The Ideology of Merit and Social Inequality

Liberal societies have equality of opportunity as a central ideological presupposition. This is embodied in the belief that merit is rewarded. This in turn implies a just distribution of goods and status, both of which are allocated in accordance with a person’s accomplishments. In an ideal-type meritocracy, social location would be in tune with an individual’s talents and effort, linking personal labor – in the broadest sense of the word – to one’s position in the social strata. A truly meritocratic society would thus also be inherently fair and its members deserving, in both the positive and negative sense, of the position they occupy. In this way, the ideology of merit serves to both legitimize and hide the reproduction of social inequality, as social status is portrayed to be concomitant with someone’s supposed degree of meritoriousness. This is necessary in liberal democratic state systems, as persistent inequality would contradict its self-ascription as open, accessible, and permeable. By linking social status to a person’s presumed degree of deservingness, the mechanisms behind the reproduction of social inequality disappear. Merit overemphasizes the individual and blanks out the social structure an individual is embedded in. This strategy of social legitimation is mainly upheld and deployed by the middle classes, upper middle classes, and elites of a given society.