Reading the description of the stamp dedicated to theeconomist Maffeo Pantaeloni (Frascati 1857- Milan 1924) on the centenary of his disappearance, no one would think that it is yet another homage to a man who supported fascism and promoted anti-Semitism. The terse description of the stamp reads as follows: “The cartoon depicts a portrait of Maffeo Pantaleoni, an illustrious Italian economist of the 19th and 20th centuries, flanked, on the left, by the title of his most representative work “principles of pure economics”, from 1889, which marked a methodological and analytical turning point compared to the economic studies of the time”. And the fact that Pantaleoni was a famous economist also recognized at an international level is not questioned by the biographies found about him online, so much so that there is even a professional institute in Frascati named after him. Biographies in which we also read that, in line with his vision of the social phenomenon based on a philosophy of individualism and on a strong idea of selective-based evolutionism, in which the influence of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism is recognized ( 1820-1903), he first joined nationalism around 1910, then interventionism at the time of the First World War, following D’Annunzio’s exploits in Fiume in 1920, and finally fascism. At the base there was the increasingly deep-rooted persuasion that identified socialism as the most insidious enemy of liberal democracy (in the individualist version) and of progress. But the most disconcerting aspect was his contribution to accrediting the false Protocols of the Elders of Zion as authentic (created by the tsarist secret police, with the intention of spreading hatred towards the Jews in the Russian Empire and which, despite their proven falsity, still received wide credit in anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist circles, and still remain the ideological basis, above all between Islamist and Islamic fundamentalist parties or movements in the Middle East, to validate the theory of the so-called Jewish conspiracy which was the basis of the anti-Semitism which then led to the racial laws and Holocaust). Pantaleoni’s role in promoting these false documents in Italy was analyzed in Luca Michelini’s volume (Full Professor of History of Economic Thought at the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Pisa.) At the origins of national-fascist anti-Semitism. Maffeo Pantaleoni and «La Vita italiana» by Giovanni Preziosi (1915-1924) published by Marsilio in 2011 where we read Pantaleoni, through the periodical «La Vita italiana», which hosted the majority of his anti-Semitic utterances, placed himself «at the top, in the years 1915-1924, of a complex movement» in which the «campaign anti-Jewish was an essential component of that political, cultural, economic and social movement that brought Mussolini to power.”
This controversial aspect of Pantaleoni’s thinking has led, in relation to the stamp issued on 29 October, to aparliamentary question by Democratic Party senator Dario Parrini che writes so. «It is the second time in less than five months that Giorgia Meloni’s government dedicates a state stamp to an openly and exasperatedly anti-Semitic personality (also bypassing the Philatelic Consultation, comprising experts called to express an opinion on the historical validity of the choices. It is a very serious fact”. In June, the senator underlines, a stamp was issued in honor of “Italo Foschi, squad member and persecutor of Jews during the RSI Pantaleoni, who wanted to publish the Protocol of the Elders of Zion in Italy.”
