A review of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge. Allen Lane, 464 pages (June 2021)

Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of the most important literary figures of the ancient world, and today the study of Latin is divided between those who favor Cicero's crisp, elegant style and those who reject it as an artificiality. His extensive writings count for the majority of the Latin text we have preserved from his generation, so respected was his prose by his intellectual heirs in antiquity. An accomplished lawyer, philosopher of the skeptic school, and at times even a major political figure embroiled in the late Republican civil wars, Cicero achieved renown and stature in his own lifetime. His reputation and authority, however, were hard-won, taking a lifetime of hard work and accomplishment. Cicero was a novus homo, a “new man.” He had no illustrious forebears, so from obscure beginnings he had to earn a name for himself using his own wiles and wits. For modern Westerners, and especially Americans raised on the Horatio Alger mythology, the enormity of what it then meant to be a novus homo is befuddling. But for the ancients, those without connections and ancestors who dared to strive were seen as grasping, venal creatures, destabilizing the natural order of things.

In The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, Adrian Wooldridge unfurls a pacy narrative that recreates this lost world of inheritance and patrimony subsequently pushed aside by the merciless sorting procedures of modern meritocracy. In the process, he highlights the universal benefits of the new order, where in the natural course of things, the competent ascend the ladder of success. But he also documents the system’s recent corruption, and addresses how we can recapture its original progressive spirit in the future.

Wooldridge is now 62, so he has seen the post-World War II meritocracy at the peak of its powers, and bemoans its calcification and eventual capture by oligarchs. It is no coincidence that someone who values merit has spent most of his career as a columnist for the Economist—a publication that manages to distill and perpetuate the essence of 19th-century British classical liberalism for which a society open to the talents of all was the holy grail. However, The Aristocracy of Talent offers more than a standard recapitulation of history, as it eventually shifts to diagnosing the illness of modern meritocracy. It ends with a prognosis, and the steps needed to restore meritocratic health.

Though an Anglo-American perspective suffuses The Aristocracy of Talent, Wooldridge makes an effort to reach deep into history and broaden his lens so that the narrative covers cultures beyond the modern West. In the process, he brings the insights of domains as diverse as evolutionary psychology, political philosophy, and psychometrics to bear on Plato’s republic, the Chinese imperial system, and the British civil service. Meritocracy is not a historically contingent phenomenon, but a human universal which has been rationalized and placed at the center of our contemporary value system. In the distant past, no doubt, our ancestors would have preferred that the best hunters focus on obtaining game, while those with weaker skills engage in other activities. Today, the meritocratic impulse is not so prosaic, as talent and competency are also important to our values.

The indispensable meritocratic patina obtains even for oligarchic dynasties for whom higher education adds little direct value. Jared Kushner is heir to a multi-billion-dollar fortune, but his father nevertheless purchased a seat for him at Harvard University with a strategic donation. All the world’s wealth and breeding do not automatically confer the imprimatur of merit that matriculation at Harvard does. Though by all accounts, Kushner is an intellectual mediocrity, his Harvard degree gives him a glamor imparted from the institution, that in turn obtains its reputation from the ranks of bright young men and women of more modest means who aspire to be peers with the country’s best. In ancient Rome, a glorious lineage was sufficient to embark on a public career, but in the contemporary US, a degree from a prestigious university is arguably just as important.

In 2021, a book with the subtitle “How Meritocracy Made the Modern World” might be expected to peddle the idea that merit is a recent invention, but Wooldridge, who has a PhD in philosophy from Oxford, goes back to the source, fleshing out the political ideas espoused by Plato in The Republic. Plato’s vision for a republic ruled by merit has been alternatively labeled utopian and fascistic, but the depth and detail of that vision, in which a small competent elite chosen for their talent and virtue rule over the masses, has shaped Western civilization from its inception. Even though Athens was dominated by the will of the democratic citizenry, while Rome’s republic was guided by the interests of great patrician families, the seeds of technocratic meritocracy always existed as a counter-culture, beginning with Plato and continuing down through the ages. The vision in The Republic resurfaced in societies as varied as Elizabethan England, where Thomas More’s Utopia was a latter-day descendent of the original republic, and contemporary Iran, where Ayatollah Khomeini explicitly modeled the Guardian Council on Plato’s philosopher-kings.

And just as meritocracy’s origins were primal, so its appeal was also widespread. Between the Han Dynasty 2,000 years ago and the Song Dynasty 1,000 years ago, the Chinese perfected a meritocratic bureaucracy that obviated the need for a hereditary nobility. Consisting of original commentaries on the humanistic canon befitting a literary gentleman, the Chinese Imperial examinations continued until 1905, resurrected by every new ruling regime. So ubiquitous was the figure of the scholar-bureaucrat in Chinese culture that a whole genre of fiction emerged depicting the romance between a youthful examination candidate and a local beauty. And yet the flipside of the pressure-cooker of Chinese meritocracy was the opportunity cost of men devoting decades to passing exams that most would fail repeatedly. In the 19th century, the Taiping Rebellion, which killed millions, was triggered by a failed examination candidate’s nervous breakdown.

