Abstract

The Paolo Leon wide production in cultural economics is deeply embedded in his ideas on the general explanation of the Italian economic situation and in particular to the problems posed by a deformed and misguided free market ideology. Mainstream economist sustains that any public intervention generates always more costs than benefits. Paolo Leon has always challenged this statement: the first act of the French revolution, after the terror, was the opening to the public of the Louvre museum. The first act of the Neapolitan revolution was the convocation of the parliament in the Bourbon museum. The desire for beauty is not the satisfaction of a need, but an innate aspiration of a collective action more than an individual preference and choice. The museum creation is an active form of identification in beauty, and imply the necessity of an administration, of the State.