This paper reconstructs, in non-formal terms, the development of Vilfredo Pareto's writings on what was to become known as "Pareto optimality". Notably, I rebuild the various versions preceeding the final definition of paretian optimum in economics and I give a few comments on its sociological adaptation.

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The paper deals with the changing relationship between economics and sociology in Pareto’s thought and suggests a new interpretation of this relationship. Pareto’s opus magnum in the field, the Trattato di Sociologia Generale (1916, French ed. 1917), is usually considered the result of the abandonment of economics by the late Pareto in favour of another field of interest, sociology—the realm of the analysis of non-rational actions—and on the basis of this interpretation it has been largely neglected by economists. This paper maintains that the sociology of the Trattato has to be considered not as an abandonment of interest in economics, but rather as a programme for the reconstruction and transformation of economics in a perspective that today could be called ‘behaviourist’.

We gratefully acknowledge useful comments on a preliminary version of the paper by Nicola Giocoli, participants in the session on General Economic Equilibrium of the XII Annual Conference of the Italian Association for the History of Political Economy held in Turin 11-13 June 2015, and two anonymous referees. Economic Theories in Competition A New Narrative of the Debate on the General Economic Equilibrium Theory in the 1930s Summary: The paper deals with the debate on the General Economic Equilibrium (GEE) in the 1930s in Vienna and at the London School of Economics and offers an interpretation of it different from that of the traditional narratives. It interprets the debate as a renewed confrontation between the two different classical methodological paths of research in GEE, the Paretian and the Walrasian ones. What emerges from this examination is a picture of different approaches and theories in competition, in particular on the issue of the relationship between theory and the real world. This was the fundamental issue at stake. Herein lies also the interest in those distant controversies for the current debate in economics.