Residues and Derivations: Vilfredo Pareto and Affective Politics

This essay revisits Vilfredo Pareto’s attempt in his Treatise on General Sociology (1916) to classify the non-rational sentiments animating social and political life, considering implications for recent theories of affective politics. Long known for having combined an irrational psychology with a model of elite rule, Pareto has more recently been cited as a predecessor for behavioral economists. However, I show, Pareto described sentiments as sources of creativity as well as inertia and supposed they are modified by complex, reciprocal interactions with ideologies and environmental conditions. As I argue, Pareto’s dynamic account of residues jeopardized his methodological aspirations, portending challenges for those seeking to identify and manage popular sentiments today. By the same token, it prefigured theories of “affect” developed by scholars who envision sentiments not only as determinants of preferences and alignments but also as sources of their undoing and transformation. In light of Pareto’s problematic attempts to reconcile tensions in his study, I examine challenges facing those who align theories of affect with radical democratic programs. I conclude that radical democratic approaches to affective politics, like their managerial counterparts, are neither logically derived from nor precluded by human psychology per se, but instead compromised by prevailing configurations of sentiments, ideologies, and practices.