Is meritocracy, like the ancien regime in the 18th century, heading for the guillotine?,” asks Kay S. Hymowitz in a review of Adrian Wooldridge’s The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.
Meritocracy is a radical idea, Wooldridge argues.
The idea that rulers should be the most worthy, not the sons and grandsons of the powerful, was first advanced by Plato. The guardians of his Republic — “men of gold” — would be those “with natural talents, pedigree be damned,” Hymowitz writes.
“The only other proto-meritocratic social order came from Asia” where the Chinese allowed those who passed a series of exams to become mandarins serving the emperor (who inherited the title).
Elsewhere, nobles or church elders sometimes helped “a few exceptional low-born strivers” rise to prominence, Woodridge notes. The nobles needed smart bureaucrats to do the work. (I highly recommend Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son who became one of the most powerful men in England under Henry VIII.)