While the ancient Western vision of meritocracy was theoretical and philosophical, and the Chinese vision was functional and pragmatic, the third precedent, that of the Jews, was religious and theological. Though many religions fixate upon a core number of beliefs and major rituals, Judaism evolved into a legalistic faith that extended the 613 commandments handed down from God to the ancient Hebrews into all aspects of life. A tradition of Jewish religious commentary emerged 2,000 years ago whereby rabbis entered into competition with one another, to test their erudition and cleverness in interpreting the Bible. This dynamic process resulted in the Talmud, a set of commentaries that in bound form totals nearly 100 volumes. For much of the last 2,000 years, this intellectual subculture did not make waves outside the ghettos of Europe, but with the Jewish Enlightenment and emancipation in the 19th century, Jews broke into broader public life, and began to dominate numerous professions and fields. Wooldridge documents this impressive record of Jewish achievement, which includes over 20 percent of Nobel Prize winners, and the attempt by gentile elites to prevent Jewish advancement through quotas and explicit discrimination.

Meanwhile, Western societies finally embraced meritocracy whole-heartedly in the 19th century. Whereas earlier generations of university students at Oxford and Cambridge were exclusively the well-heeled sons of the landed nobility, in the 1800s, slots were opened for students with fewer connections and more talent. The Aristocracy of Talent tells of an older generation of Oxford dons who simply held sinecures, producing little in the way of scholarship or mentorship. This was the case throughout the British military and civil service as well, where expenditures were allotted to support the younger sons of privileged elites with connections, who had little to offer the Empire by way of talent, and who lived off the state as a parasitic class. The world before 1800 was defined by hereditary privilege, and the elites were shameless about the dynastic principle. To rule was their right, and the offices of state were their expectation. But war’s competitive pressures between European nation-states ensured that talented officers selected on merit would always beat gentry leaders who purchased their commissions through connections. The near-miss of the 1857 rebellion against the British in India brought home to the ruling caste of the Empire that employing layabouts and wastrels was a luxury they could no longer afford. Instead, the Empire quickly pivoted to deploying bright, classically educated men of the day who could competently and effectively rule a vast territory of hundreds of millions at minimum expense.

John Adams and the Search for a Natural (and Needed) American Aristocracy

But a further question remains. Where are the men—and, today, women—of real merit that our form of government allows to come to the fore?

QuilletteAnthony Kronman

If Europeans—from the British civil service in India to the Napoleonic French officer corps—accepted meritocracy under cruel necessity, America’s aversion to heredity was part of its revolutionary inheritance. The US Constitution prohibits any person holding a government office from accepting title from any “King, Prince, or foreign State.” Though some early Founding Fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, were sympathetic to the aristocratic principle (of course, Hamilton himself was a novus homo), the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 established democratic-populism as the dominant ethos of the American republic. Despite the Jackson administration’s reputation for corruption and graft, Wooldridge notes that its openness to outsiders meant that it expanded the pool of the ruling class far beyond the small number of elite north-eastern families preferred by the Federalist party. Though a fully professionalized civil service would only come to full fruition with the progressive era in the early 20th century, Jackson’s rejection of the hereditary principle and known connections opened the door through which pure meritocracy would eventually step.

The 20th century is rightfully called the American century, as the powers of Europe tore themselves apart in two World Wars and the Soviet Union’s vision of worldwide Communism lost the clash of ideologies. But it was arguably also the century of meritocracy, as America’s emphasis on ingenuity, hard work, and individual initiative propelled it to become the technological and economic vanguard by the mid-20th century. Whereas the ancient Romans viewed a novus homo with suspicion, and Napoleon rightly understood that his parvenu status meant he would always be excluded from the club of European monarchs, in America self-made men were seen to be superior specimens to the scions of dynastic power. The existence of Gilded-Age dynasties like the Astors and Vanderbilts flew in the face of the ideal, which valorized individual new men like Andrew Carnegie, the self-made mogul, born the son of a modest weaver.

Wooldridge outlines how, in the decades after World War II, America’s institutions of excellence threw open their doors to any and all with talent, from Jews to women, and so transformed themselves into supercharged engines of upward mobility. George W. Bush matriculated at Yale in 1964, while his younger brother, Jeb, attended the University of Texas starting in 1971. The difference between the two young men did not reflect their native talent, but the shift to a stricter academic criteria at Yale in the late 1960s. While universities rolled out the red carpet for bright students of all kinds, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed the promise of America to be realized for people from all over the world who had previously been shut out. Whereas the 1924 Immigration Act attempted to maintain the ethnic balance of the US at the time, biased as it was towards north-west Europeans, the 1965 legislation encouraged the migration of vast numbers of individuals from Asia and Africa. It included clauses that prioritized those with critical skills, so that 52 percent of start-ups in Silicon Valley are now co-founded by an immigrant.