Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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fashion to the manner in which sociological visions, classical and otherwise, always 
have limitations, the reception of classical ideas in the past can often reflect the 
concerns of the context and tell us more about the interpreter than the work being 
interpreted. A good deal of the sociological reception of Pareto, for example, took 
place in the early 1930s at Harvard in particular circumstances and in the light of 
particular questions and agendas. This atmosphere impacted on the work of Parsons, 
of Homans and the Hawthorne studies. Each generation needs to reengage with 
the classics, not only to see how the classics speak to current situations but also to 
liberate the reader from the sometimes oppressive or misdirected readings carried out 
by the host of previous sociological readers. Often such re-readings can rediscover 
or even uncover new ideas precisely because they have been overlooked, ignored or 
quite inexplicitly misunderstood. We would not want our own interpretations of the 
classics to be similarly received by succeeding generations of sociologists and we 
can guard against that occurring by serious engagement with the classics. 
Hence the choice is not strictly between – getting on with interpreting the 
contemporary social world or immersing oneself in the classics at the neglect 
of the contemporary social world. Working hard at either of these coal faces can 
result in never looking to the side of one’s focus, let alone visiting another mine. 
Hermeneutically working on one concentration in order to subsequently interrogate 
the other is not as straight forward as it seems – or rather, one should not imagine that 
the results are going to be the same, if the point of departure and the purpose of the 
interrogation of the classic, is itself dissimilar. The point I would like to make here is 
that if the classics are only ever visited from the perspective of raiding them for what 
they might say in relation to a problem being investigated by the researcher than this 
process is little different from the ‘research as rape’ castigated by feminist researchers 
in other contexts. There would result very little dialogue between present conditions 
and classical theorisations and it would probably be more accurate to say that the 
visit to the classics was not necessary – one danger in not consulting the classics at 
all is to undermine the cumulative practice of sociology and to re-invent the wheel 
– as so often happens in sociological work. Further, to raid the classic can create 
an atomisation of the source (taking concepts and themes out of context): a more 
effective way to create a Weberian sociology or a Paretian political psychology is to 
begin from the texts themselves, to reconstruct the project as designed by the classical 
theorist and continue to work in the letter and spirit of the source. In sociology, one 
fears that all too often the spirit rather than the letter has directed further research in 
the name of the founder; but this is to be preferred to the ‘raid’. Even so, the ‘raid is 
to be preferred – despite its damaging implications – to total lack of engagement with 
the classics on the grounds that they are irrelevant to current concerns. 
For some in sociological circles therefore it undoubtedly appears to be the 
case that classical sociology is part of the history of sociology in the manner that 
museums display artefacts from the past because those artefacts require preservation 
and educational presentation if they are to be related to correctly: they are part of a 
heritage whose current meaning is actually provided by the museum itself (in this 
case the museum are the scholars concerned with classical sociology) and from which 
only historical meanings can be gathered. However, as curators of the Museum of the 
American Indian in Washington DC learnt early on, the presentation of individual 

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Series Editor’s Preface
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tribal histories would be inaccurate if it failed to acknowledge and include in the 
design and communication the very people who still lived by these traditions and 
for whom they were no museum piece but an element of current practice and belief. 
That is to say, museums that are not interactive and do not reflect an integration of 
past and present tend not to be successful. 
A more accurate description of what one might hope for, and in many cases 
is happening, would be to say, persisting with the notion of preservation, that the 
study of classical sociology functions like an interactive museum where the artefacts 
are not housed at all. That is, there is no working distinction between classical and 
contemporary sociology – there is no museum for classical sociologists concerned 
with modernity: rather, following an early immersion in the classics of sociology, 
classical concepts, theories and perspectives will already be part of the scholar’s 
sociological imagination, and, as almost second nature there will be little need 
for deliberate methodological reflection as to how the classics are being used 
when working sociologically. The classics are continually being rethought as new 
conditions and theorisations are encountered.
In this scenario the practice of rethinking the classics is not restricted to motivations 
to keep the classics ‘alive’ – as might be the case if the classics were to made into 
items to be kept in the museum. Rather, the rethinking also involves reevaluating the 
relationship to the classics as modernity phases into new forms, whether of versions 
of late, high, radical, or post modernity. In this mode, even when the sociologist 
considers the classical tradition to be unable to address new societal configurations 
the ‘new’ form of theorising will often place itself in relation to that classical tradition 
to underline just how ‘new’ the theorising is and just how ‘different’ contemporary 
conditions are: if class is no longer an explanatory variable or if the concept of society 
needs to be replaced by theorisations ‘beyond society’, and if experiences of risk, of 
mobilities and of technological innovations are far beyond the horizons, even of the 
imaginations of the classical writers, the analysis often convinces and explains these 
dramatic developments in terms of the trajectories that use the classics as a point of 
departure. That is, if one reason for studying the classics is to show where they are no 
longer useful, this can only be achieved, and of course is worth achieving, by accurate 
and historical and detailed reference to that tradition itself. 
There is another way of conceiving the role of classical sociology in sociology and 
for justifying the study of the classical sociologists that might be offered in situations 
where the analysis of the contemporary does not currently draw on the classical tradition 
in the manner described above. This way of conceiving the role of classical sociology 
and those studying the classics would also apply to those situations where even the 
practitioners mentioned above do not have knowledge of or time for a range of classical 
sociology that has yet to come within their ken for a variety of reasons. The analogy I 
am thinking of would be to consider those sociologists who concern themselves with 
the writings and thoughts and legacies of classical sociologists as akin to protectors 
of the writings – custodians of the transmission of texts whose oracle like status is 
only re-enlivened when a lonely traveller traverses the difficult path to the monastery 
where the traditions are kept alive and consulted by the learned scribes working away 
in the scriptorium. The texts being kept alive by the keepers of the flame for those very 
moments when events in the outside world give rise to pilgrims who are willing to make 

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