The Tyranny of Merit

I. The Rhetoric of Rising

Sandel did not invent the phrase. He counted it.

For five decades, “the rhetoric of rising” — “you can make it if you try,” “the American dream is alive,” “climb the ladder,” “reach for the stars” — has been the bipartisan consensus of American political language. Reagan launched it in the modern register. Clinton adopted it. George W. Bush ran on it. Obama refined it into a kind of secular psalm and recited it more than 140 times. Trump campaigned against the elites who wrote the psalm but never against the psalm itself; his promise was that the rising would resume, not that the metaphor was wrong. Biden inherited the same vocabulary and tried to soften it. The vocabulary is older than any of them and outlasts all of them.

The phrase is unobjectionable on its face. To tell a child “you can make it if you try” is to extend an offer of dignity, to insist that the future is open, to refuse the closed-shop fatalism of inherited rank. Read in isolation, it is the language of an open society talking to itself.

Read as a verdict, it is something else.

If you can make it if you try, then there is a coherent meaning to the inverse. Those who have not made it either did not try or were not capable of trying well enough. The rhetoric does not name the inverse. It does not have to. The inverse is supplied automatically by anyone who has been told the first half. A child told for twelve years that her future depends on her own effort, who then watches her father lose his job at the plant and her brother fail to find one, has been handed an interpretive frame for the failure: it must have been theirs. The frame is not delivered as cruelty. It is delivered as encouragement. It functions as cruelty anyway.

Sandel’s move — the move that has earned him both a wide readership and a sharp set of critics — is to ask whether the problem is that meritocracy has fallen short of its ideal or whether the ideal itself is the source of the harm. His answer is the latter. Even a perfect meritocracy — one that corrected for family background, eliminated test-prep arbitrage, equalized school funding, and selected purely on talent and effort — would still produce hubris among winners because the core meritocratic assumption is that success reflects desert. Especially a perfect meritocracy. The fairer the sorting becomes, the more confident the sorted become that the sorting is honest, and the more the winners persuade themselves that what they hold is what they earned.

“A perfect meritocracy,” Sandel writes, “banishes all sense of gift or grace. It diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate. It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes.”

Notice what is in that sentence. Three theological words sitting in the middle of a political philosophy book: gift, grace, contingency. Sandel is a careful secular thinker who has spent his career inside Harvard’s Government department, but the vocabulary he reaches for when meritocracy needs naming is the vocabulary of a tradition that took seriously the idea that one’s position in the world is partly received. Not earned, not achieved, not deserved. Received. The vocabulary is older than the country and was discarded by the country, and Sandel is reaching back for it because he cannot find a more precise word in the secular dictionary.

The standard liberal critique of American education is that it fails to deliver on its meritocratic promise. The fix in that frame is to make the sorting fairer: more financial aid, better K-12 in poor districts, holistic admissions reform, expanded Pell Grants, reduced legacy preferences. These are good things to want. They will not solve the problem Sandel is describing. The problem Sandel is describing would survive every one of those reforms. It would survive them because the problem is not in the sorting’s accuracy. The problem is in the story the sorted tell themselves about why they are where they are.

The rhetoric of rising tells the winners they earned what was given. It tells the losers they deserved what was taken. Both halves rest on the same premise — that the sorting tracks moral desert — and the premise is the pathology. Even a perfectly fair sorting machine produces hubris on one side and humiliation on the other when both sides believe the sorting reflects who they are.

II. The Hubris of Winners

Sandel is careful to distinguish the kind of hubris he is naming from ordinary arrogance. The hubris is not personal. It is structural. It is what happens to the moral self-understanding of a class of people who have been told, repeatedly and at scale, that their position is the result of their own effort and ability. Some of them are arrogant. Most of them are not. All of them have been changed by the story.

The change is the loss of a certain kind of seeing. Sandel calls it — reaching again for a religious word — the loss of gratitude. Gratitude in the sense that the recipient of a good understands that the good was not entirely their doing. They did not choose their parents. They did not choose the genes that gave them the ear for music or the patience for arithmetic or the metabolism that lets them stay focused for hours. They did not choose to be born into a household where books were read out loud at bedtime, or into a school district whose property tax base was set in 1955 by decisions about who could buy a house there. They did not choose the color of skin that the admissions officer’s eye registered as “promising” rather than “risky.” They did not choose the year they were born, the technological wave they came of age riding, the labor market that valued their particular set of inclinations.

None of this means their effort was nothing. The effort was real. They worked. They studied. They wrote the essays and took the tests and showed up. The effort matters. But the effort is not the whole story, and the meritocratic frame tells them it is. The frame collapses every dimension of their position into a single line of accounting in which the columns are talent and effort and the bottom line is themselves. Everything else gets erased.

What gets erased is the contingency. The accident. The gift.

Sandel draws a line that some readers find provocative and that he refuses to retract: from the Puritan doctrine of election, through the prosperity gospel, to the modern meritocrat’s conviction that success is a sign of virtue and failure a sign of its absence. The Puritans believed God had elected some souls for salvation and that worldly prosperity was sometimes a visible sign of that election. The prosperity gospel preachers of the late twentieth century took the same equation and stripped the theology out of it: God blesses the deserving with material abundance, and if you are not blessed, your faith is insufficient. The meritocrat does the same operation a third time, with God replaced by the market and faith replaced by talent. Success is a sign of virtue. Failure is a sign of its absence. The third version sounds secular and modern, but its grammar is the grammar of a religious doctrine that ran out of God and kept going.

“The more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient,” Sandel writes, “the less likely we are to care for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves. If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault.”

