Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Italian economist and polymath Vilfredo Pareto. He died in August 1923, less than a year after Benito Mussolini’s coup d’etat in October 1922. His magnum opus, Trattato di sociologia generale (In English, Mind and Society), published a few years before in 1916, had failed to win him a massive following, but it did enhance his aura of prestige. Indeed, Mussolini claimed (falsely) that he attended some of Pareto's lectures in Lausanne, thus attempting to present himself as a pupil of the social thinker. After their rise to power, the fascists also offered Pareto appointment as a senator in the upper house of parliament, an invitation to which he never responded. Pareto’s reputation ever since has been shadowed by accusations that he was a fascist and is therefore unworthy of serious consideration.
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