Status Updates From Pareto and Political Theory...

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.

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.

No civilisation can do without its myths and deities, according to Pareto.

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.

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.

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’

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’

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.

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;

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.

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.

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.

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.

Coercion for purposes of ‘efficiency’ or ‘social justice’ is christened with the name of ‘liberty’.

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.

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’.

The idea that the ruling class is a ‘concrete unity’ or a metaphorical person is, in Pareto’s view, a Marxist fairy story

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.

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

Pareto was scornful of 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.he focuses on logical or technical deficiencies

He claims, in a manner similar to Burke, that human society is held together by deeply rooted sentiment

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.

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.

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

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.

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 f iction, since the masses tend to be idealistic and literal-minded (i.e. lion-like).

‘whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs.’

‘The assertion that men are objectively equal’, he declares, ‘is so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted.’

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’.

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.