‘Labour’: a keyword for the 20th century?

Adopting labour as one of the keywords to approach the 20th century allows us to:

• Highlight an important with respect to the 19th century. Obviously, that is not because labour was a characteristic phenomenon of the 20th century, but because it was in this period that labour acquires a specific symbolic, normative and institutional centrality. It is no coincidence that World War I was defined «the real end of the 19th century» (T. Ascarelli). The endeavour of this ‘total war’, which massively involved civil population, was also the endeavour of organizing labour and production, with the consequence that these two elements tended to assume an importance that overshadowed the traditional role of property rights;

• Stress the importance of an element that, at the same time, connect and dissociate the two main juridical and political experiences of the 20th century: . Labour is in fact one of the great watchwords underpinning the very legitimization of the two regimes. Thus, the different outlooks of this labour centrality, with its multifaceted connections and references (i.e. with the theme of the individual and social rights, social protection, labour organizations, etc.) need to be examine, focusing on the role played, in both periods, by corporatist and neo-corporatist experiences.

• Verify ascribed to labour in relation to the specificities assumed by contemporary societies, where not only ‘poor labour’ (poorly paid, precarious, etc.) increased, but where the very necessity of labour seems to be diminishing (the so-called jobless societies).

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