August 19th marks the anniversary of the death of the Italian economist and political philosopher Vilfredo Pareto.
Sociology has long been dominated by Marxists and Leftists and is no longer seen as a fair or objective discipline. However, there have also been Conservative and right-wing sociologists, like Albert Hobbs and George Bourne. One of the most significant is the Italian thinker Vilfredo Pareto, known in particular for his insights into the nature of elites.
He was first an economist known for two economic concepts named after him: Pareto Optimality and Pareto’s Law of Income Distribution. Pareto Optimality refers to the optimal allocation of resources when it is only possible to make someone better off by making someone else worse off. Pareto’s Law of Income Distribution was derived from British data on income. and showed a hierarchical relationship between each income level and the number of people at the next income level. He found similar results for Prussia, Saxony, Paris, and some Italian cities. Pareto thought his law should be "provisionally accepted as universal" but realised that exceptions were possible. Since then many exceptions have been found. He later changed from economics to sociology, and then became involved with Mussolini due to the political situation of the time.
His work on elites is of great interest and presents a more concrete view than Marxism, drawing from human nature rather than abstract ideology. His idea of the "circulation of elites” examines differences in the temper and style of different aspects of the ruling class, something he explores with his concept of Lions and Foxes. These categories give insight into how we are ruled or misruled. Rather than vague and dated abstractions about class behaviour, they are grounded in how people actually behave.
Why do things not stay the same?
Modernist art critic Herbert Read wrote in Form in Modern Poetry (1932) that the nature of man had changed from character to personality, with character being permanent and having solid traits, while personality was more fluid and changeable.
Why are we decadent and no longer capable of defending ourselves? According to Pareto, the ruling elite is not a stable ruling class but is subject to change, namely the "circulation of elites." He thought this circulation occurs because each of the two categories capable of leadership has inherent weaknesses. Whilst the Lions' act forcefully. they lack imagination and cunning; conversely, the Foxes possess cunning but fail to act coercively.
Pareto disputed that democracy was a progressive form of government; it was, he said, just another form of elite rule. A topical insight was that Foxes often ignore invasions until it is too late. We should know. We are living through one now!
Those who rise to positions of power promote their own kind and demote those who are different until finally one of the two types dominates. A professed support for the dominant ideology is necessary to retain one's social position, and transgressions are usually rewarded with demotion and infamy. Ideological correctness is crucial to whether individuals have influence or are removed from power. I call this dominant group an “ideological caste.”
Pareto believed that in all societies, including democracies, there is a class that rules and a class that is ruled. On weak rulers he wrote:
It is similar now with the girly-men running Western countries.
Lions and Foxes
His idea of "Lions and Foxes" originated in Machiavelli's The Prince, a work that sought to formulate a rational plan of “how to rule” for new rulers who had no tradition to guide them. He advised the new ruler to be half beast and half man:
The Lions have what Pareto termed class II residues of group persistence. They have a sense of objectivity and permanence and believe in family, property, nation, church, and tradition. They are cautious in economics and value saving and “sound money.” They esteem character and duty over education and wealth, and will use force to uphold their values. They rely on their strength and stubbornness.
Foxes, tend to work in the talking professions, like journalism or the law, and live by their wits, shrewdness, deceit and fraud.
Pareto's Residues
There are six classes of Residues but the first two are relevant to our time. Class I residue is the Foxes’ instinct for "combination." They tend to manipulate words and construct abstruse theories and ideologies. They do not have a strong attachment to church, family, nation, or tradition, but can exploit these loyalties in others. They are creative in economics and politics, and promote change and novelty. They do not plan far ahead and do not look to a great future for their people. They rely on their wits to thwart challenges and respond with ad lib answers to questions.
Pareto made a distinction between changing elements, which he termed derivations, and relatively permanent ones, which he termed residues. The notion of residues is often misunderstood. He meant manifestations of sentiments or their equivalents, which are intermediate between the sentiments, which we cannot know directly, and the overt belief systems and acts that we can know and analyse. They are related to man's instincts but they do not cover all of them, since we can only discover those instincts that give rise to rationalisations in theories. Others remain hidden.
A feature of Foxes is their distaste for the martial and a stress on economics. They tend to cut back on defences with the elites acting as if we are in a safe world and have no enemies. They think they can buy other countries off with overseas aid and good will!
