Up From Meritocracy
A Review of Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address remains justly renowned for its articulation of the Four Freedoms: freedom from want and fear and freedom of worship and speech. Right before of the memorable conclusion to his address, FDR enumerated a series of “basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems.” Last of the six “simple, basic things” Roosevelt listed was the “enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.”
This line isn’t found in the philosopher Michael Sandel’s recent book The Tyranny of Merit, but it very well could have been – and bolstered his already compelling case against meritocracy as American society’s overriding organizing principle. As the animating ethos of the New Deal and liberal politics well into the 1960s and early 1970s, the idea of “a wider and constantly rising standard of living” both fits seamlessly with Sandel’s own broader arguments against meritocratic society and stands in stark contrast to the “rhetoric of rising” that’s dominated an increasingly technocratic progressive politics for the past four decades. In The Tyranny of Merit, Sandel offers a penetrating indictment meritocracy’s false promises and issues a clarion call to all of us – and the center-left in particular – to rediscover the politics of the common good.
Sandel has no brief against the use of merit to select well-qualified people to perform certain jobs or tasks. After all, we’ll obviously want to hire the best plumber or brain surgeon we can if we find ourselves in need of such services. Just as his 2012 book What Money Can’t Buy expressed an objection to organizing society on market principles rather than an inherent opposition to markets in and of themselves, The Tyranny of Merit convincingly argues that the root of our current political, social, and economic problems lies with the fact that we’ve organized society almost entirely around the principle of technocratic merit rather than the idea of the common good.
Indeed, Sandel persuasively contends that the triumph of meritocracy as a society’s organizing principle represents the failure of liberal and progressive politics over the past forty years. By embracing the rhetoric of rising and straying from “its traditional mission of taming capitalism and holding economic power to democratic account, liberalism lost its capacity to inspire.” Contemporary progressive politics shed FDR’s commitment to a “wider and constantly rising standard of living,” supplanting it with the promise that individuals can, in the words of President Barack Obama, “have the chance to go as far as their talents and their work ethic and their dreams can take them.”
At the same time, meritocracy produced an insular elite of highly credentialed political professionals and technocrats that’s become increasingly detached from the society it purports to govern. As Sandel observes, it’d be one thing if this meritocratic elite had governed effectively – but it hasn’t. The elites that governed America from 1940 to 1980, he notes, ran the country quite well: “They won World War II, helped rebuild Europe and Japan, dismantled segregation, and presided four decades of economic growth that flowed to rich and poor alike.” We could easily add unprecedented advances in science and technology like computers, nuclear power, and space exploration to that list as well. Our present-day meritocratic elites have given us stagnant wages, levels of inequality unseen since the 1920s, the financial crash of 2008, inadequate public investment, and two decades of inconclusive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East.
That’s a damning indictment in and of itself, but Sandel goes further to note that that our representative political institutions have become remarkably unrepresentative over the past four decades. While Congress, for instance, “has become more diverse with regard to race, ethnicity, and gender,” it’s become less so when it comes to class and educational credentials – some 95 percent of representatives and 100 percent of senators hold college degrees. The same story can be told in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, leading Sandel to notice that the absence of non-college graduates from European parliaments amounts to “a reversion to the way things were before most working people had the right to vote.”
Though Sandel mentions it only briefly, the meritocratic evolution of liberal and progressive politics can be seen in the diverging backgrounds of Democratic presidents from FDR onward. Both FDR and John F. Kennedy held what Sandel elsewhere characterizes as a mindset of inherited, quasi-aristocratic privilege – they were aware that their positions were the result of good fortune rather than hard work or innate talent, an awareness undoubtedly heightened by their own respective severe medical issues. Likewise, Harry S. Truman didn’t attend a four-year college, while Lyndon B. Johnson graduated from the Southwest Texas State Teachers College. By comparison, both the Clintons and the Obamas attended elite universities like Georgetown, Columbia, and Princeton before moving on to law schools at Harvard and Yale. Given this context, it’s not hard to understand why a Democratic Party “that once represented workers increasingly represented meritocratic elites.”
For Sandel, the rubber hits the road when it comes to the “the way mainstream parties conceived and carried out the project of globalization over the past four decades.” Believing merit to be a matter of individual technical expertise and policy to be the domain of technocratic experts with the right educational credentials, elites across party and ideological lines viewed globalization and other public policy issues “as matters of technical expertise beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.” This technocratic mindset took deep root in the minds of the meritocratic elite that came to dominate progressive politics, while at the same time they became increasingly detached from their fellow citizens. These elites “celebrated market-driven globalization, reaped the benefits, consigned working people to the discipline of foreign competition, and seemed to identify more with global elites than with their fellow citizens.” Or as FDR might put it, they lost their consciousness of “their individual stake in the preservation of democratic life in America.”
As Sandel compellingly argues, the real trouble with doesn’t lie globalization with the issues of “distributive justice” that consumes technocratic elites on the center-left. Simply compensating those who lost out as a result of globalization, he contends, misreads the nature of objections to globalization and the ways in which it “diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate.” It’s also reflective of the ways in which the technocratic mindset desiccates our public discourse, taking contested political questions and “substantive moral argument” about the common good and transforming them into technical questions best left to credentialed experts. In other words, this mindset allows us to dodge fundamental moral and political questions about what we owe each other as fellow citizens.
Sandel suggests that this technocratic outlook results from a fundamental philosophical misconception of merit itself. For philosophers ranging from Aristotle and Plato to Confucius and Thomas Jefferson, he writes, “the merits relevant to governing include moral and civic virtue” – not technical expertise. What’s more, a number of these schools of thought embraced an “ethic of fortune” that “sees that the cosmos does not necessarily match merit with reward.” It’s a theme that runs through the parts of the Bible like Ecclesiastes, as Sandel notes, as well as the writings of ancient Greek and Roman philosophical traditions like Stoicism. Though it’d undoubtedly prove difficult to do so, we’d do well to move away from the notion of merit as technical expertise and back toward the idea of merit as a combination of “excellence in civic virtue and phronesis, the practical wisdom to reason well about the common good.”
On a more practical level, Sandel advises liberals and progressives to ditch the meritocratic rhetoric of individual rising and return to the pursuit of a wider and constantly rising standard of living for all Americans. He helpfully frames objections to globalization and meritocracy as concerns about what he calls “contributive justice,” or the opportunity of individuals to contribute to the common good and the shared national enterprise. For decades, liberals and progressives “have been offering working-class and middle-class voters a greater measure of distributive justice – fairer, fuller access to the fruits of economic growth.” But what these voters really want, he argues, is “to contribute to the common good and win recognition for doing so.” As technocratic and meritocratic ways of thinking colonized progressive politics, the American center-left “largely abandoned the politics of community, patriotism, and the dignity of work, and offered instead the rhetoric of rising.”
Though Sandel provides less in the way of policy details than many center-left elites might prefer, he gives us something much more valuable in our present moment: a new way of thinking about politics that can help “repair the social bonds the age of merit has undone.” His proposal to orient liberal and progressive politics around “a broad equality of condition that enables those who do not achieve great wealth or prestigious positions to live lives of decency and dignity” will do much more to foster a practical sense of national unity than a return to the stale rhetoric of individual rising still prevalent in progressive political circles.
It’s advice liberal patriots ought to take to heart.