Chapter Bergson di fronte alla seconda rivoluzione industriale: dalla divisione tecnica del lavoro al lavoro intelligente della société ouverte

Abstract

Bergson’s reflection on labour is significantly present in his courses, public speeches and major published works. During the Second Industrial Revolution, he identifies the technical division of labour as the starting point of a long process of social transformation toward the “open society”. As I show in this article, Bergson, however, does not want the change of labour as such, but only the preservation of the intelligent one. Therefore, it is not possible to extrapolate from his position an alternative proposal to the simple appeal to the utopian dimension of a society that remains divided into classes. A conflict that much of the intellectual class of his time, at least those of liberal orientation, was still unwilling to resolve.