a scale of superiority and inferiority. Activities and occupations can be ranked according to the level or degree of each particular skill or trait that they manifest. Thus, there can be rank orderings of criminals, prostitutes, poets, artists, soldiers, chess players, and, we may add, footballers, stamp collectors, sociologists, and any other activity that can be imagined. An elite comprises those individuals with the highest ranking in a particular activity, and the overall elite of a society is the category of all such separate elites. The elite is the general category of individuals with the highest ranking in their social activities (Pareto 1916: 1423).

Pareto makes three key assumptions in his initial definition. First, he assumes that all occupations and activities can, in fact, be measured as continuous variables and that the level of measurement accorded to a particular individual is a matter of reliable scientific judgement. However, it is not at all clear that prostitutes, for example, can be graded objectively according to the skills and activities that they bring to their work or that all of their clients will value the same skills and abilities. Pareto believed, however, that the particular occupations in which he is especially interested – as I will show below – can, in fact, be ranked in this way.¹

His second assumption is that social positions embody a single or dominant ability or skill and that individuals can, therefore, be ranked by their social positions rather than directly by their individual traits. This means that political analysis is concerned with categories of social positions as much as it is with aggregates of the individuals who occupy them. I will explore some of the implications of this assumption below.

The third fundamental assumption made by Pareto is that an elite can be defined as the top percentage of individuals engaged in specific social activities, though the exact percentage figure was left unspecified. There is no single yardstick against which skills and abilities can be measured – even money cannot be treated as a universal measure of value – and so no absolute threshold measure can be specified for identifying an elite. An elite must be defined by a necessarily arbitrary rank ordering: as the top 0.5 percent, top 1 percent, top 10 percent, top 15 percent, or whatever, in a distribution. Pareto gives no indication of what percentage cut-off point he thinks it is feasible to use and so he bequeathed to all subsequent elite researchers the task of justifying the particular cut-off points that they must adopt in their studies.

Despite these problematic assumptions, Pareto proceeded to the second major step in his argument. He suggested that an overall social elite comprises the collection of all specialised elites in a society, but that any such overall elite can be divided into ‘governing’ and ‘non-governing’ sections. In this he again follows Kobalinska. The governing elite of a society comprises those individuals in activities related to the government of their society. Thus, chess players – no matter how skillful they may be at the game – are unlikely to form a part of the governing elite, while military officers and judges may well do so. This definition of a governing elite depends on a definition of ‘government’, though Pareto does not provide this. His model of the governing elite trades on conventional understandings of what it means to govern. The governing elite presumably includes all holders of political offices above a threshold level, but it must also be considered to extend beyond these to include all those having a significant influence over the activities of government (Pareto 1916: 1424). Again, Pareto provides no guidance on how his definitions can be operationalised in empirical work and simply assumes that the formal definition will be sufficient for his purposes.

A governing elite may include various ‘aristocracies’.² These are solidaristic and often hereditary social groups with a particular resource base, most typically economic or military. These are what Mosca (1923) referred to as ‘social forces’ in his more comprehensive account of the social basis of politics. Pareto himself does not go into any detailed discussion of aristocratic social forces, covering the ideas in just a few brief paragraphs. Pareto’s emphasis on the idea that governing elites can be characterised by the social and economic backgrounds of those who fill elite positions has, nevertheless, been the cornerstone of subsequent elite studies. Pareto himself introduced this idea in order to make the point that the social concept of an elite can change over time. Elite members may become weakened or their abilities may decline. They may decline and lose their power while new aristocracies rise to take their place. The turnover in the composition of the governing elite ensures that ‘History is a graveyard of aristocracies’ (Pareto 1916: 1430).

This idea was elaborated into Pareto’s famous thesis of the ‘circulation of elites’. He holds that any governing elite will include a diversity of individuals with a specific mix of skills and capacities. The particular mix of skills and capacities is the result of the circulation of individuals from one sphere of activity to another, whether this be within the elite or between the elite and the non-elite. He holds, therefore, that the political sociologist must study the ‘velocity of circulation’, by which he means the rate of social mobility from one group to another. The rate of mobility or circulation depends upon both the supply and the demand for particular skills and abilities.

A problem resulting from Pareto’s initial assumptions may be noted here. As I have shown, Pareto treated occupancy of a social position as an individual attribute or as an unproblematic, direct reflection of an individual attribute. This means that he saw individuals as owing their membership of the governing elite to their occupancy of particular positions and not simply to their possession of particular skills. It is difficult, therefore, to see why a changing distribution of skills would, other things being equal, result in a circulation or turnover in elite membership.

