RISULTATI RICERCA

The Papon Affair. Crimes against humanity in Vichy France - The trail of prominent functionary Maurice Papon, that played out in Bordeaux between October 1997 and April 1998, gave rise to a wide-ranging political, legal and historical debate that this article intends to examine. They were the first criminal proceedings where a French citizen was accused of complicity in crimes against humanity and were an occasion for public reflection on the guilt of the Vichy government. It was actually only in the Eighties and Nineties after decades in which the phenomenon of collaborationism had been removed from official debate that France started to investigate the responsibilities prefectures and the police had had in the deportation of the Jews. Through a re-examination of the events in the Papon affair, it is therefore possible to reconstruct the steps in a complex path along which the past was revised albeit with the reticence and silence of the Fourth and Fifth Republics often slowing down the procedure. At the same time, the process represents a stimulating starting point for us to meditate once again on the intricate question of the relationships existing between memory, history and law.

The article presents an analysis of compensation systems in Italy, as seen from different angles: historic, trade union, organizational, managerial, contractual. The aim is to demonstrate the links among the compensation system, individual expectations, the organizational functioning of the firm and its external environment. The article examines the birth and the growth of incentive methodologies as an answer to the employees’ needs and to make the cost of labour variable: management by objectives (mbo) systems, if correctly implemented, can represent a happy meeting point between persons and organizations. The exact working of the variable incentive system based on objectives depends upon the presence and the respect of the contractual characteristics contained there in, here defined as ideal and legal. The hope is to offer a global vision of the subject which can be used to set up a functional incentive system.

Foucault’s anti-modern effect - According to the author, two different approaches to modernity are now competing. The first one (coming from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) underlines the irrational and voluntaristic nature of any moral code and political power. The second one (coming from Rousseau and Kant) grounds progress and legitimacy upon democratic, legal and moral universalism. Foucault's philosophy of life belongs to the first of these approaches. This is where the clash with Habermas, belonging to the second approach, becomes poignantly significant. At first, for Foucault, the power of sovereignty represses life, whereas insanity and madness preserve a transcendent meaning of liberation. Later on, life moulds the inside like a pleat of the outside, subjectivity becomes an effect of power. In Foucault's anti-humanism, Man and God die together like far gone delusions that are recaptured into nature. Schopenhauer's compassion becomes sharp diagnosis of the many tortures inflicted upon man's body, whereas Zarathustra's heroism becomes on the one hand neo-stoical aesthetics of existence and on the other political revolutionary anarchism.