Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (1848–1923) was a leader of the marginalist revolution in economics, a pioneer of the general equilibrium economic theory, and one of the great 20th-century sociologists. Pareto’s father was against the politics of the House of Savoy and consequently he accepted voluntary exile from Genoa (Italy) to France, where he worked as an engineer and married Marie Mettenier. In 1858, the family returned to Italy. Pareto received a solid humanistic education at the Lyceum of Turin and studied engineering at the Regio Politecnico di Torino, where he graduated in 1869 with a thesis on the equilibrium of the elasticity of solid bodies. Later, he worked at the Roman railway company and, subsequently, as director of a metallurgic establishment close to Florence. As ...