Pareto, Vilfredo (1848–1923)

Vilfredo Pareto is famous for his seminal contributions to neoclassical and mathematical economics, his analysis of power, and his inquiry into the psychological and social foundations of human conduct. Born in Paris, where his father, a Genoese marchese , supporter of Mazzini and a civil engineer, lived in political exile, Pareto grew up in a bilingual and liberal aristocratic milieu. Upon his family's return to Italy in the 1850s he received a broad humanistic education and studied mathematics, physics, and engineering in Turin. After his graduation in 1870 Pareto moved to Tuscany, where during the next two decades he worked in upper managerial positions for a railway and an iron company. In this period he traveled extensively, frequented the aristocratic salons of Florence, studied the works of Comte, Spencer, Darwin, and J. S. Mill, joined the Italian Adam Smith Society to spread laissez‐faire economics, and began to write articles on various economic and policy issues. His political ambitions to be elected to the Chamber of Deputies remained unsuccessful. In 1890 he met the economist and leading Italian proponent of marginalism, Pantaleoni. Pantaleoni introduced Pareto to Walras, whom Pareto succeeded as a professor of political economy at the University of Lausanne in 1893. In the following years Pareto wrote his main works: Cours d'économie politique (1896–7) , Les Systèmes socialistes (1902–3), Manuale di economia politica (1906), and Trattato di sociologia generale (1916). With age, Pareto grew disillusioned with the workings of the democratic system, especially in Italy and France, and became increasingly conservative. After their rise to power the Fascists conferred honors upon Pareto, using his concept of elites, his critique of parliamentary democracy, and his ideas concerning the function of violence in history for their own purposes. Though Pareto sympathized with the advent of Fascism, it should be noted that he died only a couple of months after the March on Rome, and that his fervent support of laissez‐faire economics as well as his conviction that the state should protect the civil liberties of the individual ran counter to totalitarian ideologies.