81 Brock Education Journal 32 (2)

Book Review
The Tyranny of Merit: A journal of educational research and practice
What’s Become of the 2023 Vol. 32 (2) 81-84

Common Good? https://journals.library.brocku.ca/brocked

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Reviewed by Long Hoang Vu
Vietnam National University, Hanoi

Sandel, M. J. (2020). The tyranny of merit: What’s become of the common good? Allen Lane.

According to Michael Sandel’s renowned book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the
Common Good, Western education helped to arrange mass labour division in the West on
the basis of “merit” long before Michael Young (1958) first proposed the idea in The Rise of
Meritocracy. The foundation of meritocratic governmentality is the belief that “‘smart’
people (experts and elites) decide things, rather than allowing citizen to debate and decide
what policies to enact” (p. 101). The logic is sound and is supported by both centre-left and
center-right political elites in the Western hemisphere, but it is opposed by the populist
movement led by Donald Trump since its promises are unattainable for the disillusioned
disenfranchised class.

Inspired by Young’s (1958) dystopian view, Sandel’s intellectual exploration echoes that of
some of his intellectual predecessors, such as Howley (1986), Borland (1997, 2005), and
Littler (2017), who all challenge the neoliberal notion that talented people deserve the
rewards of success from the free market. A market-based education perceives students as
rivals; the most successful are those able to adjust to the market's demands. The book
tackles not just the mechanism of merit, but also the imperatives that give meritocracy a
sense of existence—the market economy and the moralization of the division between rich
and poor, winning and losing, and recurring motifs. Sandel writes: “Conducting our public
discourse as if it were possible to outsource moral and political judgment to markets, or to
experts and technocrats, has emptied democratic argument of meaning and purpose” (p. 33).

In Chapter 1, Sandel describes the status quo of Western education, where “market
mechanisms are the primary instruments for achieving the public good” (p. 23). By seeing
triumphs (in terms of the economy and morality) as individual accomplishment, meritocratic
governmentality subjects people as atomic entities, in which both successes and failures are
the result of individual efforts. By excluding “the luck and good fortune that helped them

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vuhoanglong@ussh.edu.vn
82 Long Hoang Vu

[successful people] on their way” (p. 29), meritocracy compounds the misfortune of the
failed.

Obviously, meritocracy is older than free-market capitalism. In Chapter 2, Sandel examines

the theological origins of the concept in Western thinking. Early biblical philosophy provides
an anthropocentric perspective that the “moral universe is arranged in a way that aligns
prosperity with merit and suffering with wrongdoing” (p. 37); hence, God’s rewards and
punishments are not random. The notion of merit-based worthiness is the root of
secularized meritocracy, in which individuals earn their own social position based on their
abilities: “[Meritocracy] celebrates freedom—the ability to control my destiny by dint of hard
work—and deservingness” (p. 59).

The guiding principle of meritocracy is “the idea that we do not deserve to be rewarded, or
held back, based on factors beyond our control” (p. 28). Sandel’s primary concern about this
principle is the origin of merit: Is it given by God, or must individuals earn it? If merit is
based on natural ability, do individuals deserve society’s favour? A flawless meritocratic
society might reject innate skills and contingent fortunes in favour of human efforts alone.
This form of society is tyrannical because it views the human subjects as neither biological
nor social, solely responsible for their actions.

In his book, Sandel notes that a part of the narrative of meritocracy is the idea that humans
are autonomous actors capable of controlling their own success:

The meritocratic emphasis on effort and hard work seeks to vindicate the idea that,
under the right conditions, we are responsible for our success and thus capable of
freedom. It also seeks to vindicate the faith that, if the competition is truly fair,
success will align with virtue; those who work hard and play by the rules will earn the
rewards they deserve. (p. 119, emphasis added)

Although this principle implies the influences of social and natural conditions on the
individual, it refuses to tackle the unequal distribution of environmental benefits affecting
an individual’s success or failure. Such an individualistic viewpoint lies at the centre of
meritocratic education.

The second idea is the rhetoric of rising, which is explored in detail in Chapter 3. Similar to
the logic of developmentalism, which has been prevalent after the end of World War II,
meritocracy reduces the common good to economic progress, and the worth of people’s
contributions is proportional to what they sell on the market. As commercialization and
capital accumulation become measures of human worth, meritocracy promises that “those
who work hard and play by the rules deserve to rise as far as their talents and dreams will
take them” (p. 63).