A Survey of Political Change Over the Last Two Centuries
Looking back over history clarifies the effect that elites changing from Lions to Foxes has had on our lives and the standing of the nation. In the case of Britain, the dominant anti-British tendency that favours "the other" can be traced to the aptly-named Charles James Fox, the original of the type that has persisted and increased down to the present. He exhibited the Foxes' tendency for abstractions and high-sounding ideals, which is evident from his support for the principles of the French Revolution regardless of the horrific realities. He regarded our war with France as an attempt to crush a noble experiment in human liberty. In 1786, speaking against the former Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings' response to an uprising by the Afghan Rohillas, he expressed the kind of universal abstractions that have become commonplace:
The radical MP Samuel Whitbread was even more anti-British than Fox, and excused the French while denouncing his own people. It was the dawning of our modern era when abstractions were coming to dominate and practical thinking was losing ground. Heroes like Nelson and Wellington were still at that time “role models” for young men, for their stoical and manly courage, selflessness, and high sense of duty. On the French Revolution, Edmund Burke foresaw the decline of the values that Pareto associated with the Lions:
The Duke of Wellington was a famous Lion. Like Churchill after him, Wellington had been uninterested in education as a schoolboy. Military types are typically less interested in ideas and theories. Although he defeated Napoleon, he was finally defeated by the Foxes, Cobden and Bright, who promoted free trade as a means of bringing about world peace. In 1846, the year the Corn Laws were repealed, Cobden said:
Victorian historian James Anthony Froude lamented that we had chosen economics over duty. Foxes were taking over from Lions and this can be traced through the century as economics replaced values like "nobility," "duty," and "honour". It was Disraeli who turned the Conservatives into an opportunistic party from one of tradition. He was a progressive Tory, and sympathetic to some of the Chartists' demands, and argued for an alliance between the landed aristocracy and the working class against the increasing power of the middle class. In 1842 he founded the Young England group to promote the view that the rich should use their power to protect the poor from exploitation by the middle class. During the twenty years which separated the Corn Laws and the Second Reform Bill, Disraeli sought Tory-Radical alliances - though unsuccessfully.
His main rival the Liberal Gladstone was a Fox. He was opposed to General Gordon, and tarried while that brave man was murdered in Khartoum. Gordon expressed the values of Lions in his journal, referring to “honour to his country”. The man who finally avenged Gordon and re-took Khartoum, Lord Kitchener, was worshipped by the public but attacked in the Commons as a "butcher" and "imperialist" by the Foxes. He was pushed out of the War Cabinet by Lloyd George, another Fox, who formed the War Cabinet, which had dictatorial powers and took over the running of the war. A reformer, Lloyd George also out-manoeuvred and replaced General Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial Staff with one of his own kind, Sir Henry Wilson, who wrote more about the balls he attended and the dignitaries he met than anything connected to honour and duty. Robertson was forced to resign on 11 February 1918, taking the lesser role of Commander-in-Chief of the British Home Forces. Wilson had connived with Lloyd George to create the Supreme War Council, something which Robertson had vociferously opposed.
Robertson is the only man in history to rise to the position of Field Marshall from private. A staunch supporter of Sir Douglas Haig, Robertson acted to prevent Lloyd George's attempts to divert effort from the Western to the Eastern Front; unlike Lloyd George, Robertson was a keen 'Westerner', believing that the war could only be won on the Western Front. In his book Soldiers and Statesman 1914 – 1916 (1926) Robertson repeatedly stresses “duty”. He highlighted the anti-military bias of Foxes when he wrote of how Lloyd George and his war cabinet took a private house to seclude themselves from the Generals, "where they sit twice a day and occupy their whole time with military policy, which is my job; a little body of politicians quite ignorant of war and all its needs, are trying to run the war themselves."
Stanley Baldwin turned the Conservatives from a party that was a bulwark of the Empire to one focused on offering inducements to voters such as "houses" and "prosperity." A century of disarmament, fueled by both sides of the Commons – Tories preaching appeasement while dozing in their London clubs; Socialists fantasizing about internationalism, disarmament, and submitting to the League of Nations when we were the most powerful country – left us weak and nearly defenceless.
Before being removed or neutralised, Lions are first stigmatised. The Lion Churchill spent a decade in slandered obscurity as a "warmonger" before being needed to fend off Wolves. A Lion called Enoch Powell was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet by the arch-Fox Heath, who has since admitted misleading Parliament and thus the people into the federal state of Europe, saying that it would merely be a trading arrangement. Fox John Major deceived us when he pretended that we would retain control over our borders after his legal advisers had advised him that they had been signed away at Maastricht.
