The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World Audiobook

Meritocracy: the idea that people should be advanced according to their talents rather than their birth.

While this initially seemed like a novel concept, 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?

In The Aristocracy of Talent, esteemed journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge traces the history of meritocracy forged by 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 meritocratic 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.

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“Wonderful…The Aristocracy of Talent provides an important and needed corrective to contemporary critiques of meritocracy.  It puts meritocracy  in an illuminating historical and cross-cultural perspective that shows how critical the judgment of people by their talents rather than their bloodlines or connections has been to creating the modern world.  Highly recommended.”

— Francis Fukuyama, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies