Adrian Wooldridge On Meritocracy | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
""‘The core meaning of meritocracy is that we judge people on the basis of their individual abilities and individual promise, rather than on the basis of their family connections, and their status in life, their inherited status. But I would say that there is no fixed meaning of the term. One of the messages of this book is that this is a very protean term, it's changed its meaning very dramatically over time. And its meaning is changing even today. So I think when you go back to the Enlightenment, let's say, the 18th century, people, when they talked about merits would really be talking about virtues, as much as about abilities. Very much a judgment on people's character and personal qualities. When you move more into the middle of the 20th century, it's much more tightly defined as, much more tightly identified with intelligence and mental abilities. And it may be changing again, in its meaning. So the book is both the history of the rise of the meritocracy and the history of the changing meaning of this this term meri-, but always with a sense that it means judging people on the basis of them as people rather than their position in society...
What you saw in the society at large, was a society in which people were overwhelmingly born into the positions they occupied, and, you know what, if you were called Thatcher, it was because you were a Thatcher. If you were Lord, it was because your father was a lord. So positions were inherited. And the most important organization in society, the most important institution in society in many ways is the family. You inherit your, your position as a member of a family, and you define your identity as a member of the family. So you start off with a monarchy, the monarch will inherit their position because their parents are, it’s directly biologically inherited. So society is regarded as static. It's a collection of ranks…
The third and most extraordinary element of this old world is that jobs, were not regarded as things that you got on merits, because you could perform them. They were regarded as things that people owned, and could be transmitted to their children, they could be inherited. Or transmitted to by patronage to somebody that you knew and liked or trusted. Or, that could actually be bought and sold. So jobs were much more like furniture than they were like commitments to do actual tasks. So a society that's hierarchical. A society that's driven by families and family connections, and a society that treats jobs as property and rewards and baubles that can be handed out on the basis of who you were, what relationship you were to me. And whether you grovel to me, that sort of thing…
Louis XVI is getting up in the morning… He has to live the rest of his day in a relatively public place. He eats in a public place. People watch him eating, he goes hunting. All the time that he's going through his life pageanting about, he's being pestered by people asking for jobs. And if he likes them, or if they have a connection to him, or if it's advised to him, he will give them a job. He doesn't know who they are. Or he doesn't know if they're competent at doing the job. He's giving these jobs out, because he's the king, he possesses these jobs and he can give them all out. And that was society. Really up until the, let's say the French Revolution. That was a lot of what human history was about… And this thing comes along, meritocracy, which blows all of that up. And it's completely revolutionary. It replaces the family with the individual. It replaces hierarchy with mobility, and it replaces a job as property with a job as a set of obligations that you have to perform in order to, in order to hold it.’...
‘I see the meritocracy as the very essence of modernity. I would say that meritocracy is more the essence of modernity in many ways than freedom, which is quite often contingent on on on a lot of other things, or even indeed, than than, than capitalism, because you can have maternity without capitalism. I don't really think that you can have a successful modernity without meritocracy, I think you have to have a system that will judge people on the basis of their abilities, their ability to perform certain jobs. So I would say that the essence of modernity, the transition from a pre modern society, to a modern society, is the rise of meritocracy.’
‘So you would see meritocracy as playing a fundamental role in, in what? In making societies more productive, in making them more efficient, in making them more equal?’...
‘All of those things and more. I would say that in order to have in order to have a modern society, which produces a surplus that makes modernity possible, you need to have a system of meritocratic allocation. I don't think you can have an efficient army or an efficient state, or a productive, really productive economy without having some sort of mechanism that links abilities and performance with jobs. I think that's absolutely essential. But I also think, see meritocracy, as being part of a collection of values that are identical. They're identical with modernity really. If you go back to the world I was describing before, the world of priority, degree and place in which everybody is born into a certain position, that is associated with a whole series of attitudes, which are pre modern. It's the idea that family matters more than the individual. It's the idea that you inherit your place in society rather than achieve your place in society. It's the idea that, that work, intelligence, ability are somehow to be despised. And what really matters is, your honor, your aristocratic honor, or your lack of aristocratic honor. That extravagance, that a certain sort of lackadaisical aristocratic style, are all part of civilized life. And when modernity comes along, it says that what matters is the individual, ambition, ability, social promotion, social climbing, whatever you want to call it, all of those things are coincidence or part of modernity...
The man who invented the word meritocracy was Michael Young. And he wrote a book in 1958, called The Rise of the Meritocracy. And the interesting thing about this book is that it was a condemnation of meritocracy. It was a very hostile account of meritocracy. And it was hostile because he said that what happens in meritocracy is you have nobody to blame but yourself. If you don't succeed, the only person who bears the blame for that lack of success is you… what meritocracy produces is a much more unhappy society in which people blame themselves for their lack of ability...
I regard the golden age of meritocracy in the West, as being the period after the Second World War, after 1945. From about 1945, up to about 1970. That was partly because you were getting, you had a big expansion of educational opportunity, the school leaving age was raised to 15, and then to 16, you had the creation of a lot of new schools, you had the creation of lots of new white collar jobs, which gave people more opportunities. In the United States, you had the introduction because of the GI Bill of free university education to anybody who had been, who’d fought in the war, and could then go to university free. So you had an extraordinary increase in opportunity. And what you saw with that huge increase in opportunity was that there was an enormous amount of ability in the population at large that had been ignored. And what you saw after that was a massive process of upward social mobility. Because of that, that that that talent, finding it, its natural level. And I think that begins to slow down in the 70s 80s and 90s, partly because of what I call a marriage between money and merit, that people who are rich begin to buy more educational opportunities for themselves, partly because you get rid of selective schools, which are a way of giving more opportunities to working class children. So I think we've had a slow down... Now, the one example I would add to that is modern Singapore, which I think is is an extraordinarily meritocratic system. That's a country that's taken meritocracy further than anywhere else, and continues to do so...
Plato says that the great problem is that families will try and look after themselves. It's natural for parents to look after their children. And they will try and promote their children into the guardian class, whether they're guardians or not, Plato's solution to this is extreme, he not only says that you must have a system of communal child rearing, he says you must have a system of state sponsored orgies, so that there's no nobody knows who the parents of the children are, that they're collectively created and collectively raised...
One of the many dark sides of meritocracy is in order to have upward social mobility, you have to have downward social mobility. And that the total because society gets richer, and you have more opportunities, but a certain amount of downward social mobility, and that's against what every parent wants’"