We have had constant moral outrages, such as Blair’s infamous act of sending our troops to war on a lie among his many other lies. Michael Howard, the Conservative leader in the 2005 election, campaigned on immigration control when he knew full well that the European Union would not allow him to implement his plans even had he meant to do so. In June 2004 it was revealed that he was an investor in communications firm Incepta. A subsidiary company, Citigate Lloyd Northover, won two Home Office contracts to develop websites and communications technology to speed up applications from immigrants to enter the UK and also benefitted from work for the Immigration and Nationality Directorate website that helped facilitate the admission and settling of asylum seekers.
Pareto clearly foresaw the deterioration of the Western world:
Cultural Marxists like university educated chief police officers because they are open to politically correct ideas and willing to enforce the Cultural Marxist agenda. The best sort of people to be appointed chief police officers would be former military officers as they understand human nature and how to best curb its excesses. In his autobiography Cloak Without a Dagger, the former chief constable of Sheffield and Glasgow and Director of MI5, Captain Sir Percy Sillitoe, gave this insight into human nature:
First published here in 2014.
Sociology has long been dominated by Marxists and Leftists and is no longer seen as a fair or objective discipline. However, there have also been Conservative and right-wing sociologists, like Albert Hobbs and George Bourne. One of the most significant is the Italian thinker Vilfredo Pareto, known in particular for his insights into the nature of elites.
He was first an economist known for two economic concepts named after him: Pareto Optimality and Pareto’s Law of Income Distribution. Pareto Optimality refers to the optimal allocation of resources when it is only possible to make someone better off by making someone else worse off. Pareto’s Law of Income Distribution was derived from British data on income. and showed a hierarchical relationship between each income level and the number of people at the next income level. He found similar results for Prussia, Saxony, Paris, and some Italian cities. Pareto thought his law should be "provisionally accepted as universal" but realised that exceptions were possible. Since then many exceptions have been found. He later changed from economics to sociology, and then became involved with Mussolini due to the political situation of the time.
His work on elites is of great interest and presents a more concrete view than Marxism, drawing from human nature rather than abstract ideology. His idea of the "circulation of elites” examines differences in the temper and style of different aspects of the ruling class, something he explores with his concept of Lions and Foxes. These categories give insight into how we are ruled or misruled. Rather than vague and dated abstractions about class behaviour, they are grounded in how people actually behave.
Why do things not stay the same?
Modernist art critic Herbert Read wrote in Form in Modern Poetry (1932) that the nature of man had changed from character to personality, with character being permanent and having solid traits, while personality was more fluid and changeable.
Why are we decadent and no longer capable of defending ourselves? According to Pareto, the ruling elite is not a stable ruling class but is subject to change, namely the "circulation of elites." He thought this circulation occurs because each of the two categories capable of leadership has inherent weaknesses. Whilst the Lions' act forcefully. they lack imagination and cunning; conversely, the Foxes possess cunning but fail to act coercively.
Pareto disputed that democracy was a progressive form of government; it was, he said, just another form of elite rule. A topical insight was that Foxes often ignore invasions until it is too late. We should know. We are living through one now!
Those who rise to positions of power promote their own kind and demote those who are different until finally one of the two types dominates. A professed support for the dominant ideology is necessary to retain one's social position, and transgressions are usually rewarded with demotion and infamy. Ideological correctness is crucial to whether individuals have influence or are removed from power. I call this dominant group an “ideological caste.”
Pareto believed that in all societies, including democracies, there is a class that rules and a class that is ruled. On weak rulers he wrote:
"Any elite which is not prepared to join in battle to defend its position is in full decadence, and all that is left to it is to give way to another elite having the virile qualities it lacks. It is pure day-dreaming to imagine that the humanitarian principles it may have proclaimed will be applied to it: its vanquishers will stun it with the implacable cry, 'Vae Victis.' ['Woe to the vanquished.'] The knife of the guillotine was being sharpened in the shadows when, at the end of the eighteenth century, the ruling classes in France were engrossed in developing their 'sensibility.' This idle and frivolous society, living like a parasite off the country, discoursed at its elegant supper parties of delivering the world from superstition and of crushing 'l'Infâme,' all unsuspecting that it was itself going to be crushed."
It is similar now with the girly-men running Western countries.
