I arrived in France convinced that I was a believer in meritocracy. Then they made me read a book, and I realised I didn’t know what I was actually defending.

I’ve been living in Reims since the end of August. I travelled there by train to spend a semester on the Erasmus programme at Sciences Po, which has one of its campuses here, and the thing that has made the biggest impression on me so far happened even before the term began.

Exchange students spend a week in the classroom learning how to argue a case in France. Not the language: the method. The dissertation, the research question, the rule that the thesis statement is never stated upfront and is always constructed in two stages. It’s training, and it’s necessary, because the Anglo-Saxon way of supporting an idea and developing a paper is worthless here.

Before the seminar, we were set a book to read: *The Tyranny of Merit* by Michael Sandel, an American political philosopher and professor at Harvard. I’d never even opened it. I closed it with that nagging feeling one gets when you realise you’ve been using a word for years without truly understanding what it really meant.

I have always considered myself a believer in meritocracy. I still do, and I do not entirely agree with Sandel’s political conclusions. But there is a gap between the meritocracy I had in mind and the one that actually exists – a gap I had never quantified before – and quantifying it changes quite a few things.

An American post-mortem

Sandel writes in the wake of the 2019 university admissions scandal, when the federal prosecutor’s office charged fifty people in connection with an organised corruption scheme: falsified test scores, wealthy students posing as athletes to secure a place at a top-tier university, and twenty-five million dollars in bribes paid to coaches over an eight-year period.

This scandal is the inspiration behind the book’s key image: the three doors. There are three ways to gain entry to elite American universities. The main door: merit. The service entrance: legal, million-dollar donations. The side door: fraud.

The book is an autopsy, and an autopsy means that death is deemed to have occurred. Except that the corpse keeps walking, because Americans still believe in it. In the Pew Research Centre’s 2014 global survey, 73 per cent of Americans believe that hard work is crucial to getting ahead in life, and 57 per cent reject the idea that success depends on forces beyond one’s control. The median figures across the forty-four countries analysed in the study are 50 per cent and 38 per cent respectively. This gap between belief and reality is the worst part of the story. A society where the race is rigged and nobody denies it breeds anger, conflict and calls for reform. A society in which the race is rigged and everyone believes it to be fair produces something even worse: it turns a flaw in the system into the loser’s fault. If the game is fair and you have lost, you haven’t really lost; it is you who deserve less and are therefore worth less. The winner gains a position and, with it, a moral judgement in their favour; the loser gains the exact opposite, and neither has any reason to look at the system.

The word was a warning

If there’s one thing I’ll never forget about this book, it’s how and why the word ‘meritocracy’ came about.

The term was coined by Michael Young in 1958, in *The Rise of the Meritocracy*, a satirical novel set in a future Britain where the criterion of ‘IQ plus effort’ has replaced birthright, and where the result is not a just society but a new caste, more closed than the previous one because its members are convinced they have earned their place. Young coined the term to alarm his readers, and does not stop at merely describing the caste: he brings it down. The book is presented as an essay written by a sociologist observing his own world from the year 2034, whilst the disenfranchised rise up in a ‘Populist Movement’. The insurgents even have a manifesto, the Chelsea Manifesto, which calls for a society willing to judge people on the basis of kindness, courage, imagination and generosity: qualities that no test is capable of measuring. The divide between those with qualifications and those without, Young warned, would give rise to a new and furious form of politics.

Forty years later, he found his own invention in the vocabulary of Tony Blair’s New Labour, used as an election pledge. Young protested in *The Guardian* in June 2001: “It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class with no room in it for others.” He died the following January .

Twenty-one years later, in November 2022, a decree-law added that word to the name of an Italian ministry: the Ministry of Education and Merit. In the novel, that was precisely the terrifying end point: meritocracy elevated to the status of an official principle of the state. Sixty-four years later, someone had reached that point on their own, and there was no one left to write to *The Guardian*.

And in Britain, too, the prophecy came true to the letter. The electoral divide that led to Brexit is not based on income but on educational attainment. In the analysis by Matthew Goodwin and Oliver Heath for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 75 per cent of those with no educational qualifications voted to leave, compared with 27 per cent of those with a postgraduate qualification: educational attainment is a better predictor of that vote than income. Young had written this when Blair was still at primary school.

The opposite of America

The problem remains that makes Sandel less useful than he could be: his focus is on the United States, and the three gates are a distinctly American construct. Donations, legacy admissions, sports recruitment, interviews, private endowments worth billions. A European reader might put the book down thinking it’s their problem.

The country where I am living has established the opposite system. In France, admission to elite schools is via the ‘concours’, an anonymous public competitive examination. No children of former pupils, no donors, no sports, no motivational interview, no letters of recommendation. At the École normale supérieure, those who pass the concours do not pay: they are paid a salary by the state. Every single mechanism that Sandel identifies as the cause of the problem does not exist in France.

Yet, at the École polytechnique, according to data from the Observatoire des inégalités on the 2018 intake, 69.8 per cent of those admitted come from the most socially advantaged families, who make up around a quarter of the population of the same age. The children of manual workers account for 0.4 per cent.

Four in a thousand.

Move up a level

The phenomenon is therefore recurrent, and does not depend on the causes identified by Sandel. To identify the true causes, it is best to draw on the logical framework of the realist theory of international relations – that is, the distinction introduced by Kenneth Waltz in 1959 to understand the origins of war. Waltz observed that any explanation of a recurring phenomenon falls into one of three categories: the nature of individuals, the internal structure of units, or the structure of the system in which those units are embedded.