This is the moral cost of the hubris and it is not abstract. It manifests in social policy. In 1996, the United States passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the welfare reform that ended the federal entitlement to cash assistance for poor families and replaced it with a block grant tied to work requirements. The bill was signed by Bill Clinton, sponsored by a Republican congressman, and supported by majorities in both parties. The phrase that organized the legislation was right there in the title: personal responsibility. The premise was that the previous welfare regime had failed because it had not held recipients accountable for their own circumstances. The fix was to introduce the right incentives so that the responsible would rise and the irresponsible would face the consequences of their choices.

It is possible to debate the empirical effects of welfare reform — some scholars credit it with reducing certain kinds of dependency, others with deepening extreme poverty for the families who fell through its sieves. That debate is real and the evidence is mixed. The point here is different. The point is that the legislative frame — personal responsibility — is the same frame Sandel is naming. The poor are poor because they did not take responsibility. The responsible are responsible because they took it. The frame is the moral self-portrait of a credentialed class telling itself why some people made it to where they sit and others did not. The frame is the meritocratic theology applied to the design of the social safety net, and what it produces is a safety net designed to catch only those whose failure is judged to be involuntary.

Sandel does not argue that welfare reform was wrong because of its empirical effects. He argues that the moral premise on which it was built — the premise that the disposition to work and the opportunity to work are the same thing, that having the opportunity proves you took the responsibility — is the meritocratic mistake operating at the level of national policy. The same moral premise produces the same kind of policy across domains: in health insurance (you should have planned ahead), in retirement savings (you should have contributed more), in higher education debt (you should have chosen a more marketable major), in housing (you should have known not to buy at the peak). Each of these is a place where the meritocratic frame has installed itself as the moral default and the policy responses have followed. The responses are not all wrong. The frame, applied as totally as the credentialed class has applied it, leaves no room for the contingency that is, in fact, the larger half of any human life.

What gratitude, humility, and solidarity all share — and what meritocracy systematically erodes — is the recognition that one’s position is partly received. The recognition does not require denying that effort matters. It requires denying that effort is the whole story. The denial is what Sandel is calling hubris, and the hubris is what he is calling tyrannical — not because it announces itself with crowns, but because it organizes the moral imagination of the people who run the country in a way that systematically misdescribes the country they are running.

III. Credentialism and the Degradation of Non-Credentialed Work

The most politically explosive chapter of The Tyranny of Merit is the chapter on credentialism. It is explosive because the data is not contested. The data is in the Congressional record.

Ninety-five percent of the United States House of Representatives are college graduates. One hundred percent of the United States Senate are college graduates. Roughly two-thirds of American adults are not. About two percent of Congress held working-class jobs — manual labor, service, clerical — before entering politics. The working class is roughly half of the labor force.

This is a country in which the people who write the laws and the people who live under the laws are sorted into two populations whose biographies do not overlap. The pattern is similar across Western democracies. Sandel notes the same trend in the British Commons, the German Bundestag, and the French National Assembly. The credentialed have captured the legislative branch in nearly every advanced industrial democracy in the same period.

Sandel calls credentialism “the last acceptable prejudice.” The phrase is calibrated. It is not that prejudice against the non-credentialed is more harmful than other prejudices — it is not. It is that the same elites who would find equivalent condescension on race or gender unthinkable, who have spent decades cultivating the linguistic discipline to avoid making racist or sexist remarks in mixed company, will say of the non-credentialed in mixed company things that they would not say of any other group. The condescension is not coded. It is open. It appears in the news shows, in the punditry, in the polite dinner conversation of college towns and capital cities. It appears in the assumption that people who voted for the wrong candidate must have been misled, or uninformed, or activated by resentment, or persuaded by misinformation — never that they might have correctly perceived something the credentialed class was unable to see.

The consequences of this capture are twofold. First, policy is made by people who do not share the lives of those it affects, and who tend to frame solutions in educational terms because that is what worked for them. Get more training. Go back to school. Learn to code. Earn a credential. The implicit theory of social mobility offered by the credentialed is the path the credentialed themselves traveled, recommended to people whose circumstances do not allow it and whose communities cannot accommodate it. When a steelworker is told that the answer to his lost job is community college and a coding bootcamp, the answer is not necessarily wrong, but it is being delivered by someone whose life has been a single uninterrupted credential ladder and who does not understand what it means to be told, at forty-five, with a mortgage and three children, that the work that defined your father’s life and your own is over and that your future depends on becoming someone you have never been.

Second — and this is the deeper consequence — the language of political discourse itself becomes saturated with credentialist assumptions. Smart policy. Evidence-based. The experts say. The data show. The science is clear. These phrases are not neutral. They are markers of who is allowed to speak in democratic deliberation and who is expected to listen. The non-credentialed are told their voice in the conversation is discounted because their preparation for the conversation is inadequate. Their concerns must first be translated into the proper register, vetted by the proper gatekeepers, and re-presented by credentialed advocates before they can become legitimate inputs to policy. The translation always loses something. What it loses is precisely the part the original speakers cared about most.

This is the second place Jürgen Habermas’s framework lights up. Habermas distinguished between communicative action — the deliberation through which a community works out what it shares — and the steering media of money and power, which colonize the lifeworld and replace deliberation with execution. The credentialist capture of political discourse is precisely what Habermas means by colonization. The deliberation about what a community wants and what it is for has been replaced by the execution of policy designed by experts, and the experts are credentialed. The non-credentialed can vote but cannot deliberate, because deliberation now requires fluency in a vocabulary their schooling did not give them. They can be polled. They can be canvassed. They can be mobilized. They cannot speak in a way that the credentialed register as speech.

The point is not that technocratic competence is bad. Pilots should know how to fly the plane. Surgeons should know where the appendix is. Statisticians should know what a confidence interval is. The argument is not against expertise. The argument is against a democracy in which political authority has been routed almost entirely through credentialed channels and in which the lived experience of the people the laws govern has been pushed outside the room where the laws are written. The decline of working-class representation in Congress is not a rounding error. It is a structural feature of a country that has confused credential with character, and the confusion is the meritocratic mistake operating at the institutional level the framers of the Constitution worried about most.

