Lions and foxes: revisiting Pareto’s bestiary for the age of late pluto-democracy

ABSTRACT

Vilfredo Pareto’s legacy is uncertain; while his reputation in economics is secure, references to Pareto in contemporary sociology are few and fleeting. Sociologists and members of the public who are aware of Pareto’s non-economic work likely associate the Italian polymath with a single zoological image: the lions and the foxes. This phrase has found some currency in political sociology but has also recently been employed in the popular press to explain contemporary social and political change. Yet such references are often only vaguely connected to Pareto’s larger intellectual project. This article situates Pareto’s imagery of lions and foxes in relationship to his larger work in order to transform this popular-but-vague image into useable sociological concepts. These concepts are then used to interpret contemporary political changes. Several arguments about Pareto’s work are made in the course of this discussion: that Pareto was a cultural sociologist, that a culturalist understanding of religion played a central part in his explanations of social change, and that his theory of elites should supplement existing elite theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Vilfredo Pareto
• elites
• corruption
• populism
• religious faith
• historical cycles
• plutocracy
• democracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Clayton Fordahl is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Memphis. His interests include religion, politics, conflict, and social theory. His first book, The Ultimate Sacrifice, was published by Routledge in 2020.

Notes

1 The titles of Pareto’s works have tended to be creatively translated. Though quotations from Pareto’s major treatise are taken from Arthur Livingstone’s 1935 English translation, published as The Mind and Society, I refer to the text by its original Italian title to avoid confusion.

2 Given the proliferation of editions, all citations of the Trattato are presented as section numbers. Quotations are from: Pareto (1935).