Editing Vilfredo Pareto (section)

== Biography ==
Pareto was born of an exiled noble [[Genoa|Genoese]] family on 15 July 1848 in Paris,<ref name=wife/> the centre of the popular revolutions of that year. His father, Raffaele Pareto (1812–1882), was an Italian civil engineer and [[Liguria]]n marquis who had left Italy much as [[Giuseppe Mazzini]] and other Italian nationalists had.<ref name=Amoroso>{{cite journal |last=Amoroso |first=Luigi |title=Vilfredo Pareto |journal=Econometrica |date=January 1938 |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=1–21 |jstor=1910081 |doi=10.2307/1910081}}</ref> His mother, Marie Metenier, was a French woman. Enthusiastic about the [[revolutions of 1848 in the German states]], his parents named him Wilfried Fritz, which became Vilfredo Federico upon his family's move back to Italy in 1858.<ref>{{cite book |last=van Suntum |first=Ulrich |title=The Invisible Hand |url=https://archive.org/details/ulrichvansuntumi00sunt |url-access=limited |isbn=3-540-20497-0 |publisher=Springer |year=2005 |page=[https://archive.org/details/ulrichvansuntumi00sunt/page/n40 30]}}</ref>

In his childhood, Pareto lived in a [[middle-class]] environment, receiving a high standard of education, attending the newly created ''Istituto Tecnico Leardi'' where [[Ferdinando Pio Rosellini]] was his mathematics professor.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Giacalone-Monaco |first=Tommaso |title=Ricerche intorno alla giovinezza di Vilfredo Pareto |jstor=23239355 |language=it |journal=Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia |volume=25 |issue=1/2 |year=1966 |pages=97–104 |issn=0017-0097}}</ref> In 1869, he earned a doctorate in engineering from what is now the [[Polytechnic University of Turin]],<ref name="Amoroso" /> then known as the Technical School for Engineers, with a dissertation entitled "The Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium in Solid Bodies". His later interest in equilibrium analysis in [[Economic equilibrium|economics]] and [[Social equilibrium|sociology]] can be traced back to this dissertation. Pareto was among the contributors to the Rome-based magazine ''[[La Ronda (magazine)|La Ronda]]'' between 1919 and 1922.<ref>{{cite news |title=Riviste letterarie del Novecento – La Ronda |author=Simone Germini |url=https://imalpensanti.it/2013/05/riviste-letterarie-del-novecento-la-ronda/ |access-date=24 June 2023 |language=it |work=iMalpensanti |date=31 May 2013}}</ref>

=== From civil engineer to classical liberal economist ===
For some years after graduation, Pareto worked as a [[civil engineer]], first for the state-owned Italian Railway Company and later in private industry. He was manager of the Iron Works of San Giovanni Valdarno and later general manager of Italian Iron Works.<ref name=Amoroso/> He did not begin serious work in economics until his mid-forties. He started his career as a fiery advocate of [[classical liberalism]], besetting the most ardent British liberals with his attacks on any form of government intervention in the [[free market]]. In 1886, he became a lecturer on [[economics]] and [[management]] at the [[University of Florence]]. His stay in [[Florence]] was marked by political activity, much of it fueled by his own frustrations with government regulators. In 1889, after the death of his parents, Pareto changed his lifestyle, quitting his job and marrying a Russian woman, Alessandrina Bakunina.<ref name="wife">{{cite web |url=http://statprob.com/encyclopedia/VilfredoFederigoSamasoPARETO.html |title=The Encyclopedia Sponsored by Statistics and Probability Societies |publisher=StatProb |date=19 August 1923 |access-date=4 November 2015 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304204438/http://statprob.com/encyclopedia/VilfredoFederigoSamasoPARETO.html |archive-date=4 March 2016 |quote=among a menagerie of cats that he and his French lover kept [in their villa;] the local divorce laws prevented him from divorcing his wife and remarrying until just a few months prior to his death.}}</ref>

