Free to Obey: Management from Nazism to the Present Day

I needed to sit with this one overnight before making my mind on how to rate it. My rating and review are specifically for the translated to English version of this book and I might revisit my review if I get my hands on an original French language copy. Reading this book was very uncomfortable, it felt like reading a largely favorable biography of a SS general that got away with it and went on to live a life of relative success. While it's facts that it is what happened, I was really taken aback by the sympathetic approach to the man. Considering that French reviewers did not seem to have been shocked by the approach I think this might be a question of nuance being lost in translation (hence I might revisit if I can find a French copy).
There are interesting aspect to this book and very timely ones too, if you are not convinced that there is an authoritarian/fascistic drift currently happening in many places this book might just make you see things differently without even trying. I say without trying because the focus through most of the book is on the managements principles put forward by Höhn and his management school and his life and not really on how they present in today's managerial world/political sphere but it's not hard to see if you pay even fleeting attention to what's going on around you (the use of freedom verbiage by authoritarians where in reality freedom is only freedom of mode not freedom of goals, decentralized leadership with diffuse instruction, power of the individual over only a small area of action that falls under their purview...).
In conclusion, Chapoutot is an historian and this is a history book so if you're interested in history you'll find interesting tidbits in a concise package, if you're looking for a deep cut about how current principles of management were shaped in part by Nazis this book might leave you “sur votre faim” as we would say in French.

I received an eARC of this book from Europa Editions through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.