Mark Blyth’s contribution to this picture is the observation that “meritocracy” itself is doing political work as an idea. It is not a neutral description of how things should be sorted. It is an institutional weapon that legitimates the position of the people doing the sorting. The credentialed class believes meritocracy because believing meritocracy is the moral self-portrait that lets them sleep. The non-credentialed are told to believe it because believing it is what keeps them from organizing against the people who are sorting them. Each side is being asked to believe a story about why the other side is where it is, and the story serves the people who wrote it.

This is also where Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory becomes useful, and where it must be used carefully. Haidt’s work identifies a small number of moral intuitions — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and (in his more recent work) liberty — that operate beneath conscious reasoning and that activate strongly in moral judgment. In 2023, Haidt’s team formally split the fairness foundation into two subdimensions: equality (intuitions about everyone getting the same) and proportionality (intuitions about people getting rewarded in proportion to their contribution). Proportionality is the moral intuition that meritocracy is built on. It is the intuition that effort should be rewarded, that talent should be recognized, that the person who tried harder should get more. This is the intuition that makes the rhetoric of rising feel true at the level beneath argument. It is not believed because it has been analyzed. It is believed because it activates a deep moral foundation that almost everyone shares.

Sandel’s critique, read through Haidt, becomes more interesting and harder. The critique is that proportionality, applied as a social philosophy at scale, produces the very hubris and humiliation that corrode democratic life. The intuition that makes it psychologically resilient is the same intuition that makes it politically dangerous. People believe meritocracy because the underlying moral foundation is real and deep. People also use meritocracy to harm each other because the underlying moral foundation, applied without the tempering of gratitude and the recognition of contingency, becomes a blade. The pathology and the appeal are the same thing seen from two angles.

This is one reason decades of empirical evidence against the mythology have failed to dislodge it. The data showing that absolute mobility has collapsed — ninety percent of the 1940 cohort earning more than their parents at age thirty, fifty percent of the 1984 cohort — has not changed the rhetoric of rising at all. The Chetty curve is in the textbooks. The rhetoric is in the speeches. They coexist because they are operating at different levels of the listener. The data goes to the part of the brain that processes facts. The rhetoric goes to the part that processes proportionality intuitions. The second part is winning, and it will keep winning until the people who deploy the rhetoric understand that they are not just saying something inaccurate. They are saying something cruel.

IV. The Dignity of Work

The moral core of The Tyranny of Merit is its argument about the dignity of non-credentialed work. This is the section in which the book’s philosophical apparatus becomes a description of something material, and it is the section that most demands the reader’s patience, because the claim is easy to mishear.

The claim is not nostalgic. Sandel is not arguing that postwar industrial work was idyllic, or that the steelworker of 1960 lived a more meaningful life than the software engineer of 2025, or that there was a golden age of blue-collar dignity that needs to be restored. He knows the postwar settlement was contingent, racially exclusionary, and fragile. He has read Katznelson. He knows that the dignity of work in the 1950s was administered by union halls that mostly excluded Black workers and a labor regime that mostly excluded women, and he is not asking anyone to recover that arrangement. The argument is more careful and harder to dismiss.

The argument is that contemporary American politics — bipartisan, decades-long, conducted in the mainstream of both parties — has eroded the dignity of non-credentialed labor in a specific way that is independent of wages, hours, or benefits. The erosion is in recognition. It is in the way the work is talked about, the way the workers are described, the way the political language has come to treat the act of building, repairing, growing, transporting, cleaning, caring, and serving as a category of activity that does not fully count as a contribution to the country. The dignity has been removed not by lowering the wages (though the wages have been lowered) but by withdrawing the symbolic recognition that the work is part of what holds the country together.

Sandel presses this point through a particular kind of evidence: the political rhetoric of the last forty years and what it does not say. Listen to a mainstream Democratic speech about the economy from 1995 forward and count the references to “working families.” The phrase appears constantly. Now count the references to specific kinds of work — carpenters, electricians, nurses, teachers, truckers, mechanics, farmers, line cooks, janitors, home health aides — named as carriers of a craft that the country depends on. The first phrase is abstract. It refers to a demographic. The second category of phrases is concrete. It refers to people doing things. The first category dominates. The second has nearly disappeared from the rhetoric of the credentialed class, and its disappearance is not accidental. The class that has come to dominate political language has stopped knowing the names of the work the country runs on, and the silence is a form of disrespect that does not require any active act of contempt to function as one.

The Republican rhetoric is not better. It pays lip service to “the forgotten man” and to “coal miners” and to “real Americans,” but the lip service is a substitute for policy that would actually honor the work, and everyone listening can tell. The political compliments paid to working-class voters by the right are not, on examination, compliments to the work. They are mobilization rhetoric. The actual policy that follows is tax cuts for the people the rhetoric is supposed to be against and cuts to the social insurance programs the rhetoric’s addressees rely on. The right has been better at flattering the symbols of working-class life than the left has been, but neither has done the harder work of treating non-credentialed labor as a fully human contribution to a shared common good.

Here is the contrast that Sandel asks the reader to hold in mind. The work that runs the country — the truck drivers who move the food, the electricians who keep the lights on, the carpenters who build the houses, the nurses who staff the hospitals, the farmers who grow the crops, the line cooks who feed the cities, the home health aides who care for the parents the credentialed children no longer have time for — is not optional. If any one of these categories of work were withdrawn for a month, the country would stop. The credentialed class understands this in a part of the brain that is separate from the part that allocates social esteem. The same person who knows intellectually that society depends on truckers will, in conversation with another credentialed person, refer to truckers in a tone that conveys none of that recognition. The recognition is in the textbook. The esteem is somewhere else.