=== Economics and sociology ===
In 1893, Pareto succeeded [[Léon Walras]] to the chair of Political Economy at the [[University of Lausanne]] in Switzerland where he remained for the rest of his life.<ref name=Amoroso/> He published there in 1896–1897 a textbook containing the [[Pareto distribution]] of how wealth is distributed, which he believed was a constant "through any human society, in any age, or country".<ref name=Amoroso/> In 1906, he made the famous observation that twenty per cent of the population owned eighty per cent of the property in Italy, later generalised by [[Joseph M. Juran]] into the Pareto principle, also termed the [[80–20 rule]]. Pareto maintained cordial personal relationships with individual [[socialists]] but always thought their economic ideas were severely flawed. He later became suspicious of their motives and denounced socialist leaders as an "aristocracy of brigands" who threatened to despoil the country and criticized the government of the Italian statesman [[Giovanni Giolitti]] for not taking a tougher stance against worker strikes. Growing unrest among labour in the [[Kingdom of Italy]] led him to the anti-socialist and anti-democratic camp.<ref>{{cite journal |doi=10.1080/03085149000000016 |author=Bellamy, Richard |year=1990 |title=From Ethical to Economic Liberalism – The Sociology of Pareto's Politics |journal=Economy and Society |volume=19 |issue=4 |pages=431–55}}</ref> His attitude towards [[Italian fascism]] in his last years is a matter of controversy.<ref name="RenatoCirillo">{{cite journal |year=1983 |last1=Cirillo |first1=Renato |title=Was Vilfredo Pareto really a 'precursor' of fascism? |journal=American Journal of Economics and Sociology |volume=42 |issue=2 |pages=235–246 |jstor=3486644 |doi=10.1111/j.1536-7150.1983.tb01708.x |quote=Vilfredo Pareto has been labelled a fascist and 'a precursor of fascism' largely because he welcomed the advent of fascism in Italy and was honoured by the new regime. Some have seen in his sociological works the foundations of fascism. This is not correct: Even fascist writers did not find much merit in these works, and definitely condemned his economic theories. As a political thinker, he remained a radical libertarian till the end and continued to express serious reservations about fascism, and to voice opposition to its basic policies. This is evident from his correspondence with his close friends. There are strong reasons to believe that, had he lived long enough, Pareto would have revolted against fascism}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |year=1986 |last1=Campbell |first1=Stuart L. |title=The four Paretos of Raymond Aron |journal=Journal of the History of Ideas |volume=47 |issue=2 |pages=287–298 |jstor=2709815|doi=10.2307/2709815}}</ref>

Pareto's relationship with scientific sociology in the age of the foundation is grafted in a paradigmatic way at the moment in which he, starting from the political economy, criticizes [[positivism]] as a totalizing and metaphysical system devoid of a rigorous logical-experimental method. In this sense we can read the fate of the Paretian production within a history of the social sciences that continues to show its peculiarity and interest for its contributions in the 21st&nbsp;century.<ref>Giovanni Busino, ''Sugli studi paretiani all'alba del XXI secolo'' in ''Omaggio a Vilfredo Pareto'', ''Numero monografico in memoria di Giorgio Sola'' a cura di Stefano Monti Bragadin, "Storia Politica Società", Quaderni di Scienze Umane, anno&nbsp;IX, n.&nbsp;15, giugno-dicembre 2009, p.&nbsp;1 e sg.</ref> The story of Pareto is also part of the multidisciplinary research of a scientific model that privileges sociology as a critique of cumulative models of knowledge as well as a discipline tending to the affirmation of relational models of science.<ref>Guglielmo Rinzivillo, ''Vilfredo Pareto e i modelli interdisciplinari nella scienza,'' "Sociologia", A.&nbsp;XXIX, n.&nbsp;1, New Series, 1995, pp.&nbsp;2017–2222</ref><ref>Guglielmo Rinzivillo, ''Una epistemologia senza storia'', Rome, New Culture, 2013, pp.&nbsp;13–29, {{ISBN|978-88-6812-222-5}}</ref>

=== Personal life ===
In 1889, Pareto married Alessandrina [[Bakunin family|Bakunina]], a Russian woman. She left him in 1902 for a young servant. Twenty years later in 1923, he married Jeanne Regis, a French woman, just before his death in [[Geneva]], Switzerland, on 19 August 1923.<ref name=wife/>