Epilogue

Summary

Our contemporaries are incessantly racked by two inimical passions: they feel the need to be led and the wish to remain free. Not being able to destroy either one of these contrary instincts, they strive to satisfy both at the same time. They imagine a unique power, tutelary, all powerful, but elected by citizens.

Corporate governance is too often reduced to arcane technical questions and discussed in a way that focuses on particulars but lacks perspective. Our objective, in this book, has been to describe the fundamental drivers of corporate governance, so as to permit a broader appreciation of its roots and thereby contribute to a more nuanced debate in the field. Without pretending to do all the work of political scientists, historians, and economists, we wanted to show how political philosophy, history, and economics could be combined to present a coherent explanation of both the significance and the evolution of corporate governance. The point of departure for our reflections was provided by the understanding that corporate governance is but a particular case of the much more general subject area of modern governance. Corporate governance represents to us an application to the productive organization of the same questions that have pervaded the debates and the political practices of modern liberal societies for over two centuries, namely: when the governed are defined as free and equal before the law, what gives a person (or a group of people) the right to direct a unit of social organization, whether it be a country, a town, or a corporation?