History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes sometimes. In America today it’s protectionism, tariffs, trade wars, crony capitalism, a ruling elite, and militarism—a primrose path. It was much the same in late 19th-century Italy. The new book, Political Realism and Liberal Thought: Letters to Liberty and the Parliamentary Regime, provides a fascinating picture of the corruption of Italy’s parliament in the late 1880s and details how the classical liberal economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) fought to advance liberty there, only a few short years before Mussolini’s rise.

Political Realism and Liberal Thought combines for the first time commentaries by Pareto that were published in Liberty, a journal edited by Benjamin Tucker. Pareto, who worked as an engineer and a journalist before entering academia at age 45, explains in his letters how political patronage, limited habeas corpus rights, and bourgeoisie socialism (crony capitalism) fuel government corruption and why teaching libertarian ideas to the young is vital for freedom in Italy, Europe, and the US. The book includes a separate essay by Pareto on Italy’s “parliamentary regime.”