Meritocracy

Michael Young coined the term meritocracy in his 1958 satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033. Young, a British sociologist and Labour Party intellectual who had written the party's landmark 1945 manifesto, imagined a future in which merit, defined as IQ plus effort, became the sole basis for social stratification. In his telling, this produced not justice but a new and more ruthless form of inequality, one in which those at the top believed they deserved to be there, and those at the bottom had no grounds for protest because the system had already measured them and found them wanting.

The word combines Latin mereō (to earn) with the Greek suffix -cracy (power, rule). Though Young is widely credited with coining it, sociologist Alan Fox used the term pejoratively in the journal Socialist Commentary in 1956. Young's novel was rejected by the Fabian Society and then by eleven publishers before Thames and Hudson accepted it. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was translated into seven languages.

The transformation of the word's meaning was precisely what Young had feared. By the 1970s, Daniel Bell was using "meritocracy" approvingly. By the turn of the century, Tony Blair's Labour government had made the promotion of meritocracy an explicit policy objective. In a 2001 Guardian essay titled "Down with Meritocracy," Young expressed his dismay at what had happened to his invention.

Young wrote that when those judged to have merit "harden into a new social class without room in it for others," the result is not fairness but a system of privilege that has learned to call itself earned. The satirist had watched his warning become a recruitment poster.