Margins
Free to Obey book cover
Free to Obey
How the Nazis Invented Modern Management
2020
First Published
3.85
Average Rating
139
Number of Pages

Reinhard Höhn (1904-2000) was a commander of the SS, one of Nazi Germany’s most brilliant legal minds, and an archetype of the fervid technocrats and intellectuals that built the Third Reich. Gone into hiding after 1945, he managed to survive unscathed the denazification process and reemerged in the 1950s as the founder and director of a management school in Bad Harzburg, Lower Saxony. His story wouldn’t be too different from that of other prominent Nazis, if not for the fact that the great majority of Germany’s postwar business leaders—more than 600,000 executives from 2,600 companies—were educated at his school. Is this a coincidence? Or, as explains Johann Chapoutot, a brilliant historian of Nazism, is there a profound link between the forms of organization of Nazism and the prevailing principles and practices of corporate management? As this illuminating study shows, at the core of Höhn’s vision was a specific conception of freedom, which had deep roots in German history and which found expression in the role of the manager and the administrator. In this illiberal tradition, freedom is not just intended exclusively as freedom to act, but also as freedom to obey orders from above—to carry out one’s mission no matter the cost.

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Author

Johann Chapoutot
Johann Chapoutot
Author · 10 books
Johann Chapoutot est professeur d'histoire contemporaine à l'université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. Spécialiste de l'histoire de la culture nazie et d'histoire politique et culturelle contemporaine, il est notamment l'auteur de La Loi du sang. Penser et agir en nazi (Bibliothèque des Histoires, 2014) et de La révolution culturelle nazie (Bibliothèque des Histoires, 2017).
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