Every so often, The Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is Michael Young’s "The Rise of the Meritocracy." This book, though now largely forgotten, proved to be extraordinarily influential. Published in 1958, Young’s book argued that the rise of the credentialed class in postwar Britain was undermining the egalitarian ethos of social democracy.

The author’s most important insight—the one that would prove most prophetic—was that meritocracy, the aspiration toward which governments officially subscribed and indeed continue to do so, was in reality neither desired nor desirable. Meritocracy, Young argued, leads to the establishment of a self-perpetuating elite that allocates more and more public goods to itself in the confidence that such allocation is no more than it deserves.

More problematically, meritocracy leads to the emergence of an ever-burgeoning class of the non-affluent and the despondent who have no hope of any social or economic improvement and—most seriously—are told that they have no one to blame but themselves for their failures.

Young did not write the book as a policy proposal or a sociological blueprint, but as a satirical warning—one that has been widely misunderstood precisely because the social order it mocked later came to be celebrated.

Young had been a central figure in postwar British social-democratic thought. He had been deeply involved in the creation of the Labor Party’s 1945 manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, and was a committed egalitarian in the tradition of British ethical—not Marxist—socialism. But by the mid-1950s he had grown uneasy with the direction of postwar Britain.

The welfare state had expanded, educational opportunity had widened and selection by examination—most notably through the 11-plus—had come to be seen as a triumph of egalitarianism. Bright working-class children could, by passing the 11-plus public examination, enter excellent state schools, known as grammar schools. And thus the grip of the aristocracy on British public had supposedly been broken. To enjoy a prestigious and lucrative careers children would no longer need to have been born into money and to have attended public school and Oxford and Cambridge.

Young found all of this less than satisfactory. To be sure, class privilege was no longer justified by birth or aristocratic inheritance, but by such objective measures as “ability” and “intelligence.” However, the new inequalities that were emerging were in some way more unpalatable than the old in that they were acquiring a new moral authority. The new inequalities were seen as having been deserved.

Rather than write a conventional critique of the emerging credentialed-driven hierarchy, Young chose the form of a future history. He presented "The Rise of the Meritocracy" as a mock-scholarly account, written in 2034, by an earnest sociologist who admires the system he describes. This framing was crucial. By adopting the voice of a complacent insider, Young could show how a society organized around “merit”—defined as intelligence plus effort—would come to justify cruelty, exclusion and resentment without ever acknowledging them as such. The tone is dry, pseudo-academic and deliberately misleading, inviting the reader to notice what the narrator cannot.

Young believed that meritocracy would not abolish class so much as reconstitute it. In his imagined future, the children of the “clever” intermarry, pass on advantages and dominate institutions just as thoroughly as the old aristocracy ever did—only now with the blessing of science and the trappings of democracy. The resentment of those excluded eventually erupts in social unrest, but the ruling class cannot comprehend why the system should be questioned.

Young did not write the book to attack excellence, intelligence or effort. He wrote it to attack the moral absolutism that arises when success is treated as proof of intellectual or moral worth and failure as proof of deficiency. His fear was that meritocracy would destroy social solidarity: if everyone had supposedly had a fair chance, then those at the bottom obviously deserve their fate. To Young that was more corrosive than inherited privilege, because it stripped inequality of the comforts of the sense of injustice.

The irony is that the term “meritocracy,” which Young coined to serve as a critique, came to be adopted as a term of approbation. Meritocracy was supposedly something we all wanted. Politicians across the spectrum embraced it, often without having read the book or grasped its satirical intent.

Young’s book had a direct influence on Labor Party thinking, and fueled the educational egalitarianism that the Harold Wilson governments pursued on coming to power in 1964. The tripartite state school system — grammar schools, comprehensive schools and secondary moderns — that had emerged out of the 1944 Education Act had originally been deemed to be the model of progressive policymaking. It promised to break the monopoly of elite schooling by identifying and promoting talent wherever it appeared.

By the late 1950s, however, Labor had turned against the 11-plus examination, arguing that it was entrenching class divisions rather than dissolving them. Young’s book served to legitimize Labor policy. Labor did not merely argue that the system was inefficient or unfair in practice; it argued that the very idea of educational selection by ability was morally corrupting.

When the Wilson government urged local authorities to abolish the 11-plus and move to comprehensive schooling, it was acting in an intellectual climate shaped by Young’s critique. The policy was not merely administrative; it was explicitly moral. Comprehensive education was presented as a way of preserving equality of esteem, of preventing children from being labelled as successes or failures before adolescence.

The abandonment of merit-based schooling went together with the massive expansion of higher education. The Robbins Report of 1963, which the Wilson government embraced, argued that university places should become as widely available as possible. The rationale for this was somewhat threadbare. It had something to do with competitiveness in the global marketplace, though no one knew what exactly that meant.

By expanding universities, Labor sought to preserve equality of esteem while touting the needs of a modern economy. Education, the government claimed, could be both socially inclusive and economically transformative.

None of that happened of course. The expansion of education created a large population of graduates with degrees that conferred neither the respectability of genuine intellectual accomplishment nor an automatic passport to socially and economically rewarding employment. Universities were churning out inflated credentials with declining real value.

Young did not believe that simply expanding education would solve the problems of growing inequality and the emergence of a credentialed class. If degrees became empty badges, they could humiliate just as effectively as exclusion had done earlier — especially when graduates discovered that their qualifications conferred neither status nor security.

Written almost seven decades ago, “The Rise of the Meritocracy” has proven to be a prescient work. Young brought to the fore something very discomforting. Meritocracy, which we all claim we want, removes the moral alibi for failure. Under an openly class-bound system, injustice is visible and external. If you don’t advance, you can point to immutable structures that worked against you: accent, school, connections, capital. The system may be cruel, but it is at least honest about where power lies. Your dignity survives because your failure is not treated as a verdict on you.

Meritocracy changes that completely. It tells you that the gates are open, the rules are fair, the tests are neutral. If you don’t make it, the conclusion is unavoidable: the deficiency must be yours, and yours alone. You were not bright enough, driven enough, adaptable enough. The cruelty of meritocracy is not that it excludes, but that it makes exclusion feel deserved.

Young argued that this will corrode social solidarity. The winners become morally arrogant, convinced that their success reflects virtue and intelligence rather than contingency and luck. The losers are denied even the consolation of righteous anger. Resentment does not disappear — it is internalized, turning into shame, bitterness or self-contempt. It is a recipe for dystopia.

Michael Young’s “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” though written as a contribution to the contemporary debates on the direction socialism should take once it had rid itself of all remaining vestiges of Marxism, remains relevant today as governments pursue policies punishing one class of people, while rewarding others—policies that have little to do with the inherent merits of either class.