Using Machiavelli’s metaphors, Vilfredo Pareto theorized that over time psychosocial propensities of ruling elites – manifested by predominant personality traits, mentalities, beliefs, and actions – are those of “foxes” or “lions”. Either propensity renders a ruling elite, especially its leaders, prone to bias, closure, and increasing blunders. This degenerative process leads to a severe economic-political crisis and a displacement of the elite, with groups and persons disposed toward the opposite propensity taking power. Pareto’s theory has much intuitive appeal, but its breadth and elasticity, together with the empirically elusive qualities of elites, risk facile and tendentious applications. Taking this risk, we examine what through Pareto’s lens appear to be cycles of degeneration among Western elites since he wrote, paying particular attention to dynamics of American and British elites between World War II and the profound financial-political crises in which the U.S. and U.K. now find themselves .
