Pareto's Prophecy

Vilfredo Pareto's Rise and Fall of Elites is often read as a foundational text in the modern disciplines of sociology and political science. Or else, it is viewed as a proto-fascist right-wing screed. Reading it for the first time yesterday, however, I found it to be neither of those things. More than anything, the book is an outstanding work of literary satire, directed—like all the best satire—not toward any one ideology, but against the excesses and hypocrisies of social mores writ large. 

Perhaps the most unexpected thing about this short treatise (which can easily be finished in an afternoon) is how funny it is. And indeed, this appears to be consistent with Pareto's intentions. His literary hero in the book is the ancient satirist Lucian. And in tone, the book puts one in mind more than anything of a Tom Wolfe essay about bourgeois radicals circa 1968. Or, to take a nineteenth century example, Pareto seems to be writing in the tradition of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy. 

Pareto shares Arnold's sense of irony; as well as his general loathing and dread of the vindictive rabble. In this regard, both writers partake of the classical liberal tradition, more than anything else. They seek to protect the eccentric individual from the aroused fury and cruelty of the populace at large. Pareto and Arnold also have in common, though (less admirably), the same Archie-Bunkerish grievance: both spend pages on the alleged dereliction of the police in failing to suppress riotous activity. 

It is passages like these that might seem to lend Pareto to a right-wing interpretation. And indeed, one can selectively quote from his book to arrive at a conservative or even MAGA reading. In places, Pareto does appear to foretell some of the same hobbyhorses as contemporary right-wing media. He accuses police of giving into protesters, and the court system and elites of bending over backward to favor criminals and law-breakers (shades of Fox News on the topic of West Coast "cop-free zones" circa 2020, e.g.). 

Likewise, Pareto's humorous rants about how the bourgeoisie are the only ones who appear to be buying all up all this socialist literature, creating the market for the very forces that seek to destroy them and upend their way of life, could be seen to resonate with certain right-wing critiques today of so-called "wokeness." Replace "socialist" with "anti-racist," in the above sentence, and one can imagine a contemporary screed about wealthy suburbanites and their White Fragility reading groups.

A right-wing reading of Pareto's book, however, would miss the fact that he is equally withering on the topic of nationalists, jingoists, "patriots," and anti-Semites. The real object of Pareto's scorn throughout the book, therefore, is the ideologue, of any party—the person who tries to distort reality to make it fit their preferred convictions, rather than adapting their ideas to the environment. And this, more than anything, is what places Pareto in the tradition of the satirists rather than the polemicists. 

In my previous post on this blog, after all, I drew on both Henri Bergson's theory of humor and Northrop Frye's anatomy of satire to point out that the chief object of the satirist's ridicule, throughout history, has always been the crank and the ideologue. Bergson would say this is because the essence of the comic is found wherever human beings behave as machines, rather than as supple and adaptable living organisms; and there is nothing more dead, unresponsive, and calcified than a dogmatic ideology. 

And since this is his true aim, Pareto spends as much time dunking on prohibitionists, temperance advocates, "miracle diet" cranks, spiritualists, crusaders against "immoral literature," and modern Catholic scientists who try to defend the Church's persecution of Galileo, as he does the political Left. The trend in modern society that he really detests is the broad revitalization of what he calls the "religious sentiment," whether it masquerades under secular humanitarian or explicitly clerical garb. 

And indeed, Pareto's fundamental contention still rings true today. Wherever there are people devoted to a political cause, they will come ever more to resemble a religious group in their devotion. And this comes with all the positives and negatives that such a comparison might imply. People become capable of admirable sacrifice to the cause, of superhuman devotion—but they also begin to develop the persecuting spirit that haunts all sectaries. They start to police their own community for the slightest deviations. 

Pareto provides one example in the footnotes that does indeed seem to presage modern debates about "cancel culture" on the Left. He describes an incident in which a member of the socialist party was expelled for taking his brother's side in a duel, because this was seen as dangerous backsliding into feudal custom. A writer in the socialist periodical Avanti, however, protested against the excommunication. He worried it set a dangerous precedent of establishing purity tests that would turn the party into a sect. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pareto tells us, that same editorial writer, who questioned the decision to expel the member, was subsequently expelled in turn, for taking the latter's side. There is a circularity here that is all too characteristic of political sects that have advanced on their journey to becoming ecclesiastical societies. One is reminded of the various liberal intellectuals who were cancelled for signing statements denouncing cancel culture, thereby proving their argument for them. 

All of that happened not so long ago, by the way. Yet already, many people reading this now, or in years shortly to come, will think I am making this up. As Pareto writes, people—when told about the excesses of contemporary ideologists in an age of "religious" revival—"will regard as exaggerated certain accounts which are indeed understatements." (Zetterberg trans.) Similarly, they will have a hard time believing that people ever took all these ideologies as seriously—and carried them as far—as they did in our time. 

So it will eventually be with our era as well—if, indeed, this has not already happened. Pareto is not wrong to find the element of the ludicrous, therefore, in contemporary politics. This does not mean, however, that I suggest we agree with Pareto. 

Fundamentally, Pareto is engaged in what Northrop Frye called the "satire of the low norm"—the literature that pokes fun at humanity's attempts to climb into the moral and philosophical empyrean, when it cannot even manage to avoid the basest hypocrisies and cruelties in everyday life. But however effective and salutary such satire may be, this does not mean it is the final word. Just because we often fall short of even the "low norm," that does not mean the low norm is all we should actually strive for. 

If Pareto is right—and I think he is—that social life is made up in part of rising crests and falling troughs of "religious sentiment"—this does not mean the crests are all bad and the troughs are all good. Our political life needs to be revitalized at times by the crests. We need to occasionally rediscover our ability to hope for something greater—some ultimate justice—beyond what our ordinary political and social life delivers. And we should fear the gullies in this sentiment just as much as we do its peaks—for these too can awaken forces of cruelty and violence of a quite different kind. 

On the final page of his book, after all—which was originally published in 1901—Pareto utters a prophetic observation that parts of continental Europe may be primed for a "military dictatorship." This is indeed what happened—except worse—including in his own country. This is what can come when the reaction against humane sentiment takes hold. The next generation after Pareto learned too well the lessons he taught about the hypocrisies of weak-kneed humanitarians and hypocritical bourgeois liberals. They failed to heed, however, his even more salient warnings against the danger of aroused nationalism.

As our society goes through its own quite similar trough today—the cynical, jaded era of the present, which has followed upon the crest of the religious sentiment that occurred around 2020—the one that is so often shorthanded as "wokeness" (it has also been described, to underline the point, as the "Great Awokening")—we have every reason to heed this latter warning. The types of reactionaries that society may be inclined to empower, in the wake of a receding crest of humanitarian sentiment and progressive hopes, may prove to be infinitely more dangerous than even the most annoying health food cranks and spiritual faddists.