ABSTRACT
As is universally acknowledged, Pareto played the role of forerunner and source of inspiration in the gradual shift of economic theory from the utilitarian framework of the ‘first generation’ Marginalists to a less demanding, ordinal framework based on the notion of preference, and from here to an empirically based approach that takes choice as its primitive notion. Indeed, besides suggesting that economic theory could do without cardinal utility, Pareto went so far as to surmise that even preference is an unnecessary concept, and that all that the theory needs to take into account is the mere fact that individuals make choices. A thorough discussion of this aspect of his work can be found in Gross and Tarascio (1998), who rightly remark, however, that this innovation of his was more methodological than theoretical or mathematical. Pareto did not actually develop a theory entirely based on the fact of choice; this was left to be elaborated decades later, starting (or perhaps re-starting) anew with Samuelson’s theory of revealed preference and with
the problem of the relationship between the structural properties of preference and the observable regularities of choice behaviour. The investigation of this problem has generated a consistent body of literature, a by-product of which has been the construction of a notion of economic rationality as being identified with ‘consistency’ – an observable feature of behaviour, instead of an unobservable property of the underlying mental processes (on this, see Giocoli, 2003, Ch. 2).
