Baptiste Rappin
This article proposes an interpretation of modernity through the phenomenon of management. It argues that management should not be understood merely as a set of techniques specific to business administration, but rather as a total social fact that now structures the whole range of collective practices. After retracing the principal stages of the managerial revolution, from Taylor to Burnham and Drucker, the article examines the analyses of Boltanski and Chiapello, Michel Freitag, and Pierre Legendre in order to show that organisation, efficiency, and control have become the dominant principles of social regulation. It then reconstructs the scientific genealogy of the concept of organisation, from modern biology to cybernetics, where it assumes the form of the feedback loop. The article thus advances the thesis that managerial society socially actualises the idea of organisation: feedback becomes the mechanism through which conduct, institutions, and systems are continuously assessed, corrected, and adapted. This perspective renews the philosophy of history by interpreting managerial society as the contemporary fulfilment of the Saint-Simonian project, according to a Hegelian structure in which an idea is realised in the social world.