Vilfredo Pareto

Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian polymath, born in Paris in 1848, who trained as a civil engineer before turning to economics in his mid-forties, lecturing at the University of Florence from 1886 and succeeding Leon Walras at the University of Lausanne in 1893. Beyond his economic work on income distribution and the concept later called Pareto efficiency, he pioneered elite theory in sociology, developing the concept of the circulation of elites to describe how governing classes replace one another over time, set out at length in his major sociological work, Trattato di sociologia generale (1916), published in English as The Mind and Society (1935). He died in Celigny, Switzerland, in 1923.