Pareto was born of an exiled noble Genoese family on 15 July 1848 in Paris,[7] the centre of the popular revolutions of that year.

Enthusiastic about the revolutions of 1848 in the German states, his parents named him Wilfried Fritz, which became Vilfredo Federico upon his family's move back to Italy in 1858.

[9] In his childhood, Pareto lived in a middle-class environment, receiving a high standard of education, attending the newly created Istituto Tecnico Leardi where Ferdinando Pio Rosellini was his mathematics professor.

[11] For some years after graduation, Pareto worked as a civil engineer, first for the state-owned Italian Railway Company and later in private industry.

In 1889, after the death of his parents, Pareto changed his lifestyle, quitting his job and marrying a Russian woman, Alessandrina Bakunina.

[7] In 1893, Pareto succeeded Léon Walras to the chair of Political Economy at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland where he remained for the rest of his life.

Pareto maintained cordial personal relationships with individual socialists but always thought their economic ideas were severely flawed.

He later became suspicious of their motives and denounced socialist leaders as an "aristocracy of brigands" who threatened to despoil the country and criticized the government of the Italian statesman Giovanni Giolitti for not taking a tougher stance against worker strikes.

[13][14] Pareto's relationship with scientific sociology in the age of the foundation is grafted in a paradigmatic way at the moment in which he, starting from the political economy, criticizes positivism as a totalizing and metaphysical system devoid of a rigorous logical-experimental method.

In this sense we can read the fate of the Paretian production within a history of the social sciences that continues to show its peculiarity and interest for its contributions in the 21st century.

[7] Pareto's later years were spent in collecting the material for his best-known work, Trattato di sociologia generale (1916) (The Mind and Society, published in 1935).

[18] Pareto might have turned to sociology for an understanding of why his mathematical economic theories did not always predict actions of individuals in practice, in the belief that unforeseen or uncontrollable social factors intervened.

He wrote: "Basic to Pareto's method is the analysis of society through its non-rational 'residues,' which are persistent and unquestioned social habits, beliefs, and assumptions, and its 'derivations,' which are the explanations, justifications, and rationalizations we make of them.

"[21] Renato Cirillo wrote that Pareto had frequently been considered a predecessor of fascism as a result of his support for the movement when it began.

[24] Franz Borkenau, a biographer, argued that Mussolini followed Pareto's policy ideas during the beginning of his tenure as prime minister.

[13] Pareto turned his interest to economic matters, and he became an advocate of free trade, finding himself in conflict with the Italian government.

He replaced it with the notion of Pareto-optimality, the idea that a system is enjoying maximum economic satisfaction when no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

Over the years, Pareto's law proved remarkably close to observed data, with economists typically finding it plausible according to the Encyclopædia Britannica.

[36] According to Oxford Reference, the Pareto principle can be controversial in welfare economics since its assumptions are empirically questionable, may embody value-judgements, and tend to favour the status quo.