Lecturers often tell students never to start with a dictionary definition. They do this for a reason: the temptation to treat dictionary definitions as immutable empirical truths flung from a faceless, ahistorical summit of scientific rationality. But these definitions are also gravitated towards because they are attempts to condense shared understandings of what a word means at the time the dictionary was put together. When Raymond Williams produced his book Keywords, he solved this problem by taking significant words in everyday use, situating them in broader contexts and tracing the longer evolutions of their meaning across time and space (Williams 1983). ‘Meritocracy’, unfortunately, is not one of the words examined by Williams in Keywords (although, as I discuss below, he did have some very powerful and important points to make about meritocracy in a book review). We will therefore have to do some of this genealogical work ourselves.
It is only too easy to see from the dictionary entry above why meritocracy is such a charged, ‘of the zeitgeist’ subject. Just look at the issues it connects to: the question of who governs society, the issue of a small group having influence over the many, competitiveness in general and within education in particular, the thorny problem of what it means to have ‘merit’ and the promise (and, less conspicuously, the pitfalls) of social mobility. These are core themes and problems of our time. Noticeably, however, other dictionary definitions have slightly different emphases. Some foreground meritocracy’s emphasis on individual advancement through wider social structures. To take the widely used online Free Dictionary’s current version:
(Free Dictionary 2016) Here meritocracy is a system structured around advancement of people who are selected on the basis of individual achievement; and, as I show throughout this book, its emphasis on the individual is important. The ‘-ocracy’ of ‘meritocracy’ derives from the Greek word for government, and, as this definition illustrates, the word can with modifications (‘meritocrat’) refer to an elite group of people who govern and who have been able to arrive at such a position ‘on the basis of individual ability or achievement’. Whereas ‘a meritocracy’ refers to a social system where people are selected by some undefined source according to their merit, ‘the meritocrats’ can also mean an elite group of rulers who have risen up through this system. There is an immediate palpable contrast and chasm between the elite cadre of rulers and the ‘open’ system of access to that elite, a gap that is bridged by the image of travelling up the ladder.
As we have seen already, ‘meritocracy’ has been a word used to describe both a social system and a set of discourses, cultural meanings, associations, ideas, judgements, presumptions and emotions about it. These definitions and distinctions (much like terms like ‘government’ or ‘economy’) can be difficult to separate given the extent to which they have shaped each other. Furthermore, as this chapter discusses, contemporary definitions of meritocracy often rest on some problematic foundations in terms of what they cite as the first use of the word. As Amartya Sen wrote, ‘the idea of meritocracy may have many virtues, but clarity is not one of them’ ((Sen 2000).
In the introduction I suggested that it is useful to separate the meaning of the social system from meritocracy as an ideological discourse and to rigorously contextualise both of them. This chapter discusses the slippage between meritocracy-as-a-social system and meritocracy-as-a-discourse in a number of ways. It considers how meritocracy has changed in meaning, tracing its etymology, mapping the stunning U-turns the word has undertaken in its journey from negative slur to positive axiom of modern life. It suggests that particular conceptual categories might be created to help understand the mutations of the word. To these ends this chapter traces a journey from what it terms the ‘socialist critique of meritocracy’ through ‘social democratic meritocracy’ and then finally to ‘neoliberal meritocracy’. It traces these historical formations through the usage of the word in social theory, from Alan Fox, Hannah Arendt, Michael Young, Daniel Bell and Anthony Giddens. Social theory does not exist in a vacuum, and so the discussion gestures to the lines of traffic between these writers and the wider cultural and political climate that they helped form and which formed them, contexts which are explored in more detail in later chapters. But to begin with it is useful to consider what happened to meritocracy before it was coined as a word.
Early genealogies, histories and geographies
The meanings of ‘meritocracy’ were, of course, not just born with the invention of this word in English in the 1950s. As a complex concept it can be connected to much longer historical and geographical genealogies, an extensive discussion of which is beyond the scope of this book. The discourse and social systems this book discusses are primarily those which have been mobilised in the West or the Global North and particularly as manifest in relatively recent Anglo-European culture, with a pronounced bias towards my own standpoint as a British citizen. However, as we have already begun to see, this discourse has a wider resonance beyond this zone. What this book terms a recognisable discourse of neoliberal meritocracy has been noted in South Africa, Singapore and South Korea, with pronounced specific geocultural variations (James 2012; Soko 2015). For instance, the language of diversity, meritocracy and opportunity have been used to help entrench economic inequality in Singapore’s educational system and its wider society between the 1970s and the present, despite and alongside its novel attempts to tackle racialised forms of discrimination (Quinn Moore 2000; Talib and Fitzgerald 2015). In terms of wider histories of the concept, we might cite a number of different international examples, such as the early example of the exams introduced in the civil service in imperial China providing ‘access for all’ to the profession (Elman 2013). And at the same time the meaning of meritocracy, as I discuss it here, has been shaped by Western histories and values which themselves were shaped through past and present transnational imperialisms.
