Meritocracy has come in for some hard knocks of late. Critical race theorists, egalitarians and others on the left deride meritocracy as ideology, a mechanism for perpetuating and legitimising hierarchy, elite privilege and structural inequities. Populists on the right are no less contemptuous, dismissing elites who claim to owe their positions in society to superior ability and effort as the shills of a system that is ‘rigged’. Prominent critics, meanwhile, like the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel or the Yale law professor Daniel Markovits, inveigh against what they have described in recent books as the ‘Tyranny of Merit’ or the ‘Meritocracy Trap’, arguing that our current system of preferment is as bad for the few it benefits as for the many it leaves behind.
