1. Introduction

Nowadays, for economists, as well as for the majority of historians of economic thought, the name Vilfredo Pareto evokes only the notion of the Paretian optimum and, conceivably, his law on the distribution of income. Such a condensation, while not completely off the mark, is decidedly uncharitable with regard to one of the last scholars who attempted, in the typically nineteenth-century manner, to examine social phenomena from differing economic, sociological and political standpoints. As Pareto did not spend all his life as an academic, we subscribe to the view that to gain an understanding of his complex scientific output requires not only a patient and detailed exegesis of this output itself but also its meticulous contextualisation within the framework of the subject’s intellectual biography.