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FOREWORD

“My project is not to legislate on new forms of companies, but to promote the consciousness of the enterprise.”

Pierre SÉGELLE

(1899-1960², Deputy and Mayor of Orléans and Minister of Labour in 1949). (Report to the Sub-Committee for the Study of the Reform of the Enterprise at the Economic Council, 15 February 1949.)

The Institut Technique des Salaires was founded by three people united in complete and lasting friendship: Jacques Dubois, André Boyer and Milka Lodetti-Boyer, his wife. Jacques Dubois had received a solid training at a teachers’ training college (École Normale d’Instituteurs), André Boyer held a degree in History and Geography, and Milka Lodetti was an agrégée in Philosophy. Quite naturally, within this team, she was “the intellectual mentor.” But she was even more than that, for she collaborated actively in the study and implementation work of the Institut Technique des Salaires, and it is to her that we owe the whole collection of the journals “Producteurs.”

In taking as the subject of her doctoral thesis in philosophy, with the approval of Raymond Aron, “La conscience de l’entreprise” (“The Consciousness of the Enterprise”), Milka Lodetti sought to bear witness, within the world of philosophers, to an experience lived in the economic world.

Milka Lodetti died in February 1969, a few months before the defence of her thesis at the Faculty of Letters of Paris.

This is why Jacques Dubois and André Boyer wished, by publishing this work, both to pay tribute to a thinker of the highest calibre and to communicate to the public ideas that are fundamental for action.

In a manuscript that was found again, dated 29-12-1964, this is how Milka Lodetti herself set out her thinking on the “consciousness of the enterprise.”

“The private consciousness of the enterprise, which is the consciousness of the act of undertaking¹, is not only at the origin of existing enterprises and of the whole of industrial civilization, but it is the support and the driving force of that civilization. Even where it was thought to have been eliminated, one comes back to it.

“And it may be that enterprises and economic systems in which this private consciousness of the enterprise does not exist are sustained by those in which it does.

“More generally, the pursuit of personal profit does not seem able to be eliminated from industrial civilization without destroying it.

“This profit is sought not only by the one who undertakes, alone or in association with others, but by all those who, within an enterprise, take part in production.

“And, precisely, if we have come to want to suppress this individualistic form of economic activity in favour of forms reputed to be more socialist, it is because private consciousness is not sufficient unto itself.

“It should not have been suppressed; it should have been completed.

“The very evolution of the notion of enterprise lent itself to this, since an enterprise is first an institution, an act, and only then a fact: it is constituted.

“The institution is private, but its functioning can be public.

“A public consciousness of the enterprise is therefore possible, at the level of the enterprise itself and not at the national level.”

Editor’s note: In French, “entreprise” derives from “entreprendre” (to undertake), a link on which the author builds: “la conscience de l’entreprise” is defined as “la conscience de l’acte d’entreprendre,” and the enterprise is “d’abord une institution, un acte, ensuite un fait.” English “enterprise” comes from the same Old French root (entreprendre/entreprise), but it and “undertake” no longer look related, so the connection is less visible. ↩
Editor’s note: The printed text gives 1950; Pierre Ségelle died on 8 October 1960 (Assemblée nationale records). The date is given here as corrected in the reference French text. ↩