This is what Sandel means by the degradation of non-credentialed work. It is not that the work has become less valuable, in the sense that the country has stopped needing it. It is that the symbolic system through which the country tells its citizens which contributions count has stopped counting it. The carpenter who built your kitchen, the woman who took care of your dying mother, the mechanic who kept your car alive for ten more years — they did the work. They got paid. The pay was, in many cases, inadequate to the labor and to the skill. But the deeper insult is not the pay. It is that the people who hold political office and write the laws and produce the cultural discourse have stopped acknowledging that their work was a contribution to anything beyond the wage they received for it. The work was treated as a transaction. The contribution was disappeared.

And then those same workers were told, by the same credentialed class, that the answer to their wage stagnation and their thinning communities and their dying towns was that they should have gotten degrees. They should have moved. They should have retrained. They should have learned to code. The answer assumed that the work they had been doing was not, by itself, a sufficient contribution to a life. The answer treated the request that they become someone else as a kind of generosity. The answer was, in Sandel’s precise word, humiliating, and it was humiliating not because it was malicious but because it was constructed inside a moral frame in which the only contributions that fully counted were the ones that came with credentials.

This is why the article’s most uncomfortable connection — uncomfortable because it cuts across the partisan grid in a way that displeases everyone — is the connection to the deaths-of-despair data. Anne Case and Angus Deaton have spent the last decade documenting a rise in mortality among white working-class Americans without college degrees, driven by suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related disease. The mortality curve broke from its historical trajectory around 1990 and has bent upward since. Case and Deaton attribute the rise to the collapse of steady manufacturing jobs and the attendant losses of meaning, marriage, dignity, and community. Their book is empirically meticulous and politically careful. It is also the place where the meritocratic mythology meets its material correlate.

Sandel does not claim that meritocratic humiliation alone causes deaths of despair. He claims something narrower and harder to refute: that the loss of these jobs was not only economic but interpretive. The meritocratic narrative told the people losing them that they had failed. The despair is partly about the wages and the work and the community, and it is partly about being told one’s losses are deserved. Case and Deaton, in their own writing, make almost the same connection. They use almost the same words. The connection is not Sandel imposing his philosophy on their data. The connection is in their text.

This is the material correlate of the moral diagnosis. The hubris of the credentialed and the humiliation of the non-credentialed are not just affects floating around in the cultural ether. They are correlated with mortality curves. The communities that lost the work and were then told the loss was their own fault are the communities whose middle-aged white men are now dying ten years earlier than their parents did. The communities have names: Mingo County, McDowell County, Logan County in West Virginia, Pike County in Kentucky, and hundreds of others across the Appalachians, the industrial Midwest, the rural South. The mortality curves bend in the same places the political maps shifted in 2016. The meritocratic story did not cause Trump alone. It did not cause the deaths alone. But it is in the same room as both, and Sandel is asking the reader to look at that room with the lights on.

V. What 2016 Was About

The hardest move Sandel makes in The Tyranny of Merit — the move that has cost him the most readers on the political left — is the argument that the populist revolts of 2016, including Brexit and the Trump victory, were partly a response to meritocratic humiliation. He is careful about it. He is not endorsing Trump. He is not romanticizing Brexit. He is offering a diagnosis of what made these political outcomes possible, and the diagnosis is uncomfortable across the partisan grid.

The diagnosis: not primarily an economic revolt, though economics mattered. A revolt against being told one’s economic position reflected one’s worth. The pain of falling wages and dying communities is real, but there have been falling wages and dying communities in many places without producing the specific political eruption that 2016 produced. What was distinctive about 2016 was that the falling wages had been accompanied, for forty years, by a moral discourse that explained the falling as the fault of the falling. The voters who turned to Trump and Brexit were not just hurting. They were hurting and being told the hurt was deserved. They wanted, more than policy, to be told it was not.

“The politics of humiliation,” Sandel writes, “is a more combustible and dangerous politics than the politics of injustice, because it’s about recognition and esteem.”

This is an unpopular sentence on multiple sides. The left does not like it because it suggests that the meritocratic rhetoric of the Clinton-Obama Democrats helped manufacture the constituency that elected Trump. The right does not like it because it implies that the Trump constituency was animated by something other than the policy preferences the right would prefer to claim them for. The careful center does not like it because it sounds dangerously close to excusing what happened next. Sandel is not excusing it. He is doing the harder thing: explaining how a country that had been telling itself for decades that it was a meritocracy produced a political eruption that nobody in the meritocratic class saw coming.

The reason nobody saw it coming is part of the diagnosis. The credentialed class does not interact with the non-credentialed class in the contexts where moral grievance is communicated. They share neighborhoods in the broadest geographic sense, but they do not share the rooms where the grievance becomes audible. The polling that would have caught the warning was set up to measure things the credentialed class understood as relevant: economic anxiety, attitudes on specific policies, demographic indicators. The polling did not measure recognition and esteem because the people building the polls did not have a category for “the desire to not be told your loss was deserved” as a separable political input. The category was not in the dictionary the polling profession had inherited.

Trump, whatever else he was, spoke a language of recognition to people who had been told for decades that their losses in the economic sorting were their own fault. He spoke it crudely, with grievances that were often misdirected and with policy promises that were often false. The point is not that the response he offered was good. The point is that he was answering a question the meritocratic left had stopped asking. The meritocratic left could not answer the question because answering it would have required disowning the moral frame the meritocratic left had built its identity on. There was no way to say “we were wrong to tell you that the system was a meritocracy and that your failure to rise was your own fault” without abandoning the language the credentialed Democratic Party had been speaking since Bill Clinton. The language could not be put down without putting down everything that had been built on it.

