In The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?, Michael Sandel argues that the American experiment of wholesale meritocracy has failed, and that a new paradigm needs to be found and implemented if human flourishing is truly the goal of society. Sandel sets out in The Tyranny of Merit to dismantle a host of common misconceptions and assumptions about the system of meritocracy that has ruled American public life for more than a century. Sandel is a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and has written several notable works on justice, ethics, and liberalism.

The Tyranny of Merit was initially published in 2020 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, with a revised paperback edition quickly following in 2021. This guide uses the 2021 edition.

Plot Summary

In the Prologue, Sandel invites the reader to consider the book in light of the recent Coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020, especially regarding the glaring inequality that the pandemic highlighted across a wide spectrum of groups. Politically-speaking, it revealed an even more deeply wounded and divided American populace that saw itself through politically-charged lenses on both sides of the political aisle. This divide is largely thanks to the meritocracy set in place by a century of social rhetoric and economic policies, and confirmed by the various educational backgrounds of the populace.

In the Introduction, Sandel sets the stage by framing the conversation with the higher education scandal of 2019, where a large number of Hollywood figures and those considered “liberal elites” were indicted on federal charges of cheating their way into various colleges and universities on behalf of their adolescent children. The scandal is less important for the specifics than it is for the questions that it raised on a national platform: In what way is merit considered a genuine marker of success, and what does the willingness to cheat for the sake of perceived academic esteem say about the current educational, political, and social climate?

The scandal illuminated the fact that even in a country like America, where opportunities and rewards are meant to be predicated on personal talent and hard work, equality of opportunity is not actually implemented. While the American founders rejected monarchy and aristocracy in favor of equality and equal dignity, the rise of meritocracy has created its own kind of academic and financial aristocracy that functions to divide the rich from the poor. Even more so, the system of meritocracy deludes the successful into thinking that their success is purely of their own making, causing pride and hubris, while causing the poor and downtrodden to feel as if their life is the result of their own personal moral failings.

Chapter 1 deals with the perception of certain people and groups as “winners” and “losers,” focusing on those who have benefitted from a technocratic regime that has tended towards globalization, and those who have been left behind by a system that requires access to higher education, inherited wealth, or important personal connections. This has resulted in a populist backlash against the elites of the system and a rejection of this manner of viewing the multitude of people who never had the opportunity, or desire, to get a college education. This attitude leads to the dilemma of Chapter 2, featuring the question of whether America became great because it was good, or whether it gained power and esteem in spite of its moral flaws.

Built on the back of the nation’s Christian roots, the concept of merit grew out of its founders’ initial commitments to the work of divine providence and questions about the role of works in personal salvation. Thanks to America’s Calvinist roots and what is often referred to as the “Protestant work ethic,” hard work became a sign of one’s salvation and moral rectitude. In an increasingly secular environment, however, this morphed into the current meritocracy that we have today. In concert with this idea comes the language and rhetoric of rising, dealt with in Chapter 3, where the idea that an individual will rise to the heights which their talent and hard work will take them took over American politics and culture in the mid-20th century. The problem with this language is that it no longer matches the lived experience of the average person on the ground, who has grown disenchanted with the idea that an education is supposed to solve all their problems.

This leads to the topic of Chapter 4, credentialism, whereby assumptions are made about higher education that, for all intents and purposes, causes a college degree to be seen as a panacea. Without a degree, an individual is looked down upon and seen as somehow less worthy, and the paradox of the matter—dealt with specifically in Chapter 5—is that the credentialism of the current meritocracy has recreated the aristocracy that it set out to disband. Success is no longer based purely on one’s genealogy and blood, but one’s life circumstances have an outsized effect on one’s outcome simply based on the fact that the current financial system allows the rich to increase their wealth—and then pass it on to their children—while preventing the poor from taking advantage of the so-called social mobility supposedly made possible by the focus on merit and self-determination.

The prime candidate for change, as Chapter 6 points out, is the American college or university. Colleges have become massive sorting machines by which society determines who is worthy of access and success, and who is less worthy and deserving of far less. The idea that college is a kind of litmus test of personal moral worth and intelligence is a myth that needs to be disbanded and done away with, as most jobs in the nation are those which do not require a college education. This does not make people without a college education less worthy of esteem or dignity.

The final Chapter, Chapter 7, places the burden on politicians going forward to find a way to recenter the dignity of all work in their political platforms. Work is not just a means of getting a paycheck, work is rather a source of happiness, dignity, self-esteem, and most importantly, a means by which the individual can contribute directly and meaningfully to the common good. In his Conclusion, Sandel argues that the implementation of meritocracy and equality of opportunity has been a very good thing, but the problem is that it has elevated a stopgap solution to a systemic reality. The need to find an escape by means of the meritocracy is evidence enough that the system is flawed, since it is evidence that the system is not in itself already just.