collapsedsquid:

Francis was introduced to this school of thought by his study of Vilfredo Pareto, whom he discovered through the work of James Burnham. Pareto was an early-twentieth-century Italian sociologist who sought to construct a “science of power” (in ­Burnham’s words) by observing recurring patterns of change in political history. With this approach, ­Pareto believed, it was possible to discern universal laws of social organization. He argued that all political societies, except for the most primitive, were dominated by an elite minority. Even modern societies that called themselves democratic in fact functioned as oligarchies. Pareto did not endorse elite government in the form of aristocracy, and he denied that elites were better, wiser, or more virtuous than the multitude. Elites were simply inevitable, and political history was the story of how the composition of the dominant class “circulated” over time, according to the changing character of a nation.

Pareto explained minority rule through its use of ideology, whose nature, he argued, was hidden even from its beneficiaries. Elites governed society largely for their own benefit, but they rarely ruled through violence or intimidation. They ruled through myths, stories, and ideals that justified their domination by endowing it with moral credibility. Pareto was one of the first scholars of ideology, and he carefully examined discrepancies between the abstract content of political rhetoric and its real-world uses. He distinguished between the “formal” and “real” meanings of political ideology. The formal meaning of an ideology is communicated by its explicit concepts and values, and can be understood philosophically. Its real meaning is revealed through its intended effects on political behavior, which are disguised by its rhetoric. Though Pareto saw ideologies as self-serving, he did not believe their sole purpose was to deceive the masses. They reflected a genuine human desire, shared by both rulers and ruled, to live together on the perceived basis of morality rather than force.

Francis used Pareto’s work to explain the impotence of American conservatism. Why had conservatives, despite election victories, failed to reduce the size of government or stop social liberalization? Francis had a cynical view of Republican politicians, attacking even Reagan at the height of his popularity. But he placed the blame on conservative intellectuals, who had made two compounding errors. The first was to take the formal meaning of liberalism at face value. Under the popular slogan “ideas have consequences,” they had assumed that liberal ideas, rather than the political interests they advanced, were their primary enemy. Francis’s writing in the 1980s frequently attacked influential conservatives such as Irving Kristol, George Will, and Richard John ­Neuhaus, criticizing their “esoteric” preoccupations. While conservatives were staging conferences to ponder the moral foundations of democracy, liberal intellectuals were perfecting strategies for seizing institutional power. Neuhaus may have offered “formal defenses” of traditional institutions, ­Francis complained, but his respect for civil debate only served to “legitimize managerial control.”

Tradcaths at First Things wrote a piece on Sam Francis