While one wonders about the business of the twenty-first century and "the company post-crisis", it is useful to return to the original company of the twentieth century. Under what conditions it is born? What explains the forms that we know? And what are the foundations that could now be challenged? Berle and Means provide a historical interest, since their book The Modern Corporation and Private porperty (1932) analyzes the emergence of modern business in the early the twentieth century.