The Powerful Are Loving Life. Utopia, Ideology and Biopolitics of Baťa's Zlín

Abstract

The article deals with the ideology of Tomáš and Jan Antonín Baťa, the founders of the worldwide known shoemaking company. The author points out that the thinking of both industrialists was typical by its utopical features, the effort to build up (firstly within the company, then within the limits of the town Zlín and then in the whole of Czechoslovakia) a very modern and authoritative company. The author also points out that their utopical thinking was grounded in several basic values: the Protestant work ethics, bio-help and biopolitics, the positive attitude towards the Italian fascism and the USA, individualism, collectivism and the stress on the values of the working-class movement. The author stresses that the utopical features of thinking were especially distinctive in the work of Jan Antonín Baťa, who in the second half of the 30s demonstrated his vision in his proposal of the superinduatrialised Czechoslovakia with a motorway connecting the east and west of the country. The Baťa ideology did not develop independently, but was influenced by the international situation in the first three decades of the 20th century: the modernisation and rise of the USA, the emergence and successes of the Italian fascism and of the Soviet Union.