The diagnosis is contestable. Critics point out, correctly, that Trump voters were not on average poorer or less educated than the median American, and that the meritocratic-humiliation story may apply to a specific subset of the Trump coalition rather than to the whole. This is a fair correction. The story is not the whole story. It is a part of the story that was systematically invisible to the people who needed to see it, and it was invisible because seeing it would have required them to recognize that their own moral self-portrait was implicated in the political outcome they were bewildered by. The bewilderment is itself the diagnosis. A coalition that cannot understand its own opposition is a coalition that has stopped speaking the language its opposition is using, and the meritocratic credentialed left had stopped speaking that language.

It is worth saying clearly what Sandel is and is not arguing. He is not arguing that Trump was right. He is not arguing that the populist response was healthy or constructive. He is not arguing that the answer to meritocratic humiliation is xenophobia, conspiracy theory, or contempt for democratic institutions. He is arguing that those responses are now in the political bloodstream because the meritocratic frame manufactured the conditions in which they became thinkable, and that until the frame is examined, the responses will keep coming back. The machine breaks in a way that hides the machine’s responsibility for the breaking. The class that built the moral discourse that produced the eruption is the same class that, looking at the eruption, can see only its irrationality, never its origin.

This is where the article’s harder honesty has to land. The author of this series has been trained in the meritocratic frame Sandel is describing. The series’s readers, to the extent they are reading philosophical journalism with primary-source citations and a five-scholar framework, have been trained in the same frame too. The temptation, reading Sandel for the first time, is to receive the argument as a description of the wrong people — the bad credentialed liberals, the smug pundits, the tone-deaf consultants — and to exempt oneself from the diagnosis. The exemption is the trap. The hubris is structural. It belongs to the position inside the frame, not to the personality. The reader who feels nothing on encountering Sandel’s argument is the reader who has not yet read it.

VI. The Steelman

The book-length response to Sandel from the defense side is Adrian Wooldridge’s The Aristocracy of Talent, published in 2021. Wooldridge is the former political editor of The Economist and now writes the Bagehot column. His book is not a hatchet job. It is a serious historical and philosophical defense of the meritocratic principle, and it has to be engaged on its own terms.

Wooldridge has three main moves. Each one has real force. The series engages each one before making Sandel’s deeper move.

Move one: the historical alternatives are worse. Meritocracy, whatever its current pathologies, replaced systems that were manifestly more arbitrary and oppressive. Aristocracy distributed positions by birth. Patronage distributed them by personal favor. Nepotism distributed them by family. The Catholic Church distributed senior offices to the sons of the right families for centuries. The British civil service before the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan reforms was a patronage swamp in which the Foreign Office was staffed by the cousins of the foreign secretary. The Indian civil service before the same reforms was a private club for the East India Company’s favorites. The expansion of meritocratic principles since the French Revolution and the nineteenth-century civil service reforms has been one of modernity’s great progressive achievements, opening opportunities to people who would have been categorically excluded under any of the prior arrangements. Wooldridge charges that Sandel compares actual meritocracy to an ideal alternative and that the comparison is intellectually unfair. Compared to the historical alternatives meritocracy actually replaced, even a flawed meritocracy is a moral improvement.

Wooldridge is direct about this. “It is shockingly ahistorical to assert that those born in aristocracies would recognize the good fortune of their birth and be any less arrogant than those who succeed in meritocracies,” he writes. The aristocrat who inherited his position was not more humble than the meritocrat who earned his. He was simply entitled in a different grammar. Replacing the aristocrat’s entitlement with the meritocrat’s does not make the entitlement appear out of nowhere. It just translates it.

This is a real point and the article will not pretend otherwise. Sandel’s argument is weaker against the historical defense than against the moral-psychology defense. The historical defense does not deny that meritocracy produces hubris; it observes that other arrangements produce hubris too, and that the hubris is in some sense a permanent feature of any system that distributes scarce goods. The question is not whether hubris exists. The question is which arrangement produces less of it, and on that comparison meritocracy does plausibly outperform aristocracy and patronage. The world in which a poor child of the right talents could become an Oxford don, an American senator, a Supreme Court justice, or a corporate executive is a better world than the one in which those positions were closed by birth. Sandel knows this. He does not deny it. The reader should not let him be misread as denying it.

Move two: the empirical case. Meritocratic institutions outperform their alternatives on measurable outcomes. Singapore’s meritocratic civil service is less corrupt and more effective than most of its alternatives. American research universities, meritocratically selected, produce a disproportionate share of the world’s scientific breakthroughs and Nobel Prizes. Countries that have adopted more meritocratic selection procedures — Finland in teacher recruitment, Korea in civil service examinations, post-Mao China in university admission — have outperformed peer countries that have not. The history of scientific progress since 1800 tracks closely with the expansion of meritocratic access to scientific training. The improvement in government capacity in nineteenth-century Britain and Prussia tracked closely with the adoption of competitive civil service exams. The United States’ postwar innovation advantage was partly a function of meritocratic expansion via the GI Bill and federal research funding.

This is a real argument and it is not refuted by Sandel’s critique. A society that wants its surgeons to be competent, its bridges to stand, its airplanes to fly, and its scientific breakthroughs to actually break through has good reason to prefer meritocratic selection over the alternatives. The argument that meritocracy is the least bad sorting mechanism for technical competence is broadly correct. Sandel does not argue against it on competence grounds and the article does not argue against it on competence grounds either.

Move three: the reform agenda. Wooldridge’s positive proposal is not to abandon meritocracy but to re-moralize it. Build stronger protections against the capture of meritocratic channels by the already-privileged: reform legacy preferences, regulate the test-prep industry, invest more heavily in the talent identification and development of working-class children, restore the early-twentieth-century Conant ideal of meritocracy as a vehicle for bringing brilliant poor kids into the elite. Wooldridge is not defending American meritocracy as practiced. He is defending meritocracy as principle against Sandel’s deeper critique. This is a reasonable position and it is shared by a wide range of thoughtful people who have looked at the same data Sandel has looked at and concluded that the answer is to make the sorting fairer, not to abandon it. It is the position most credentialed liberals would defend if asked, and most centrists hold it by default.

