Pareto is credited with helping the development of microeconomics. His Manuale of Political Economy in Italian in 1906 (French ed. 1909) introduced the analytical approach that has informed a significant part of 20th century economic thinking. This is a revised and extended translation of the Italian 100th anniversary critical edition.

Notwithstanding our firm conviction that to really get to know an author, one needs to read him or her in the original, we nevertheless consider that this new English-language translation of Vilfredo Pareto's Manuale-Manuel (the earlier, highly criticized one, dating back to 1971) represents an important contribution to Anglo-Saxon Pareto studies. The translation, overseen by John Chipman with the assistance of Michael McLure, is completed by a valuable translation of the commentaries by Aldo Montesano, Alberto Zanni, and Luigino Bruni contained in the Italian edition published in 2006.

Aldo Montesano is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Bocconi University of Milan, Italy. From 1983 to 2008 he was editor of the International Review of Economics (formerly RISEC, Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Economiche e Commerciali). He is fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and of Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere. He was President of the Associazione Italiana per la Storia dell'Economia Politica (Storep) from 2006 to 2009. He has published numerous articles mainly on microeconomics, decision theory, and the history of economic thought and methodology. Alberto Zanni, now retired, was formally Associate Professor at the Università degli Studi di Firenze. He is a graduate from the European University Centre at Nancy Université (France), where he was subsequently employed as a translator and researcher. After his appointment to the Università degli Studi di Firenze, Dr Zanni's scholarship largely focused on the history of economic thought. He has written numerous articles for Quaderni di Storia dell'Economia, Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Economiche e Commerciali, Studi Economici and Storia del pensiero economico, as well as articles for the journal History of Economic Ideas. Luigino Bruni is associate professor of Political Economy at the University of Milan Bicocca. He received his Doctorate in the History of Economics and his PhD in Economics from the University of East Anglia. He is also adjunct professor of 'Ethics and Economics' at the Liverpool Hope University. His research covers different areas of economics and the social sciences, ranging from ethics and economics, history of economic thought, methodology of economics, and sociality and happiness in economics. He co-editor of the International Review of Economics, and member of the board of the Review of Social Economy. John S. Chipman is Regents' Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, having retired in 2007. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University in 1951, was a postdoctoral fellow and guest of the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago in 1950-51, and an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University, 1951-55. He was also a Permanent Guest Professor at the University of Konstanz, June-July 1986-1991 and a Visiting Professor there June-July 1992-1997. He was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society (1957), of the American Statistical Association (1974), and a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association (1999); he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (1993), of the International Statistical Institute (1994), and of the history of thought section of the Verein für Socialpolitik, Berlin (2000). Michael McLure is Professor of Economics at the University of Western Australia and author of Pareto, Economics and Society (Rouledge, 2001) and The Paretian School and Italian Fiscal Sociology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). From 2007 to 2011, he was the joint editor of the History of Economics Review and he jointly edited the 4 volume Vilfredo Pareto: Critical Assessments (Routledge, 1999). Professor McLure has published numerous articles on the history of Paretian and Pigouvian economics in scholarly journals.