Best and brightest?

PETER MANDLER considers a sweeping analysis of meritocracy’s role in shaping the western world and debates the effectiveness of attempts to usher in equality

- PETER MANDLER

In this readable and wide-ranging book, Adrian Wooldridge – sitting tenant of the “Bagehot” column in The Economist – brings a historical perspective to the current “crisis of the meritocracy”, in which meritocratic values and institutions (especially educational ones) are assailed from both the left and populist right as mystified bastions of privilege. Against this attack, Wooldridge maintains that meritocracy is revolutionary and egalitarian. He makes life easier for himself by foraying backwards, as far as Plato, focusing especially on the long haul from the Enlightenment to the brink of the present, when hereditary privilege was challenged by new meritocratic ideals of ability and hard work. There are few defenders of feudalism nowadays to argue otherwise.

Wooldridge has many tales to tell of doughty crusaders for truth and justice fighting against entrenched and unearned privileges. The story is a familiar one of “the rise of the west”. Our old friends the Renaissance, the Protestant work ethic, the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, the industrial revolution with its cohort of self-made men, and the dawn of competitive examinations in the 19th century all play their appointed roles. Indeed, Wooldridge has a habit of name-checking conventional claims for the rise of the west – about its embrace of rationality, economic growth, liberty and democracy – and telling us these are really about meritocracy. Thus meritocracy plays the starring role that in some other accounts might have been assigned to Magna Carta, Protestantism or the Enlightenment.