In the West the expansion of the potential for ‘social mobility’ has been a key feature of ideological narratives, if not of widespread social reality, in different ways and forms ever since the establishment of industrial capitalism and the Enlightenment, which emphasised the supposedly equal potential of those it qualified as ‘human’. For instance, after the Paris Commune of 1871 – which overthrew the French monarchy – was crushed, the re-established republic announced that it was now a regime in which ‘careers were open to talents’ (Ross 2002).2 These developments were echoed in the British Victorian self-help tradition, most famously represented in the bestselling books by Samuel Smiles (e.g. Self-Help, 1859). Smiles had been a Chartist but later jettisoned his commitment to socialism in favour of an enthusiastic embrace of capitalism and the Protestant work ethic and the perceived potential of the individual to pull themselves up by their bootstraps (Lindemann 2013: 121–122; Hobsbawm 1988: 255). The gradual expansion of the democratic franchise and educational provision in the UK in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also justified and rendered acceptable to conservatives and capitalists on the basis that it would facilitate the movement of a small pool of talented people into the Establishment, and into the capitalist class, rather than on the basis of increasing equality (Todd 2015).
In the US, where ‘[p]eople understand the idea of the American Dream as the fulfilment of the promise of meritocracy’ (McNamee and Miller 2009: 2) a similar set of tenets was mobilised. The basis of the American Dream was that, as Thomas Jefferson famously put it, an ‘aristocracy of talent and virtue’ was replacing the aristocracy of birth that characterised a degenerate European social order. From this perspective, rejecting aristocratic hereditary privilege and striving through the Protestant work ethic meant ‘freedom’, and it was exactly this shake-up of the European social order and the break with feudalism that so struck the French diplomat, historian and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote about it in his book Democracy in America (De Tocqueville 1994).
A narrative of social mobility enabling a talented few to rise to the top has then been a discourse which is extremely compatible with capitalism for a couple of centuries. Indeed a dominant strand of the Western liberal capitalist tradition is that we are ‘taught to scorn equality of property whilst aspiring to equality of condition’, as Steve Cross put it (Cross and Littler 2010). This division is reflected in how the phrases ‘equality of opportunity’ and ‘equality of outcome’ became political terms. ‘Equality of opportunity’ became synonymous with liberal capitalism, and ‘equality of outcome’ became associated with socialism (Schaar 1997). To some extent these terms echo classic sociological theory. ‘Equality of opportunity’ echoes Emile Durkheim’s idea of a society providing ‘free space for all merits’: that the most social harmony will be achieved if people can find work according to their natural ability (Durkheim 2013). ‘Equality of outcome’ echoes Marx’s emphasis on dissecting capitalism’s exploitations to argue for equality in distribution of wealth, a theory taken up across the wide political spectrum on the left, from vicious authoritarian communists through social democrats to libertarian anarchists (Marx and Engels 2004).
In general, ‘equality of opportunity’ has been used by right-wing and liberal or neoliberal governments. ‘Equality of outcome’ is a left-wing idea, although it is not a term which has been used rhetorically in the same way as ‘equality of opportunity’ and it has little if any popular resonance. Indeed, politicians who are actually arguing for ‘equality of outcome’ have mainly tended simply to use the language of ‘equality’, which has also blurred the debate. In the neoliberal era formerly left-wing parties have switched sides: an important strand of the New Labour government in the UK of the 1990s (which Margaret Thatcher described as her greatest success) was jettisoning the idea of equality of outcome in favour of equality of opportunity, as we will see in the next chapter. ‘Opportunity’ can sound excitingly open and undetermined; ‘outcome’ can sound fairly defined and final. In part what this book does is to examine how this language of equality of opportunity has been used to justify rampant and increasing social inequality; and, whilst arguing for equality of outcome in terms of greater parity of material resources and expenditure of effort, it also argues that it is crucial to both factor in, and to mobilise, the diversity, malleability and variability of flourishing that ‘opportunity’ has historically been associated with.
