Pure Economics

As we have seen in our retracing of his intellectual activities in the course of the previous two chapters, it was against the background, and with the stimulus, of his relations with the University of Lausanne and of his ongoing passion for the political arena, that Pareto finally and definitively turned his full attention to his scientific work. His attention was concentrated principally on the subject of political economy, mainly as a result of his didactic commitments. In this and the following five chapters, we will examine Pareto’s interpretation of the discipline, looking in logical sequence at each of the areas which appear to be the most important, that is, pure economics (in the sense of the foundations of economic theory), general economic equilibrium, the economics of well-being, the theory of international trade, the economics of socialism, the currency and other topics of applied economics. In this chapter, we summarise Pareto’s ideas about the scope of economics (Sect. 3.1), the methodology of economics (Sect. 3.2), the statistical computation of the final degree of utility (Sect. 3.3, the most important theoretical issue according to Pareto), the formal derivation of the law of demand (Sect. 3.4) and of the law of supply (Sect. 3.5).