Firstly, the individuals. The fault lies with the arrogance of the winners, who believe themselves to be the architects of their own success and look down on those who have been left behind. The remedy is a moral one: more humility, more gratitude, greater awareness of one’s good fortune. This is the conclusion reached by Sandel, and it is the easiest to applaud yet the hardest to put into practice, because one cannot legislate on a feeling of the heart.

Secondly, the institutions. The fault lies with the system: the entrance exam, the fast-track for the children of former pupils, and fee-paying preparatory courses. The solution is technical: the systems are adjusted, quotas are introduced, along with grants and social inclusion programmes. This is the reformist agenda, the one that comes up whenever the topic of merit is discussed: grants, careers guidance and widening access. And France has already implemented it in full.

Third image: the structure. And it is here that the French case contradicts the arguments at the two lower levels, because Paris removed the entire second image and the outcome did not shift by a single millimetre. The measures taken by the grandes écoles to promote social diversity have not altered the composition of their student bodies: the Institut des politiques publiques found that between 2006 and 2016, the number of places increased whilst the social background of those filling them remained exactly the same. When a result survives the removal of all its presumed causes, the explanation did not lie in those presumed causes. Waltz said this about wars, and it applies equally here: why do we continue to focus on the level that we have already shown to be irrelevant?

The Price of Plato

To understand why a competition might not work as well as it should, you first need to understand what it measures.

It does not measure what a person is: it measures the capital that person brings with them when they enter the classroom. And there is not just one type of capital. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu distinguishes three types, plus a fourth that arises from the first three. Economic capital, which a state can redistribute. Social capital: one’s parents’ address book. Embodied cultural capital: the vocabulary absorbed within the family, the ease in front of an examiner, the certainty of being in the right place: Bourdieu notes that this last form cannot be passed on by gift or bequest, purchase or exchange. Nor can it be confiscated. It is passed on through proximity – that is, simply by growing up alongside someone.

Together, these three produce a fourth form of capital: symbolic capital – the prestige, reputation, honour and social recognition that the other forms of capital yield when society perceives them as legitimate. It is this transition that matters, because that conversion requires a mechanism to carry it out, and in our time that mechanism is called meritocracy. The competition takes an inherited advantage and awards a title that has been earned.

And if cultural capital is passed on through proximity, no law can stop it. Plato realised this twenty-five centuries ago.

In the fifth book of *The Republic*, he states that in a just city, the children of the guardians are to be taken away at birth and brought up in the community, so that no father recognises his own son. This is not a delusion: it is the only coherent solution to the problem. If advantage is passed on through kinship, then to eliminate it, the family must be abolished.

Let’s suppose we paid that price. Let’s suppose the children were selected. Would we finally have a meritocracy? According to Sandel, no. You would still be born with a body and a mind you did not choose, in an era which, by pure chance, rewards that type of mind and not another. Two strokes of luck in a row, and neither is down to merit. The city that has abolished the family would continue to allocate positions on the basis of a lottery, only with fewer witnesses. It is the line from the book that makes the book worth reading: “Finding ourselves in a society that prizes our talents is our good fortune, not our due.”

Before reading Sandel, I would have said that meritocracy is an ideal that we apply poorly. Now the problem seems to me to be a different one: meritocracy, as we understand it, is not an ideal that is poorly implemented; it is something that cannot exist. A missed target can be corrected. An impossible one continues to demand credence – and gets it.

A parliament of university graduates

There is a reason why this concerns anyone involved in politics in Europe, and not just those who study it. The continent’s ruling class now coincides with the educated class, and this coincidence is no longer merely a sociological detail.

In the House of Commons elected in 2024, according to a survey by the Sutton Trust, 90 per cent of MPs are university graduates and one in five are graduates of Oxford or Cambridge. In the country they represent, 81 per cent of people have never attended university. The Bundestag follows a similar pattern. These are regularly elected assemblies, with impeccable procedures, whose composition resembles that of nineteenth-century parliaments, when the right to vote was reserved for those who met a property qualification. The filter is no longer wealth, but a university degree, and it produces the same result.

An assembly of this sort can govern effectively. Representation is another matter entirely, and the difference becomes apparent when the country votes against the unanimous opinion of the graduates who administer it, and the graduates conclude that the country was wrong. In Europe, the situation takes a turn that Sandel does not acknowledge, because he is looking at a country that believes in its own system. Here, nobody believes in it: in the same Pew survey, in France only 25 per cent believe that hard work is crucial to success, in Germany 49 per cent, compared with 73 per cent in the US. On this side of the Atlantic, academic qualifications no longer tell the story of a society open to everyone. It humiliates those who lack it without even legitimising those who possess it. We pay the psychological cost of meritocracy without reaping its sole narrative benefit, and at that point, preaching humility to the winners is a cure for an illness we do not have.

To select is not to consecrate

I didn’t become anti-meritocratic simply by reading a book during a week-long seminar, and I don’t believe in the alternative proposed by Sandel – a lottery amongst those who qualify: a threshold of competence is set, and above that threshold, places are allocated by lot. Allocating scarce places through an exam remains the least brutal method humanity has devised, and I shall sit such exams again in the coming years.

The point is quite another. An entrance exam does two things at the same time, and they are two different things. It allocates places. And it determines the worth of those who have secured them. The first is necessary; someone has to decide who gets in. The second is something nobody has authorised it to do. Four in a thousand on one side, seven out of ten on the other: that exam didn’t measure anyone’s talent; it took a class that was already divided and stamped its approval on it. It didn’t discover an elite. It certified one.

I accept the first verdict. The second, I do not. And saying so only counts if it comes from someone who has passed that exam: that is why I am writing this now, whilst I am still at a grande école, and not on the day they slam the door in my face.