Meritocracy names a rule of allocation: desirable positions and rewards should go to those with the greatest merit, conventionally defined as ability plus effort, and demonstrated through open competition rather than claimed by descent. As a principle it belongs to the modern break with ascription — the movement from status assigned at birth to status achieved in competition. As a description of any actual society it has always been contested, and as an ideology it performs work of its own by making the resulting hierarchy appear deserved.
The most important fact about the word is usually the one omitted. Michael Young coined it in The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) as satire. His book is a dystopia narrated from the year 2033, in which Britain has perfected selection by intelligence and effort — Young's fictional formula is merit as IQ plus effort — and has thereby produced a new ruling class more arrogant than the old aristocracy, because it believes it earned its position, alongside a demoralised underclass with no grievance left to voice. The narrator is killed in the uprising he dismisses as impossible. Young spent his later life protesting that the term had been stolen and inverted into a compliment.
The functionalist defence
Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945) supplied the classic justification for unequal reward, and their argument is the one meritocracy usually leans on. Every society must fill positions that differ in functional importance and in the scarcity of the talent and training they require. Some positions are unpleasant, prolonged in preparation, or heavily burdened with responsibility. To induce the ablest people to undertake the sacrifice of long training and then to perform conscientiously, societies must attach differential rewards — income, prestige, leisure — to those positions. Stratification is therefore a functional necessity, and meritocratic selection is the efficient mechanism for matching persons to places.
Melvin Tumin's reply (1953) is equally standard. Functional importance cannot be measured independently of the rewards it is invoked to explain, so the argument is circular. Talent is not scarce so much as undiscovered, because stratified societies systematically fail to identify and train ability among the poor. Access to training is itself unequally distributed, so the pool of candidates is pre-selected. Motivation is not exhausted by material reward. And stratification generates hostility and distrust, which are dysfunctions the theory ignores.
The reproduction critique
Where Tumin attacks the logic, the reproduction theorists attack the measurement. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron argue that schools do not measure ability neutrally; they reward the possession of cultural capital — linguistic facility, aesthetic dispositions, familiarity with the codes of legitimate culture — which is transmitted in the home long before any examination. Because the school treats this inherited competence as natural talent, it converts social privilege into certified merit and issues a diploma that misrepresents its own origins. Bourdieu calls the outcome the reproduction of the class structure through an apparently impartial institution, achieved by symbolic violence: the losers accept the verdict as a judgement on their capacity.
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis reach a parallel conclusion from a Marxist direction. Schooling, they argue, corresponds to the social relations of production: it grades and sorts, rewards punctuality, deference and predictable effort, and legitimates the resulting distribution of jobs by presenting it as the fair outcome of individual competition. Merit, in this reading, is less a measure of capability than a technology of legitimation.
The critique is not that ability does not exist. It is that the measurement of merit is contaminated at source, because everything a test can register — vocabulary, confidence, exam technique, preparation time, health, freedom from domestic labour — has been distributed by family and locality first. Merit appears to be a property of individuals; sociologically it is largely a property of trajectories.
The Indian debate: merit versus reservation
No society argues about merit more intensely than India, because here the competing claim is constitutionally entrenched. The merit position holds that selection by examination score is the only defensible neutral criterion, that reservation lowers standards in medicine, engineering and administration, and that group-based entitlement should yield to individual assessment. The sociological reply is that in a society where educational infrastructure, nutrition, language of instruction and social networks were until recently distributed by caste, a score is a record of accumulated advantage rather than of native capacity.
Several strands sharpen this reply. Ambedkar's argument that untouchability disabled entire communities from entering competition at all makes group remedy a matter of repair rather than favour. Béteille has argued that caste and class no longer coincide neatly, which complicates both sides: group categories capture disadvantage imperfectly, yet income tests miss stigma. Studies of affirmative action — Ashwini Deshpande's survey among them — question the empirical claim that beneficiaries underperform once given comparable time and support, and emphasise that examination performance measures preparation as much as promise. The coaching-and-cram-school economy in Indian entrance competition is perhaps the clearest available demonstration of merit's purchasability: the ability to buy two years of full-time preparation is a market advantage that the score itself records as talent.
Meritocracy as ideology
Read as ideology, meritocracy does three things simultaneously. It legitimises inequality by supplying a story in which outcomes are earned. It individualises failure, converting structural disadvantage into personal inadequacy and thereby dissolving the basis of collective grievance — exactly Young's warning. And it conceals its own conditions, since a system can be formally open at the point of selection while being closed at every earlier point where capability is formed. This is why sociologists treat high mobility, not high competition, as the test: a genuinely meritocratic order would show weak association between the position of parents and that of children, which no large society has yet produced.
For the UPSC answer
Begin with the fact examiners reward: Young coined meritocracy as satire, not as an ideal, and the dystopia turns on a self-satisfied new elite and a demoralised underclass. Then run the debate as a pair — Davis and Moore's functional justification of differential reward against Tumin's five objections — before moving to Bourdieu and to Bowles and Gintis, whose distinctive contribution is to attack not the principle but the measurement of merit through inherited cultural capital. Use the Indian merit-versus-reservation debate as the applied case, with coaching for competitive examinations as your concrete illustration of merit as purchased advantage. Close on the sociological formulation: merit is accumulated advantage misread as individual quality, so the empirical test of a meritocracy is intergenerational mobility, not the openness of the examination hall.
References & further reading
- Young, M. (1958). The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033. Thames and Hudson.
- Davis, K. and Moore, W. E. (1945). Some Principles of Stratification. American Sociological Review, 10(2).
- Tumin, M. (1953). Some Principles of Stratification: A Critical Analysis. American Sociological Review, 18(4).
- Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Sage.
- Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America. Basic Books.
- Béteille, A. (1992). The Backward Classes in Contemporary India. Oxford University Press.