Historical-Philosophical Support and Effects of Modern Administration

Modern administration gravitates on very old and unexpected bases for many organizational management professionals. These are semi-hidden foundations related to philosophical thought, common (although unnoticed as such) in daily administrative practice. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the foundations of management that come from the philosophical thinking of past centuries. The arguments are structured in three main sections: The first section discusses the type of discipline that is management; the second presents the thought of some philosophers whose contributions have transcended the current forms of managing organizations and outlines a critique of the current repercussions of life outside of philosophy, especially separated from ethics; The last one touches on what could be called an administrative wisdom, a natural and imaginative understanding that some leaders possess and that would bring high level administration closer, to a kind of art more than science or technique, which could be called Administrative Art.