A ‘society…divisible into the blessed and the unblessed’: Michael Young and ‘Meritocracy’ in Post-war Britain

Abstract

With merit now considered a positive and essential route to social progress and reward, the article considers the origins and emergence of the concept as largely a perjorative dimension of social democratic discourses of equality in the 1950s, and the formative contribution of Michael Young to these debates and the conceptual pre-history of 'meritocracy'.
It considers his dystopian vision of a society stratified according to narrow 'merit' and reaction and responses to his seminal work, The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958). It further identifies a subsequent ‘meritocratic turn’ in which, in spite of its satirical origins and warnings of dire social consequences, meritocracy presently enjoys a confirmatory position as a concept of opportunity and social mobility, as an embedded ideal of social organisation and means of allocating differential rewards.