The article also has to take the personal version of the objection seriously. The hypocrisy charge: Sandel is a Harvard professor critiquing Harvard’s sorting function. Harvard Magazine, reviewing the book, called it “a view of Harvard as seen from Harvard.” Sandel addresses this directly in the preface. He acknowledges he benefits from the system. He does not claim exemption from the hubris he diagnoses. He notes that the book is partly confessional. He observes that a system that produces internal critics is not thereby disqualified from criticism; the production of internal critics is itself evidence that something is wrong. And he applies the argument to himself concretely — he has proposed the lottery of the qualified knowing it would dilute the credential he has spent a career accumulating. None of this dissolves the charge. The reader is entitled to find his answer partial and to keep weighing the argument anyway, because the question of whether a critique’s legitimacy depends on the critic’s biographical standing is itself a philosophical question with defensible answers in either direction.

With all of that conceded, here is Sandel’s deeper move, which the steelman does not refute. The steelman is a defense of meritocracy as a sorting mechanism, and it is correct that meritocracy is, on the historical evidence, the least bad sorting mechanism for many purposes. What the steelman does not address is that even the least bad sorting mechanism is morally corrosive when its winners stop seeing their position as gift, accident, or contingency. Wooldridge concedes that meritocracy produces some hubris. He does not concede that the hubris is structural to the principle itself, or that the cultural by-products — the condescension of the credentialed toward the non-credentialed, the political capture of legislatures by the college-graduated, the disappearance of working-class voices from democratic deliberation, the welfare-reform style of policy that treats poverty as a failure of personal responsibility — are inherent to the meritocratic frame and cannot be reformed away by adjusting test-prep regulation.

The steelman accepts the sorting and tries to clean it up. Sandel accepts that the sorting may be necessary and asks what the sorting is doing — to the people inside it, to the political language they speak about each other, to the moral imagination of the country that lets them sort. Wooldridge answers the first question well. Sandel is answering the second, and the second has no policy fix. The fix, if there is one, is closer to a change of consciousness about what one’s position in the sorting actually means. Wooldridge is right that meritocracy is better than its historical alternatives. Sandel is right that meritocracy, even at its best, produces a moral discourse that misdescribes the human being. Both can be true. The question of which truth matters more is philosophical, not empirical, and it cannot be settled by counting Singapore’s civil service rankings.

VII. Contributive Justice as Alternative

Sandel’s positive proposal is the part of the book that gets the least attention and is the hardest to summarize, because it is more a philosophical reorientation than a policy program. He calls it contributive justice.

The standard frameworks for thinking about justice in modern political philosophy are distributive: how should goods be divided, by what principles, with what mechanisms? John Rawls’s difference principle is distributive. Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory is distributive. Utilitarian welfare maximization is distributive. Each of these starts from the premise that justice is fundamentally a question about how to allocate things — income, opportunity, rights, resources — among the members of a society. Each disagrees with the others about the right principle for the allocation. None disputes that the problem of justice is the problem of allocation.

Contributive justice asks a different question. It does not ask how the goods should be divided. It asks what the goods are for, and what kind of contribution to a shared common good a person is enabled to make by the work they do. The dignity of work, on this view, consists in the ability to offer something that others need and to earn their esteem for offering it. This is distinct from the wage the work commands. It is also distinct from the rights the worker holds. It is about recognition and belonging, not just allocation. The framework is older than modern liberalism. Sandel draws it from Aristotle, from Hegel, from the American civic republican tradition that runs through Jefferson and the early labor movement, and from Catholic social teaching, particularly the encyclicals on labor that began with Rerum Novarum in 1891 and continued through Laborem Exercens in 1981.

The Catholic source is worth pausing on because it is the place where contributive justice has been articulated most carefully. Laborem Exercens, written by John Paul II, defends the proposition that work is fundamentally about what the worker contributes to the human community, and that the wage is the means by which the contribution is sustained, not the measure of its worth. The framework is incompatible with the meritocratic frame in a way that is easy to miss. Meritocracy says: the wage measures the contribution. Laborem Exercens says: the contribution measures itself, by what it does for the people it serves, and the wage exists to make the contribution sustainable. In the first frame, a teacher who earns less than a derivatives trader has made a smaller contribution. In the second frame, the comparison is meaningless: each contribution is what it is, and the question of whether the wages are appropriate is a separate question from the question of whether the contribution is honored.

The policy implications of contributive justice are modest but real. They include wage subsidies for low-wage work that produces visible community benefit. They include tax policy that rewards production over speculation — treating income from labor more favorably than income from capital gains, on the grounds that the first is a contribution and the second is rent. They include public honor and recognition for non-credentialed trades through ceremonies, awards, public commemorations, and the kinds of small institutional rituals that mark a society’s declaration of who belongs. They include reform of the political economy to restore the conditions under which non-credentialed work can sustain a family and a community without requiring two incomes and three side hustles.

None of this is new. The labor movement of the early twentieth century understood it. The New Deal understood it. The civil-rights labor coalitions of the 1960s understood it. The understanding has been lost not because better arguments arrived but because the political language that articulated it has been displaced by the meritocratic vocabulary. Contributive justice is the older name for what most Americans, asked the right way, would say they believe about work. The meritocratic vocabulary has overwritten it without the writing class noticing the overwrite.

For the series, contributive justice is the philosophical alternative to the meritocratic framework, and it is the framework on which the carpenter/house distinction in Article 7 will rest. The carpenter who builds the house contributes. The Latin tutor who teaches the language contributes. The work each one does is evaluable by what it offers to the people who receive it, and the wage each receives is the means by which the contribution sustains itself. The admissions consultant who gets a child into Harvard for forty thousand dollars is in a different category, because what the consultant is selling is not a contribution to the child or to anyone else. It is access to a sorting mechanism whose value depends on its scarcity. Contributive justice has a name for that distinction. The meritocratic vocabulary does not.

