Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (15 July 1848 – 19 August 1923), born Wilfried Fritz Pareto, is one of the most important classical social theorists ever. He was an Italian industrialist, sociologist, economist, and philosopher.
His contributions to 
His contributions to sociology were equally important. Compendium of General Sociology was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and the Compendium has been published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Society, to Pareto, was governed principally by non-rational forces, and he was critical of all rational explanations and ideologies. He contributed to the development of functionalist and systems theories of social and economic life and was a major influence on the work of Talcott Parsons. He was also an advocate of empirical and experimental methods in the social sciences as well as of mathematical sociology and economics.
It is sad to notice that some of Vilfredo Pareto’s important works are almost impossible to get hold of. This concerns, for example, his Mind and Society
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