The value of a college degree also serves as a measurement tool for the worth of
individuals, which leads to credentialism. Chapter 4 reveals that the desire for academically
83 Brock Education Journal 32 (2)

elite degrees has a dualistic connotation: Winners deserve all the praise because they are
“smart,” whereas losers deserve criticism because they are “stupid.” The smart versus stupid
dichotomy appears non-ideological; yet, it suggests that the brightest “are better at
governing than their less-credentialed fellow citizens, which is a myth born of meritocratic
hubris” (p. 96). This rhetoric results in two issues. First, it undermines the foundation of
Western democracy by enabling just those with the proper credentials to make decisions,
rather than allowing all people to debate and choose which policies to implement. Second, it
puts harmful pressure on the winners—"Unlike the old hereditary elite, which assumed its
place at the top without much fuss or bother, the new meritocratic elite wins its place
through strenuous striving” (p. 166). This “strenuous striving” is in fact the attempt to
inherit parents’ wealth through specialized education: “test-prep tutoring, sports training,
dance and music lessons, and a myriad of extracurricular and public service activities, often
under the advice and tutelage of private admissions consultants whose fees can cost more
than four years at Yale” (p. 167).

The moralization of smartness results in the moralization of success. In Chapter 5, Sandel

states that social mobility, not social equality, is the basic trait of meritocracy. It supports
the notion that children from wealthy and poor households should be able to achieve the
merit-based social positions they deserve. It does not oppose the notion that inequality is
inherent to human society. Thus, “The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is
a justification of inequality” (p. 117). Sandel wonders how a meritocratic education
distinguishes, on a small scale, those who deserve to attend prestigious institutions and, on
a larger scale, those who deserve to govern society, from the rest of the people.

Chapter 6 examines why universities and other institutions of higher education fail to
encourage social mobility. The majority of students who attend premier institutions are
wealthy in the first place. Let us assess the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)’s function in
sorting pupils. The standardized exam is not an objective assessment of students’ abilities,
since the scores of privileged students may be increased via the employment of private test-
prep classes and tutors: “Private tutoring helps, and a profitable industry has arisen to teach
high school students the gimmicks and tricks to boost their scores” (p. 155). Elite pupils,
prompted by their parents, come to prestigious schools not just to study among
intellectually bright peers, but also because these institutions have the greatest meritocratic
standing.

In his final chapter, Sandel critiques the assumption that certain occupations are better or
worse than others. This separation is formed as a result of the meritocracy’s sorting
process, which separates society into successful and failed individuals doing divisive types
of labour. While successful individuals’ occupations require credentials from universities,
failed ones expect none. Not only do the marginalized earn less money than others, but
their work is also not held to the same social value as that of the prosperous because they
are uneducated. An extreme notion of unemployment is having no self-esteem whatsoever.
84 Long Hoang Vu

This meritocratic virtue pushes those without a bachelor’s degree to die because of drug
overdose, alcoholism, or suicide. Therefore, politicians can promise to fight for the failed
ones by turning jobs back to white working-class people without having to conceal that
their populist discourses may bleed into open racism.

Despite the significance of Sandel’s criticism to the literature on meritocracy and its flaws,
he neither offers answers to its flaws nor expands his thesis outside the U.S. education
system. One of the proposed solutions is to introduce a lottery for college applications to
alleviate admissions competition. This may be effective in Western education, where merit,
talent, giftedness, and human value are defined on an individual basis. Nonetheless, in the
Global South, where the definitions of both human subjects and society are different from
those of the West, an ontological contextualization should take place, and additional
versions of the book may be written, ranging from the origins of merit in religious writings
to its articulations in Global South education. Such analysis delinks local and Indigenous
education from the hegemony of Western schooling and provides alternatives to the
market-based educational approach. Sandel’s work must be viewed through decolonial
lenses, in which the ontological nature of human talents and abilities in the non-West is
carefully analyzed based on specific ethnographic accounts.

References

Borland, J. H. (1997). The construct of giftedness. Peabody Journal of Education, 72(3-4), 6–

20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1493033

Borland, J. H. (2005). Gifted education without gifted children: The case for no conception of
giftedness. In R. J. Sternberg & J. E. Davidson (Eds.), Conceptions of giftedness (2nd
ed., pp. 1-19). Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511610455.002

Howley, A. (1986). Gifted education and the spectre of elitism. The Journal of Education,
168(1), 117-125. https://doi.org/10.1177/002205748616800108
Littler, J. (2017). Against meritocracy: Culture, power, and myths of mobility. Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315712802

Young, M. (1958). The rise of meritocracy 1870–2033: An essay on education and equality.
Penguin Books.