Jun
17
5:00pm
Festival of Ideas: Adrian Wooldridge, Why Does Meritocracy Matter to the Modern World?
By Bristol Ideas
Adrian Wooldridge explores the history of meritocracy, how it transformed cultures and societies and what it means today.
Meritocracy is the idea that people should be advanced according to their talents rather than their status at birth. For much of history this was a revolutionary thought, but by the end of the twentieth century it had become the world’s ruling ideology. How did this happen, and why is meritocracy now under attack from both right and left?
Wooldridge looks at the politicians and officials who introduced the revolutionary principle of open competition, the psychologists who devised methods for measuring natural mental abilities and the educationalists who built ladders of educational opportunity. He looks outside western cultures and shows what transformative effects it has had everywhere it has been adopted, especially once women were brought into the meritocractic system.
Wooldridge also shows how meritocracy has now become corrupted and argues that the recent stalling of social mobility is the result of failure to complete the meritocratic revolution. Rather than abandoning meritocracy, he says, we should call for its renewal.
In conversation with Bristol Ideas director Andrew Kelly.
Adrian Wooldridge’s The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World is published by Penguin. Buy a copy from Waterstones, our bookselling partners.
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Image credit: Paul Vicente Sunday Times
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