Pareto’s argument that there is a constant circulation of individuals and, therefore, a continual change in the composition of the governing elite, is central to his explanation of the equilibrating tendencies of social systems. Equilibrium is a fundamental system state for Pareto, and he seeks to show how governing elites contribute to the attainment or disturbance of such equilibrium. Equilibrium, he argued, is disturbed whenever the changing composition of skills and abilities is such that a governing elite no longer recruits individuals with the appropriate balance of skills and capacities. He states that:

the governing élite is always in a state of slow and continuous transformation. It follows on like a river, never being today what it was yesterday. From time to time sudden and violent disturbances occur. There is a flood – the river overflows its banks. Afterwards, the new governing élite again resumes its slow transformation (Pareto 1916: 1431).

The transformation of a governing elite may be slow and gradual, or it may involve the revolutionary overthrow of one group by another. To understand Pareto’s idea fully, however, his analysis of the forces behind changing skills and abilities must be followed through his analysis of social action.

Action, Residues, and Rationalisations

All actions, Pareto argues, follow from subjective states of mind. People base what they do on their understandings of the world and of the likely consequences of their actions. On this basis, Pareto identified two polar types of action that are to be the building blocks of his social theories. Some actions – those that Pareto referred to as ‘logical’ – are strategic or instrumental in orientation. These actions have a means-ends structure and are based on the technical knowledge possessed by the actor. They are ‘actions that use means appropriate to ends and which logically link means with ends’ (Pareto 1916: 77). The prototype of logical action is that which is objectively logical as well as subjectively logical. That is, such action can be judged as technically appropriate by scientific observers. Contrasted with this strategic form of action is the ‘non-logical’ type of action in which the means-ends relationship is irrelevant to the actor or in which a scientific observer would judge it to be technically unfounded. In non-logical action, emotional and value commitments prevail over technical rationality. Non-logical actions are driven by sentiments but are invariably rationalised in theories that aim to justify or legitimate these actions, obscuring the real subjectivity by casting the action in a more socially acceptable context of meanings.

It is not clear that the attitude that a scientific observer might take towards an action is especially crucial in delineating the two types. Pareto’s sociological analysis rests on the subjective orientation and organisation of action rather than its scientific status. The important distinguishing characteristic is the subjective orientation of the actor, and the two types of action can be regarded simply from the standpoint of the actor’s subjectivity and definition of the situation as strategic or expressive or committed.

Strategic – ‘logical’ – orientations are, Pareto argued, typical of artistic, scientific, and economic activity, and also characterise much military, political, and legal activity. Such action was central to his own economic theory (Pareto 1896–7). Expressive or committed – ‘non-logical’ – orientations, on the other hand, are typical of religion and magic but also of certain political activities. Pareto’s view of political activity and government is that it combines the logical and the non-logical, with the latter predominating. However strategic they may be, political activists frequently act from irrational or non-rational motives and delude both themselves and others about the true motives behind their actions. It is non-logical action that Pareto sees as having the greatest importance in explaining the emergence and circulation of elites and the justifications they offer for their exercise of power. For this reason, he saw an analysis of the forms of non-logical action as the essential foundations for an adequate theory of politics.

The sentiments that motivate non-logical action are relatively fixed and enduring appetites, tastes, inclinations, and interests. They are generally unconscious, though individuals may become partly aware of them through the traces or ‘residues’ that they leave in consciousness. These residual manifestations of the sentiments are the bases of the more extended theoretical elaborations that individuals derive from them. These derived theories are the imagined works of the mind that are more variable from one society to another and that comprise the rationalisations, justifications, and legitimations that individuals offer for their actions. It is the ‘residues’ and the ‘derivations’, rather than the sentiments themselves, that Pareto focuses on in his classification of the forms of non-logical action.

As already noted, Pareto gave no significance to the particular terminology that he used. The terms residues and derivations have a plausible meaning within the theoretical narrative that he builds, but he remarks that their commonsense meanings are of no relevance at all and that they are used simply as a matter of convenience instead of making constant reference to ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘C’ in quasialgebraic notation. The terms used are mere conventional labels.

Pareto identified six types of non-logical action on the basis of their residues, along with numerous sub-types (Pareto 1916: 516–9). These six types are those articulated as a tendency to combine, a tendency to form persisting relationships, a tendency for self-expression, a tendency to associate collectively with others, a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Pareto and the Elite
• 2 Talents and Obstacles: Pareto’s Morphological Schema and Contemporary Social Stratification Research
• 3 The Role of Sticking Points in Pareto’s Theory of Social Systems
• 4 Pareto, Machiavelli, and the Critique of Ideal Political Theory
• 5 The Idea of a Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty: Insight from Pareto
• 6 Pareto’s Theory of Elite Cycles: A Reconsideration and Application
• 7 Pareto, Mill and the Cognitive Explanation of Collective Beliefs: Unnoticed “Middle-Range Theories” in the Trattato
• 8 Pareto’s Rhetoric
• 9 Pareto’s Manuscript on Money and the Real Economy
• Index