The ideal enterprise between factory and community : an intellectual biography of Adriano Olivetti ; L'entreprise idéale entre usine et communauté : une biographie intellectuelle d'Adriano Olivetti

Abstract

Entrepreneur, urban planner, politician, editor, the Italian intellectual Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960) proposed a novel reading view of modernity and demonstrated that an alternative way, one that was complex and disinterested in the common good, was possible. Relying on previously unexploited research drawn from Olivetti's library and various archives, this intellectual biography reconstructs the life of Adriano Olivetti looking through the lens of the specifics of his territory and his family, the scientific management, urban planning, anti-fascism, entrepreneurial activity and politics, thereby providing a global and historically-based interpretation of the man and his thought. Adriano Olivetti was born in Ivrea, in the Canavese. Situated between Aosta and Turin, this small rural town had little industry when, in the early twentieth century, his father Camillo Olivetti founded a typewriters' factory. Camillo was a socialist of Jewish origin, whose wife was Waldensian, and his son was educated in religious freedom and would become a Catholic. As an engineering student, Adriano Olivetti supported the principles of autonomy and of federalist socialism, before focusing on scientific management which he had observed in the USA. In the early '30s he became the director of the company, where he inaugurated the scientific management of mass production. He subsequently noticed that the modernization of industry, conceived as the only means to generalize the well-being, generated serious social and urban problems. As a result, as the company grew larger and conquered foreign markets, he coordinated an urban plan of the Val d'Aosta. An antifascist, he contributed to the fall of Mussolini by working with the Allies. While exiled in Switzerland, he developed a plan for the reform of Italian institutions which would set the territories at the center of politics, the "Communities" that would allow the citizens to participate more directly in the management of politics, economics, urban and social development. When in 1945 ...