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For some authors, the techniques of social intervention could be understood from the angle of a process of normalisation. This rather pessimistic perspective can be backed up empirically by the study of the managerial measures which tend today to structure social interventions. At the same time, the abundance of civic initiatives (for example, those that advocate a solidarity economy) is symptomatic of a contrary movement aimed at the democratisation of practices. In fact, two opposing tendencies can be identified here ranging from the more or less coercive strict expertise of “specialists-judges” to the more or less participative involvement of “citizens-users”. These tendencies offer the observer a less monolithic reality than it seems. Although we can follow the process of normalisation as one of the paths of modernisation, it is still true that the interventions that are connected with it are permanently contested in the name of other principles which, when reactivated, pluralise occidental solutions. Ultimately, it is against a composite backcloth that different modalities of human interventions compete with each other. Two forms will be examined here. Each of them is anchored in a particular epistemology: intervening in the world (with classical science and Descartes) and intervening with the world (with the School of Copenhagen and Dewey.