power it would give to the executive. Nevertheless this constitutional position
has not entirely removed the need for the function to be fulfilled, and there are
those who would wish to argue that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the
National Guard in the USA and perhaps the Special Patrol Groups of British
police authorities are little different, and scarcely preferable, to fully-fledged
paramilitary forces. Whatever institutional arrangement is made to cope with
it, the problem of public order policing is endemic, and as both police and
public dislike the role being fulfilled by ordinary police forces, the argument
for a special force is very powerful.
Pareto
Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) was the most important of the Italian political
sociologists called the ‘New Machiavellians’ who started the powere ́litism
school of analysis of modern societies, which developed, via the work of
people likeSchumpeterandDahl, into modernpluralism. Pareto, who was
at least as famous as an economist, attached especial importance to the fact, as
he saw it, that the bulk of human behaviour was essentially non-rational,
though justified and explained by rationalizations, myths and ideologies
stemming from instinctual drives. These basic drives, common to all societies
and all times, which he called ‘residues’, are masked by the justifying myths,
‘derivations’, but are the real source of social patterns, rather than the apparent
ideologyof a society.
In a theoretically complex way Pareto links this general proposition about
human behaviour to a thesis about the structure of power in a society.
According to him all societies have been, and always will be, ruled by a small
e ́lite governing in their own interest (seeoligarchy), and keeping the masses in
order either, depending on the nature of their ‘residues’, by force or by guile.
These e ́lites arise originally because political talents, just as much as intellectual
or musical talents, are unequally distributed in a population. However, a
governing e ́lite naturally wishes to bequeath its position to its offspring, and
e ́lites regularly erect entry barriers against those who, though from the masses,
have the capacity to govern. Over time the natural inequalities of talent in the
population produce a revolutionary leadership among the lower classes of
greater capacity (and greater preparedness to use force) than the ailing ruling
class, and the latter is overthrown. It is replaced though by the new ‘e ́lite’,
which will eventually suffer the fate of its victims. This theory, which has
surface resemblances to the views ofMarxismon the class struggle, has been
termed the ‘circulation of e ́lites’.
Although no one would accept the often curious details of Pareto’s theory
nowadays, the basic ideas, and the need to combine both a theory of ideology
Pareto