After leaving school, Pareto decided to take up a business career. He served for a time as the director of the Rome Railway Company and then be- came managing director of an iron-products company based in Florence. In these early years of his career, Pareto frequented aristocratic salons and moved in the circles of the high bourgeoisie, but, following in his father's footsteps, he expressed fervently democratic, republican, and even pacifist sentiments. These sentiments were soon to change and the son later violently rejected the ideals that had imbued his father.

In 1876, the free-trading rightist regime that had run Italy fell from power. There followed a long period in which the moderate left parties dominated Italy's political scene; they moved away from free trade, pursued an economic policy of protectionism, and led Italy into military adventures abroad. Pareto soon became a violent opponent of the political regime, the so- called transformism, and attacked it in a series of newspaper blasts. His changed orientation can be accounted for by his principled stand in favor of free trade and against government intervention, as well as the distasteful neces- sity to make "deals" with influential deputies and government agents in his capacity as company director. In 1882 he ran as an opposition candidate for a Florence constituency but was beaten by the government-supported candidate. Increasingly bitter about the current state of affairs, he now saw in the new ruling elite of Italy a band of corrupt, contemptible, and self-serving careerists who used the levers of government to enrich themselves and to buy political success through economic favors in rigged elections.

Pareto's father died in 1882, and when his mother died a few years later, Pareto decided to change his whole style of life. He gave up his directorship in 1889, married Alessandrina Bakunin, a young, impoverished Russian girl from Venice, and moved from Florence to semiretirement in a villa at Fiesole, where he diverted himself with translations from the classics, read avidly in six or seven languages, and turned to a serious study of economics. No longer encumbered by managerial obligations, Pareto continued his fierce crusade against the government's foreign and domestic policies in the name of free trade and old-fashioned liberalism. Between 1889 and 1893 he wrote no less than 167 articles, mostly violent and vituperative antigovernment polemics, but some of them of a more scholarly cast.

Pareto now turned against the Mazzinian ideals of his father. His demo- cratic faith in the virtues of the people was shattered and he developed that cynical contempt for humanitarianism, republicanism, and progress that was to characterize his views until the end of his days. Like a lover spurned, he turned against the Italian political system that rejected his advice and wallowed, so he felt, in a mire of corruption.

During the years of his semiretirement, Pareto cultivated relations with a number of Italian economists and publicists of liberal persuasion who shared his free trade, Manchesterian principles. Somewhat earlier he had joined the Adam Smith Society in Florence, which was founded by Francesco Ferrara and included in its membership such other liberal economists as De Johannis and Martello. One of its members, Maffeo Pantaleoni, a leading liberal econ- omist, became his close friend and acquainted him with the mathematical equilibrium system in economics then elaborated by Leon Walras, the pro- fessor of political economy at Lausanne. From then on, Pareto contributed articles of economic theory, reflecting the Walras viewpoint, to a number of learned journals in Italy and France.

From Coser, 1977:403-404.