Allen Lane; 496 pages; £25. To be published in America in July by Skyhorse; $24.99
THIS MASTERLY book offers a robust defence of meritocracy. Adrian Wooldridge,
The Economist’s political editor, traces the idea from Plato’s “Republic”, through Napoleon’s “career open to talent” to the attack on Victorian nepotism led by Britain’s intellectual aristocracy. He ends with interesting speculation that meritocracy may now have better prospects in Asia than in the West.
The term “meritocracy” was coined by Michael Young, a British sociologist, in a book published in 1958. Young feared that a system that rewarded merit defined as IQ plus effort could actually be dystopian because the losers would suffer more than ever. He predicted a revolt against it and that revolt is indeed under way, with powerful challenges from critics including Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, and Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard Law School. Such detractors d