Publisher Description
The Times (UK) book of the year!
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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About Adrian Wooldridge
Adrian Wooldridge
was educated at Oxford and went on to work for The Economist as West Coast correspondent, social-policy
correspondent, and management editor, and is currently Washington, DC,
correspondent. Together with John Micklethwait, he has co-authored several
books, including The Witch Doctors, A Future
Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalisation, and The Company: A Short History of a
Revolutionary Idea.
About Jonathan Cowley
Jonathan Cowley, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a British actor hailing from Eastbourne, East Sussex, but he currently calls Los Angeles home. He has narrated many audiobooks and can also be heard on both sides of the Atlantic narrating film trailers and documentaries. He is also an active television and film actor who has appeared in Grey’s Anatomy, Veep, and WestWorld.