Lions and Foxes
His idea of "Lions and Foxes" originated in Machiavelli's The Prince, a work that sought to formulate a rational plan of “how to rule” for new rulers who had no tradition to guide them. He advised the new ruler to be half beast and half man:
"So, as a Prince is forced to know how to act like a beast, he should learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion is defenceless against traps and a fox is defenceless against wolves. Therefore one must be a fox in order to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves."
The Lions have what Pareto termed class II residues of group persistence. They have a sense of objectivity and permanence and believe in family, property, nation, church, and tradition. They are cautious in economics and value saving and “sound money.” They esteem character and duty over education and wealth, and will use force to uphold their values. They rely on their strength and stubbornness.
Foxes, tend to work in the talking professions, like journalism or the law, and live by their wits, shrewdness, deceit and fraud.
Pareto's Residues
There are six classes of Residues but the first two are relevant to our time. Class I residue is the Foxes’ instinct for "combination." They tend to manipulate words and construct abstruse theories and ideologies. They do not have a strong attachment to church, family, nation, or tradition, but can exploit these loyalties in others. They are creative in economics and politics, and promote change and novelty. They do not plan far ahead and do not look to a great future for their people. They rely on their wits to thwart challenges and respond with ad lib answers to questions.
Pareto made a distinction between changing elements, which he termed derivations, and relatively permanent ones, which he termed residues. The notion of residues is often misunderstood. He meant manifestations of sentiments or their equivalents, which are intermediate between the sentiments, which we cannot know directly, and the overt belief systems and acts that we can know and analyse. They are related to man's instincts but they do not cover all of them, since we can only discover those instincts that give rise to rationalisations in theories. Others remain hidden.
A feature of Foxes is their distaste for the martial and a stress on economics. They tend to cut back on defences with the elites acting as if we are in a safe world and have no enemies. They think they can buy other countries off with overseas aid and good will!
A Survey of Political Change Over the Last Two Centuries
Looking back over history clarifies the effect that elites changing from Lions to Foxes has had on our lives and the standing of the nation. In the case of Britain, the dominant anti-British tendency that favours "the other" can be traced to the aptly-named Charles James Fox, the original of the type that has persisted and increased down to the present. He exhibited the Foxes' tendency for abstractions and high-sounding ideals, which is evident from his support for the principles of the French Revolution regardless of the horrific realities. He regarded our war with France as an attempt to crush a noble experiment in human liberty. In 1786, speaking against the former Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings' response to an uprising by the Afghan Rohillas, he expressed the kind of universal abstractions that have become commonplace:
"By those laws which are to be found in Europe, Africa, and Asia – that are found among all mankind, those principles of equity and humanity implanted in our hearts which have their existence in the feelings of mankind…"
The radical MP Samuel Whitbread was even more anti-British than Fox, and excused the French while denouncing his own people. It was the dawning of our modern era when abstractions were coming to dominate and practical thinking was losing ground. Heroes like Nelson and Wellington were still at that time “role models” for young men, for their stoical and manly courage, selflessness, and high sense of duty. On the French Revolution, Edmund Burke foresaw the decline of the values that Pareto associated with the Lions:
“It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched…The age of chivalry is gone. The age of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.”
The Duke of Wellington was a famous Lion. Like Churchill after him, Wellington had been uninterested in education as a schoolboy. Military types are typically less interested in ideas and theories. Although he defeated Napoleon, he was finally defeated by the Foxes, Cobden and Bright, who promoted free trade as a means of bringing about world peace. In 1846, the year the Corn Laws were repealed, Cobden said:
"I believe that the physical gain will be the smallest gain to humanity from the success of this principle. I look farther; I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe – drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace."
Victorian historian James Anthony Froude lamented that we had chosen economics over duty. Foxes were taking over from Lions and this can be traced through the century as economics replaced values like "nobility," "duty," and "honour". It was Disraeli who turned the Conservatives into an opportunistic party from one of tradition. He was a progressive Tory, and sympathetic to some of the Chartists' demands, and argued for an alliance between the landed aristocracy and the working class against the increasing power of the middle class. In 1842 he founded the Young England group to promote the view that the rich should use their power to protect the poor from exploitation by the middle class. During the twenty years which separated the Corn Laws and the Second Reform Bill, Disraeli sought Tory-Radical alliances - though unsuccessfully.