VIII. The Lottery of the Qualified

Sandel’s most concrete educational reform proposal is the one that has gotten the most pushback and that he means most literally, even as he is careful to present it not as a scalable policy fix but as a philosophical thought experiment.

The proposal: set a baseline of academic preparedness that an applicant must meet to be considered for admission to a selective university. From the pool of applicants who meet that baseline — the qualified pool — admit by lottery. Random selection. No further sorting on the basis of essays, recommendations, character interviews, demonstrated leadership, geographic distribution, or any of the holistic criteria that A. Lawrence Lowell invented in 1922 to keep Jews out of Harvard and that the Lowell apparatus has used in different costumes ever since.

Sandel has proposed variants. He has suggested admitting half a class normally and half by lottery as a transitional step. He has noted that Stanford’s faculty committee seriously considered a version of this proposal in the late 1960s before the admissions dean killed it. He returned to the argument at a Harvard talk in February 2026 and the Crimson covered it. The proposal is real. He means it.

It is also, as critics correctly observe, a proposal that cannot scale to fix the problem Sandel is describing. The twelve most selective American universities enroll roughly 0.9 percent of American undergraduates. Even if every one of them adopted lottery admissions tomorrow, the structural inequality of American higher education would not change in any measurable way. David Deming, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told the Crimson in October 2025 that the lottery “wouldn’t actually make a dent in any of the rising inequality that Professor Sandel mentioned.” Raj Chetty, also at Harvard, has made similar observations. Both of them are correct on the empirical point.

This is where Sandel is most interesting, and where the misreading of his proposal happens most consistently. Sandel does not present the lottery of the qualified as a scalable policy fix. He presents it as a thought experiment whose function is to chasten merit’s hubris. The point of the proposal is not that it would make American higher education more equal. The point is that it would force the winners of the sorting to recognize that their admission was contingent rather than earned. The good of the institution would be redistributed without being debased, because the lottery would operate on candidates who had already demonstrated baseline preparedness. What would change is not the quality of the admitted class but the story they tell themselves about why they are there. The story would be the truth: I met the bar; the bar admitted more qualified applicants than there were seats; chance picked me from the pool of the qualified; I am here partly because of chance.

This story is intolerable to the meritocratic frame. The frame requires that the story be: I was selected because I am the best, and the selection process recognized something distinctive about me that the rejected applicants did not have. The frame requires this story because the frame organizes the moral self-portrait of the credentialed class, and the moral self-portrait is the source of the hubris Sandel is trying to chasten. The lottery does not chasten the hubris by making the sorting more accurate. It chastens the hubris by making the chance visible. Once the chance is visible, the meritocratic story can no longer be told. The winner has to admit they were lucky.

The reform’s function is therefore epistemic, not distributive. It is a device for changing what the winners know about themselves. Read this way, the criticism that the lottery would not measurably reduce inequality is correct and beside the point. Sandel is not trying to reduce inequality with this proposal. He is trying to dislodge the moral story that lets the inequality feel deserved. The lottery is one way to make the story dislodge itself, because once you have admitted that chance picked you from the qualified pool, you have already conceded the central meritocratic claim about the relationship between your position and your worth.

This is also why the proposal makes the institutions Sandel is critiquing furious. The lottery is the move that costs the credential its signal value. Harvard’s admission is valuable, in the labor market and in the marriage market and in the social scene of every American city, precisely because the people who hold it can present themselves as having been selected for talent and character. Once the selection becomes lottery selection from a qualified pool, the holder can only present themselves as having met a threshold and gotten lucky on the draw. The credential’s value collapses to the value of the threshold, which is much lower than the value of the prior story. No elite institution has voluntarily adopted lottery admissions, despite the fact that the operational costs would be trivial. The reason is not administrative. The institutions are refusing the lottery because it works.

This is part of the diagnosis. A reform whose only flaw is that it would actually do the thing it claims to do is being refused by the institutions it would affect. The refusal is what tells you the diagnosis is correct. The story is constitutive of the credential’s value. Without the story, the credential is just a piece of paper that says you met a competence bar.

The lottery, then, is not a policy proposal the article is recommending. It is a thought experiment whose function is to make visible what the meritocratic frame is hiding. The reader is not being asked to lobby for the lottery. The reader is being asked to notice what the lottery would expose — that one’s credential is a position in a sorting mechanism that selected from a pool of the qualified, where the selection was partly chance and partly the bias of the sorters and partly the inheritance the sorted brought to the bar in the first place. Once that recognition is in place, the story changes by itself. The lottery becomes unnecessary because its work has already been done.

IX. What Sandel Does Not Fix

The article should be honest about the parts of Sandel’s argument the series is not fully adopting and the parts the steelman has correctly identified as weak.

Sandel’s treatment of race is brief and inadequate. He acknowledges that American meritocracy was never race-neutral, that the Reconstruction betrayal locked in a racial stratification meritocratic rhetoric has obscured, and that the deaths-of-despair literature is explicitly about white working-class mortality. He does not develop the acknowledgment at length, and the failure is one of his book’s real weaknesses, noted by multiple Black critics in the American Journal of Law and Equality symposium. The argument about meritocratic humiliation is sharpest when applied to white working-class voters because the racial hierarchy was already doing humiliation work for Black Americans long before meritocracy entered the picture. A Black worker in 1965 was not told by the dominant culture that her position reflected her individual merit. She was told what the dominant culture had decided about Black women. The meritocratic frame is a different kind of insult, and Sandel’s account does not fully integrate the two. Article 2 of this series tried to fill in some of the racial dimension. It did not finish the job.

