THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'This unique and fascinating history explains why the blame now
being piled upon meritocracy for many social ills is misplaced-and that assigning
responsibilities to the people best able to discharge them really is better than the
time-honoured customs of corruption patronage nepotism and hereditary castes. Wooldridge
upends many common assumptions and provides an indispensable back story to this fraught and
pressing issue.' Steven Pinker '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 crucial the judgment of people by
their talents rather than their bloodlines or connections has been to creating the modern
world. Highly recommended' Francis Fukuyama *Shortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times and
McKinsey & Company Business Book of the Year Award* Meritocracy: 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? 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 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.
