Making Meritocracy

Abstract Meritocracy refers to any social system in which the allocation of opportunities and rewards is determined by merit. This volume draws together contributions that explore efforts to implement meritocracy in the political and educational realm in China and India, both historically and in the present. Contributors explore the philosophical underpinnings of meritocracy in the two societies, historical efforts to implement meritocracy according to culturally specific definitions of merit, contemporary debates about how to overcome obstacles to meritocracy such as the power of inherited privilege, and prognoses for the future. Our overall message is that debates over meritocracy are not novel aspects of modern industrial society but an unconscious echo chamber of questions that have been explored in other societies and at other times. Contemporary debates about meritocracy and affirmative action in the United States are far from historically unique. The entrenchment of privilege—instrumentally and cognitively—and affirmative action to attempt to remedy this can be found much more broadly. The chapters open up ways of thinking about meritocracy for non-elites as well as urge us to think through issues related to the measurement of merit and the uses and abuses of technology to alleviate some of the flaws of past attempts to instill greater meritocracy. Meritocracy appears to always be a work in progress. Its proponents must content themselves with “making” meritocracy rather than seeing it fully “made.”