Sandel’s communitarian foundation is contestable. His move against the “unencumbered self” he reads in Rawls and Kant, in favor of a “thick self” constituted by community and tradition, is a serious philosophical position and also one that readers with a more liberal view of the self will find unpersuasive at the foundational level. Sandel has, for what it is worth, publicly rejected the “communitarian” label, including in the preface to the second edition of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice: “LLJ is not a communitarian critique but a critique of the unencumbered self that liberalism presupposes.” The distinction matters because his critique is epistemological and ontological rather than ideological. The series is using the Sandel framework without endorsing the full underlying philosophical anthropology, because the meritocratic critique is portable and survives outside the specific ontological commitments.

The contributive-justice framework is operationally vague. How does a polity decide which contributions are valuable? Sandel gestures toward democratic deliberation as the answer, but the deliberation in any actual society happens among credentialed political actors — the same ones Sandel is critiquing for capturing the language of policy. The recursion problem is real. The honest move is to acknowledge that the alternative framework is a direction, not a policy menu, and that getting from here to there requires reforming the moral imagination of the people who would be doing the reforming. That is a slow project. It does not lend itself to legislative solutions.

The 2016 causal claim is hard to falsify. Sandel’s argument that meritocratic humiliation caused or substantially contributed to the Trump victory is one plausible narrative among several. Critics observe that Trump voters were not, on average, poorer or less educated than the median American, and that the meritocratic-humiliation story may apply to a specific subset of the coalition rather than to the whole. The diagnosis is offered in the spirit of pattern-recognition, not historical proof. It is not the whole account. Anyone who tries to use it as the whole account is using it for something other than what Sandel offered it for.

None of these caveats unwind the central diagnosis: that the meritocratic frame produces hubris and humiliation as structural outputs, that the hubris and humiliation are corrosive to democratic life, and that the corrosion is not a malfunction but a feature. The caveats are about the edges. The argument at the center can still do what it is for — name the moral discourse the credentialed class has built around its own position and ask whether the discourse is the truth or a flattering self-portrait that has crowded out the truth.

X. The First-Person Plural

Sandel is a Harvard professor critiquing Harvard’s sorting function. He addresses this directly in the preface to the book: he benefits from the system he is describing, and that is not a reason to dismiss the critique but a reason to take it seriously, because a system that produces critics from inside it is more credible than one whose beneficiaries defend it uniformly. The same move is available to the writer of this article and to its readers. The diagnosis cannot be received as a description of other people. It has to be received as a description of the frame the writer and the reader have been trained inside, together, and the temptation, on encountering it, will be to find another villain to point at — the smug pundits, the tone-deaf consultants, the credentialed liberals who voted the wrong way — and to exempt oneself. The exemption is the trap. The hubris is structural. It belongs to the position inside the frame, not to the personality. The reader who feels nothing on encountering Sandel’s argument is the reader who has not yet read it.

An article written in the register Sandel demands cannot end with a policy bullet list. The temptation, having walked the diagnosis, is to convert it into an action plan: ten things to do, five reforms to advocate, three op-eds to write to your representative. The article is going to refuse. The diagnosis Sandel offers is not the kind that converts cleanly into legislation. It is the kind that asks the people running the country to look in a different direction and to stop telling themselves a particular story. What the article can leave the reader with is a set of small changes in attention. Not a program, but a discipline.

The first is to stop using the rhetoric of rising. Not because the underlying commitment to opportunity is wrong — it is not — but because the rhetoric, in its current form, supplies the listener with the inverse verdict the speaker did not intend. When you catch yourself reaching for “you can make it if you try” or any of its variants, ask yourself who in the room is hearing the inverse, and what the inverse is doing to them.

The second is to count the names of the work the country runs on. When you talk about the economy, name the work. Carpenters. Electricians. Truck drivers. Nurses. Farmers. Mechanics. Line cooks. Home health aides. The naming is not nostalgia and it is not condescension. It is the recovery of a vocabulary the credentialed class has lost. The work is still being done. The names exist. Use them.

The third is to notice when the language of expertise is being used to exclude voices from a deliberation those voices have a right to participate in. Smart policy. Evidence-based. The experts say. These phrases are sometimes the right thing to say. They are also sometimes the credentialist gatekeeping Sandel is naming. The discipline is to notice which work the phrase is doing — clarifying or dismissing — and to ask whether the dismissal is honest.

The fourth is to remember the contingency of one’s own position. Not as a single confessional moment but as a recurring practice. The genes you did not choose. The household you were born into. The teachers who happened to notice you. The technological wave that valued your particular inclinations. The year of the labor market when you happened to be looking. The thousand small accidents that compounded to put you where you sit reading this article. You did the work too. The work was real. It is not the whole story. The recognition that it is not the whole story is what Sandel calls gratitude, and the gratitude is what disarms the hubris.

The fifth is to read the data Sandel is asking us to read. Not as a partisan prop, not as an indictment of the other side, but as a description of what has happened to this country over the last fifty years. The Chetty mobility curve. The Case-Deaton mortality curves. The credentialism statistics. The data has been in the textbooks for years. The question is whether the credentialed class is going to keep reading it as a problem to be solved by adjusting the sorting, or as a description of the moral discourse that has organized its own life.

None of this is a program. None of it requires legislation. All of it is available to any reader who wants to do it, beginning today, in the next conversation about the economy or politics or college admissions or the people who built the room you are sitting in. The discipline is small. The discipline is also what Sandel means by what could come next, and the article is going to leave the reader with the discipline rather than with a plan, because the discipline is the part the credentialed class can actually do without first having to take power. This is the modesty Sandel asks for. The article inherits it. The diagnosis is in the first person plural.

The next article in this series goes from the moral diagnosis to the structural one. Sandel describes what the meritocratic frame has done to the people inside it. Tyler Cowen describes what the people who won the meritocratic game are now doing to defend the game. The two diagnoses are independent. They are also mutually reinforcing. Read together, they are the picture of an order that is corroding from the inside out and protecting itself with the same mythology that produced the corrosion.