The Word Meritocracy Began as a Warning

In 1958 the British sociologist Michael Young published a short book called The Rise of the Meritocracy, written as a mock academic report from the year 2033. It described a society that had abolished the privileges of birth and replaced them with a system of tests, in which every person was sorted by intelligence and effort. The narrator, a self satisfied historian, celebrates the arrangement. Young did not. He meant the book as a warning, and the word it popularised, meritocracy, was coined as an insult. In 2001 he wrote in a newspaper that he was dismayed to see politicians adopt the word as praise, and that a satire had been taken for a programme.

The warning rested on a simple observation. A society that says rank follows merit also says that those at the bottom deserve their place. Under hereditary privilege, a poor person could blame an unjust order. Under a meritocracy, the poor person is invited to blame the self. The philosopher Michael Sandel developed the point in The Tyranny of Merit in 2020, arguing that the winners of such contests come to believe they earned everything and lose gratitude toward the community that made their success possible, while the losers are left with humiliation as well as disadvantage.