The industrialized societies of the third millennium find themselves entrusted to the care of science and base their decisions on social and economic forecasting techniques based on rationality. In this way, scientific knowledge gradually becomes a kind of new secular religion, ethically neutral, justified by its very being and endowed with an immanent validity that does not need transcendent ethical imperatives. This is what the back cover of the new and interesting pamphlet by Franco Ferrarotti, the father of sociology in Italy, reads.
In the majority of cases, neutrality itself - we read - becomes the screen behind which the divorce between science is concealed - too inclined to forget that it is nothing more than a human enterprise - and conscience. To reconcile the disagreement it is necessary to understand that the future does not depend on simple development, but on the capacity for global critical evaluation, that is, on an integrated culture in which science rediscovers its function with respect to the meaning of man without claiming to exhaust it.
Franco Ferrarotti, ememo professor of Sociology at the La Sapienza University of Rome, director of the journal La Critica sociologica, independent member of the Italian Parliament from 1958 to 1963, was between 1948 and 1960 one of Adriano Olivetti's closest collaborators. Awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 2001 and appointed Knight of the Grand Cross of Merit of the Republic by President Ciampi in 2005, he published La Religione Dissacrante for EDB. Conscience and utopia in the age of crisis (2013), Revolution and transcendence (2013) and The concrete utopia of Adriano 0livetti (2014).
