Machiavel aujourd’hui : des consultants au travail dans le secteur public

• Main Author: Nicolas Belorgey
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: La Nouvelle Revue du Travail 2014-05-01
• Series: La Nouvelle Revue du Travail
• Subjects: work; Machiavelli; public action; intermediary actors; expertise
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nrt/1604

The paper scrutinises the thinking and practices of private consultants operating in the public sector, along with their link to one seminal canon of political thought, Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. It relies on four years of ethnographic fieldwork by consultants working in French public sector institutions, notably hospitals. It reveals a series of continuities between the two eras in question: one marked by a position of subordination to political power, realism, pragmatism, concealment and malice to certain social groups; and another characterised by renewal, accentuated today by recourse to mercenaries, a much more advanced use of symbolic violence alongside physical constraints and a greater fragmentation of political power.