His main rival the Liberal Gladstone was a Fox. He was opposed to General Gordon, and tarried while that brave man was murdered in Khartoum. Gordon expressed the values of Lions in his journal, referring to “honour to his country”. The man who finally avenged Gordon and re-took Khartoum, Lord Kitchener, was worshipped by the public but attacked in the Commons as a "butcher" and "imperialist" by the Foxes. He was pushed out of the War Cabinet by Lloyd George, another Fox, who formed the War Cabinet, which had dictatorial powers and took over the running of the war. A reformer, Lloyd George also out-manoeuvred and replaced General Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial Staff with one of his own kind, Sir Henry Wilson, who wrote more about the balls he attended and the dignitaries he met than anything connected to honour and duty. Robertson was forced to resign on 11 February 1918, taking the lesser role of Commander-in-Chief of the British Home Forces. Wilson had connived with Lloyd George to create the Supreme War Council, something which Robertson had vociferously opposed.
Robertson is the only man in history to rise to the position of Field Marshall from private. A staunch supporter of Sir Douglas Haig, Robertson acted to prevent Lloyd George's attempts to divert effort from the Western to the Eastern Front; unlike Lloyd George, Robertson was a keen 'Westerner', believing that the war could only be won on the Western Front. In his book Soldiers and Statesman 1914 – 1916 (1926) Robertson repeatedly stresses “duty”. He highlighted the anti-military bias of Foxes when he wrote of how Lloyd George and his war cabinet took a private house to seclude themselves from the Generals, "where they sit twice a day and occupy their whole time with military policy, which is my job; a little body of politicians quite ignorant of war and all its needs, are trying to run the war themselves."
Stanley Baldwin turned the Conservatives from a party that was a bulwark of the Empire to one focused on offering inducements to voters such as "houses" and "prosperity." A century of disarmament, fueled by both sides of the Commons – Tories preaching appeasement while dozing in their London clubs; Socialists fantasizing about internationalism, disarmament, and submitting to the League of Nations when we were the most powerful country – left us weak and nearly defenceless.
Before being removed or neutralised, Lions are first stigmatised. The Lion Churchill spent a decade in slandered obscurity as a "warmonger" before being needed to fend off Wolves. A Lion called Enoch Powell was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet by the arch-Fox Heath, who has since admitted misleading Parliament and thus the people into the federal state of Europe, saying that it would merely be a trading arrangement. Fox John Major deceived us when he pretended that we would retain control over our borders after his legal advisers had advised him that they had been signed away at Maastricht.
We have had constant moral outrages, such as Blair’s infamous act of sending our troops to war on a lie among his many other lies. Michael Howard, the Conservative leader in the 2005 election, campaigned on immigration control when he knew full well that the European Union would not allow him to implement his plans even had he meant to do so. In June 2004 it was revealed that he was an investor in communications firm Incepta. A subsidiary company, Citigate Lloyd Northover, won two Home Office contracts to develop websites and communications technology to speed up applications from immigrants to enter the UK and also benefitted from work for the Immigration and Nationality Directorate website that helped facilitate the admission and settling of asylum seekers.
Pareto clearly foresaw the deterioration of the Western world:
"The plutocracy has invented countless makeshift programs, such as generating enormous public debt that plutocrats know they will never be able to repay, levies on capital, taxes which exhaust the incomes of those who do not speculate... The principal goal of each of these measures is to deceive the multitudes... When a society's system of values deteriorates to the point where hard work is denigrated and 'easy money' extolled, where authority gives way to anarchy and justice to legal chicanery, such a society stands face to face with ruin... It is a specific trait of weak governments. Among the causes of the weakness two especially are to be noted: humanitarianism and cowardice – the cowardice that comes natural to decadent aristocracies and is in part natural, in part calculated, in "speculator" governments that are primarily concerned with material gain. The humanitarian spirit ... is a malady peculiar to spineless individuals who are richly endowed with certain Class I residues that they have dressed up in sentimental garb."
Cultural Marxists like university educated chief police officers because they are open to politically correct ideas and willing to enforce the Cultural Marxist agenda. The best sort of people to be appointed chief police officers would be former military officers as they understand human nature and how to best curb its excesses. In his autobiography Cloak Without a Dagger, the former chief constable of Sheffield and Glasgow and Director of MI5, Captain Sir Percy Sillitoe, gave this insight into human nature:
"There is only one way to deal with the gangster mentality. You must show that you are not afraid. If you stand up to them and they realise you mean business they will knuckle under. The element of beast in man whether it comes from an unhappy and impoverished background, or from his own undisciplined lustful appetites, will respond exactly as a wild beast of the jungle responds – to nothing but greater force and greater firmness of purpose."
First published here in 2014.
