What is meritocracy, and why is it contested? Young, Sandel, Sen, Rawls and Spain's oposiciones

Meritocracy is the idea that jobs, public posts and rewards should go to people according to their talent and effort, whatever family they come from and whoever they know. Almost everyone in Spain uses the word with approval, and almost every serious book about it in the last few years has been an attack. This explainer goes through where the word comes from, why it is contested, and the answer Amartya Sen and John Rawls give, which is the one the radical centre takes.

A word born as a warning

The sociologist Alan Fox used the word meritocracy in 1956, and it was Michael Young who made it famous two years later with The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958). The book is a satire. The Fabian Society turned it down, as did eleven other publishers, before Thames and Hudson took it.

It is written as a report from a future Britain, where merit is defined as intelligence plus effort and has replaced social class as the way to sort people. The clever rise, get tested again and again, marry each other and pass their position on, so the merit elite becomes hereditary. Those who fail the tests are left with no excuse and no pride. The story ends in 2034 with the Populists rising against the elite.

Young lived long enough to see the word used as praise. In 2001 he wrote in The Guardian that he was disappointed Tony Blair's Labour had embraced it. He kept a clear distinction: appointing people to jobs on their merit is sensible, and the trouble starts when those judged to have merit harden into a new social class.

The critics and the defenders

Two books revived Young's warning. Daniel Markovits published The Meritocracy Trap in 2019. His argument is that meritocracy has become a mechanism for passing wealth and privilege down the generations, that the middle class is sliding away from the professional elite, and that even the winners are trapped, working ever harder to earn back the cost of their expensive education. He presents all this as the result of meritocracy working as designed.

Michael Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit (2020) moves the argument from money to morals. A society that sorts people into winners and losers by merit, he argues, breeds hubris at the top and harsh judgement of those left behind, while the odds stay stacked in favour of the already fortunate. He links the resentment to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, and asks for more attention to luck, an ethic of humility and a politics of the common good. The idea that the dignity of work does not depend on a degree comes from this camp, and it is a fair point from the left.

The defence is just as old as the word. For most of history, jobs and posts went by birth and patronage, and the merit principle was the weapon used against both. Adrian Wooldridge's The Aristocracy of Talent (2021) tells that history and calls meritocracy, the advancement of people according to their talents, whatever their status at birth, a revolutionary idea that made the modern world. Where mobility has stalled, he says, the cure is to finish the meritocratic revolution and renew it. The market-liberal case adds efficiency: an open contest puts the most capable person in the job, which serves everyone who depends on that job being done well.

Sen and Rawls

Amartya Sen wrote an essay, Merit and Justice, for a Princeton volume edited by Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles and Steven Durlauf, Meritocracy and Economic Inequality (2000). His point cuts across the whole quarrel. What counts as merit depends on what we take a good society to be: an action has merit when it produces outcomes we value. Rewarding merit is mainly an incentive, a way of encouraging those actions, with no deeper claim that the rewarded person deserves more as a human being. Sen finds three errors in the usual meritocratic thinking: it moves merit from actions to persons or groups, it treats rewards as intrinsic desert, and it leaves distribution out, even though a society that values less inequality has to count that in its idea of good outcomes.

Rawls arrives nearby from another road. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out his view, nobody deserves the family they are born into or their natural gifts, so these give no claim in themselves to a larger share. He asks for fair equality of opportunity, roughly the same prospects for people with similar talent and motivation whatever their class of origin, and he allows economic inequalities only when they work to the advantage of the least advantaged, treating the spread of talents as a common asset. Our explainers on Rawls's Political Liberalism, Sen's The Idea of Justice and how the two differ go further into each.

Put together, these ideas give a clear position. Merit is a good rule for filling jobs and public posts, because it judges what people can do for the job, it is open to anyone, and it beats the alternative of family and party. It is a poor verdict on a person's worth, and it is only fair when the chances to build merit are spread early. That last part is Sen's capability approach applied to school: what matters is what a child can actually learn and do by 16, and some children need far more help to get there.

In Spain the merit principle has a name and a constitutional home. Article 103.3 of the Constitution requires access to the civil service according to the principles of merit and capacity, and article 23.2 gives every citizen the right to equal access to public posts. The oposición, the competitive public exam, is how the state keeps that promise: an exam open to anyone and the same for everyone. The weak spots are around it. Senior posts and political advisers are often filled by free appointment, which we looked at in our piece on merit in Spain's administration. And preparing an oposición takes years of study, which is far easier for a candidate whose family can support them.

That is where Democracia 21 comes in. In her launch speech in Madrid on 10 October 2026, Miriam González asked for a Spain where getting on depends on effort, and named the parties' "agencias de colocación", their job agencies, as what blocks it. That is the market-liberal half of the argument, and it is right. Today's companion piece on getting on through effort and merit in public and private jobs turns it into proposals. Sen's reading adds the other half: keep the oposición and open competitions everywhere, pay attention to who can afford to prepare for them, invest in children long before any exam, and respect the people who end up doing the jobs that no exam selects for.