rationality and logic in social attitudes and structures; another is to confuse residues and derivations." Fascism and power distribution Renato Cirillo wrote: Benoit Mandelbrot wrote: Pareto had argued that democracy was an illusion and that a ruling class always emerged and enriched itself. For him, the key question was how actively the rulers ruled. For this reason, he called for a drastic reduction of the state and welcomed Benito Mussolini's rule as a transition to this minimal state so as to liberate the "pure" economic forces. Mandelbrot summarized Pareto's notions as follows: When he was still a young student, the future leader of Italian fascism Benito Mussolini attended some of Pareto's lectures at the University of Lausanne in 1904. It has been argued that Mussolini's move away from socialism towards a form of "elitism" may be attributed to Pareto's ideas. To quote Franz Borkenau, a biographer: Karl Popper dubbed Pareto the "theoretician of totalitarianism", but, according to Renato Cirillo, there is no evidence in Popper's published work that he read Pareto in any detail before repeating what was then a common but dubious judgment in anti-fascist circles. Some fascist writers, such as Luigi Amoroso, wrote approvingly of Pareto's ideas: Author Renato Cirillo argued, on the contrary, that: Pareto's elite theory also influenced a number of liberal theorists, such as the anti-fascist Piero Gobetti, who wrote: Other liberals influenced by Pareto include Norberto Bobbio and Raymond Aron. Economic concepts Pareto Theory Of Maximum Economics Pareto turned his interest to economic matters and he became an advocate of free trade, finding himself in difficulty with the Italian government. His writings reflected the ideas of Léon Walras that economics is essentially a mathematical science. Pareto was a leader of the "Lausanne School" and represents the second generation of the Neoclassical Revolution. His "tastes-and-obstacles" approach to general equilibrium theory was resurrected during the great "Paretian Revival" of the 1930s and has influenced theoretical economics since. In his Manual of Political Economy (1906) the focus is on equilibrium in terms of solutions to individual problems of "objectives and constraints". He used the indifference curve of Edgeworth (1881) extensively, for the theory of the consumer and, another great novelty, in his theory of the producer. He gave the first presentation of the trade-off box now known as the "Edgeworth-Bowley" box. Pareto was the first to realize that cardinal utility could be dispensed with and economic equilibrium