meritocracy

A meritocracy is lauded in some circles as the ideal society, where one is rewarded for one’s skill, intelligence, and abilities rather than, for instance, the circumstances of one’s birth. Yet it is worth knowing that the word meritocracy, was originally intended as a description of a dystopian society, and early use was often in a tongue-in-cheek, satirical vein. Like the phrase pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, it was not intended to be taken as a serious proposition.

The term meritocracy arose in socialist circles in the 1950s as a derisive term for a new system of class oppression. The first known use of the term is by Alan Fox in the journal Socialist Commentary of May 1956. Fox writes:

[Social stratification] will remain as long as we assume it to be a law of nature that those of higher occupational status must not only enjoy markedly superior education as well but also, by right and necessity, have a higher income in the bargain. As long as that assumption remains—as long as violation of it are regarded as grotesque paradoxes—then so long will our society be divisible into the blessed and the unblessed—those who get the best of everything, and those who get the poorest and the least. This way lies the “meritocracy”; the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfillment of exercising their natural endowment but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure.

This is not enough. Merely to devise bigger and better “sieves” (“equality of opportunity”) to help the clever boys get to the top and then pile rewards on them when they get there is the vision of a certain brand of New Conservatism; it has never been the vision of socialism.

The term made its way into mainstream discourse via the publication of Michael Young’s 1958 The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: The New Elite of Our Social Revolution. Young’s book is a satirical look at 1950s British society from the perspective of someone writing from the distant perspective of the year 2034. Young writes of an imagined scenario where a fixed retirement age created a system that, while preferable to the old aristocratic hereditary order, ended up sidelining the most experienced and able:

Before the meritocracy was fully established, age-stratification as a substitute for the hereditary order may have been necessary for the sake of social stability. But the cost was very high. Every year hundreds of thousands of elderly me, some of whom would have been much more assets than liabilities to their employers, were forced to retreat into idleness, and deprived of their own self-esteem, by the rigidity of the promotion system.

Young is basically echoing Fox’s sentiment that the meritocracy is simply a replacement of one class of bosses with another. In Young's fictional future-history, the hereditary rulers of Britain had been replaced by a seniority system (“age-stratification”), which, in the 1950s, was being replaced by one based on perceived merit. Young’s book made something of a splash, and was much commented upon in the mainstream press upon its publication.

Young later claimed to have coined the term, and he may have used it without conscious awareness that it was already in use. And many writers have followed suit, crediting Young with coining the term. But he did not—as any quick look at the OED, which contains the Fox citation from two years earlier, would confirm. Young was simply using a term that was already in use by those discussing the problems of social and economic stratification.

Meritocracy was originally derisive, not satirical, although Young’s book is definitely satire. But it is certainly ironic that twenty-first century capitalism has adopted this socialist slur as justification for its existence.

Sources:

Fox, Alan. “Class and Equality.” Socialist Commentary. May 1956, 11–13 at 13.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2001. s.v. meritocracy, n.

Young, Michael. The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: The New Elite of Our Social Revolution (1958). Hammondsworth, England: Penguin, 1961, 91.

Zimmer, Ben. “A ‘Meritocracy’ Is Not What People Think It Is.” The Atlantic. 14 March 2019.

Image credit: Unknown artist, 17th or 18th century. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.