Thesis title: L'utopia di Adriano Olivetti. Politica ed estetica
The thesis examines Adriano Olivetti’s political-aesthetic thought as an integrated project of democratic, cultural, and social reform.
The first chapter reconstructs Olivetti’s “creative synthesis” of liberalism, socialism, and democracy. Opposing both individualism and statism, he advocates a notion of social freedom grounded in the reciprocity between person and community, institutionalized in the concept of the Concrete Community. This forms the core of a functional federal state where power is tripartite—universal suffrage, labor democracy, and cultural aristocracy—and freed from partisan monopolies.
The second chapter explores the socialist aesthetics underpinning this political framework. Drawing on the Greek unity of truth, beauty, and goodness, Olivetti entrusts form—whether in objects, architecture, or urban landscapes—with the capacity to envision non-alienated social relations. Various aesthetic laboratories demonstrate how architecture, industrial design, advertising, and a particular style can become practices of civic education, harmonizing technique, labor, and everyday life.
The third chapter interprets Olivetti’s action as an “experimental utopia”: the yearning for a new world unites socialist faith and anti-capitalist critique, entrusting “projecting intelligences” with the task of reconciling reality and possibility. Situating the “Olivetti case” among contemporary Italian communal experiments, the research affirms his stature as an organic intellectual and proposes the Community as a paradigm to rethink the connection between production, culture, and democracy, with utopia serving as a method for transforming reality.