Pareto, Vilfredo

Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) is best known for his views that the rationalizations people use for their behavior change, while their reasons or motivations do not; that the successful use of power justifies itself; and that elites rule sometimes by the use of force and sometimes by cunning.

Few theorists have elicited more intense reactions than Pareto. One writer calls him “the adversary of humanitarian democracy” (Zeitlin 1994:192). Another describes him as “a humanist who fought ceaselessly for democracy [and] for freedom of any sort” (Lopreato in Pareto [1916]1980:xx). Why such differing interpretations? The answer lies in Pareto's changing responses to the times in which he lived and others' fragmentary knowledge of his work.

Vilfredo Pareto was born in Paris to an Italian political-exile father and a French mother. When Vilfredo was a small boy, the family moved back to Italy, where he became imbued with humanitarian/democratic ideals.

The powerhunger of Europe's leaders, culminating in World War I, was paralleled by Pareto's increasing cynicism about political life. The cynical portions of his work became known in the West before his earlier works, and his writings about fascism, especially that of Mussolini in Italy, were misunderstood as sympathetic with the brutal totalitarianism that developed in Italy after Pareto's death.

Not only did events in Europe affect Pareto's view of society and politics, but so did his personal life. In 1882, he ran for office in Florence, and was defeated by a government-supported candidate. This defeat he attributed to the corrupt practices of Italy's ruling elite. Soon thereafter, his friend Maffeo Pantaleoni was forced to resign his teaching post because he had criticized a customs duty on wine. Pareto considered himself partly to blame because he had quoted Pantaleoni's incriminating article in print.

In 1893, Pareto was appointed to the chair of political economy at Lausanne, where he taught for 20 years. In 1901, he inherited a substantial fortune and moved to a villa at Celigny. Later that year, his wife ran off with a servant—a deeply disturbing experience for Pareto. After that, he came to be known in intellectual circles as “the hermit of Celigny,” although he continued to entertain his friends, including both Pantaleoni and theorist Robert Michels.