The reference scientist: Vilfredo Pareto

The Italian engineer (but a French native speaker), accepted willingly and in 1893 promptly delivered courses as an extraordinary professor, before he was appointed full professor the following year.

A brilliant teacher, Pareto made the difference from his so illustrious predecessor, because the latter was a poor teacher. From his earliest lessons, Pareto, while paying homage to the Master, took a personal approach whose inspiration was to look more to Hermann Heinrich Gossen and the English economists. Admittedly, by appropriat­ing the concept of ⁱrarete^, and dubbing the “Walras equation”, Pareto demonstrated his desire for some continuity, but probably more for diplomatic than scientific reasons.

Pareto’s analytical inputs to the Walrasian general equilibrium were many: a new concept of utility and of production, the notions of optimum and the modernization of mathematics. Regarding the latter, Pareto provided, throughout his contribu­tions (marked mainly by the Cours and completed by the Manuel), a mathematicized version of the general equilibrium, which established itself as the standard for modern microeconomics. Pareto also renewed the concept of utility - which he preferred to call “ophelimity” - and rid the construction of the general equilibrium of the difficulties linked to its measurability. With his exclusive use of an ordinal ranking of different com­binations of goods, modern microeconomics was born. In his production theory, Pareto reactivated the research programme on variable coefficients but in a framework of a non-circular production process (though this may not be called real progress). Finally, Pareto developed a key concept in the history of welfare theories. Based (loosely) on Walras’s theorem of maximum satisfaction, Pareto developed his optimum concept, and what is now appropriately called - in the wake of Kenneth J.

For his part, Walras intended, though he had retired, to issue new publications and even the systematic treatise on political and social economy he had planned at the begin­ning of his career - the famous “triptych”. However, owing to his poor health, Walras eventually had to abandon this project, deemed beyond his strength, but he did not give up on his deep conviction of the need to complement pure economics by applied and social economics. That is why, instead of the triptych, he published, along with the third edition of the Elements (1896), two collections of articles: Etudes d’economie sociale (Studies in Social Economics, 1896) and Etudes d’economie politique appliquee (Studies in Applied Economics, 1898), each containing a major original text: respectively, the “Theory of property” and “An outline of an economic and social doctrine”.

Meanwhile, Pareto published his Cours d’economie politique professe a l’Universite de Lausanne (Political Economy Course Delivered at the University of Lausanne, 1896-97), and, on resuming the teachings in applied economics and social economics when he had to meet the faculty’s new educational requirement, he replaced them with a course entitled “Socialist Systems” and another, “Principles of Sociology”. Moreover, Pareto also rejected Walras’s social economics because, he claimed, it is “metaphysical”, which was completely incompatible with his own logico-experimental method. Not that Pareto was uninterested in applied or social considerations, but he did it differently. No doubt inspired by his experience - Pareto had long managed a forge in Italy, where he was able to actually experiment the variation in production coefficients and the effects of policies hostile to free trade - Pareto anchored his understanding of human actions in empirical facts.

When Pareto came into some inherited money, he considered, as early as in 1898, giving up teaching to dedicate himself to research, and, after much dithering and long negotiations with the university, he obtained permission in 1900 to henceforth give only one weekly one-hour lesson. Vittorio Racca, his assistant since 1898, was appointed as “substitute” teacher. The same year, Walras published the fourth edition of Elements, which includes a major innovation, “tatonnement sur bons” (tatonnement on written pledges).

Pareto did not completely retire from academic policy and played an important role in the promulgation of the 12 February 1902 Law, which established the diplomas of Bachelor of Science and Doctorate in social sciences awarded by the Faculty of Law but managed by a new institution: the Ecole des sciences sociales et politiques (School of Social and Political Sciences), which was then established.