Sandel is not about guilt-tripping anxious parents of front-row kids; they’re suffering too, he says. But the credentialed have come to imagine themselves as smarter, wiser, more tolerant — and therefore more deserving of recognition and respect — than the noncredentialed ... But we are left with an important issue Sandel does not address: the targeting by the right wing of colleges themselves ... So now’s a good time for both sides to sit down for a very serious talk, with The Tyranny of Merit required reading for all. And invited from inner-city, suburban and rural schools across the land should be those who warmed seats both in the front row and in the back.
Sandel’s prescriptions seem inadequate to this bracing indictment ... Sandel is especially adept in cataloguing the array of economic, social, and psychological pathologies of a society based upon rule by 'merit.' His insight into the distance between the claims that justify meritocracy and its real-world implications is particularly striking. Whatever the benefits of meritocracy in demolishing the aristocracy of the ancien régime, meritocracy has produced in turn a pervasive system of inequality and resulting instability ... Sandel is especially insightful in dismantling the egalitarian veil that many Left academics have donned to assuage their bad conscience, even as they blithely participate in and benefit from the meritocracy ... Sandel is less curious, however, about the increasingly central role played by 'identity politics' ... In the end, Sandel flinches: in spite of accusing the new ruling order of 'tyranny,' he fails to locate any tyrants. This silence on the meritocracy’s self-deception, in what is otherwise a singularly powerful critique of the pathologies of meritocracy, is telling. Sandel is remarkably incurious about whether meritocrats’ justifications of their moral eminence might in fact shroud the deeper 'will to power' one would expect to find among tyrants ... What is sorely needed is deeper reflection, and paths to action, for how to realize the common good.
As a critique of meritocracy and an explanation of today’s populist resentment toward educated elites, The Tyranny of Merit is a compelling book. But Sandel’s tentative suggestions for remedying the harms of meritocracy focus far too much on liberal elites, while failing to address the much more significant ways in which business elites have harmed workers. In addition, by focusing on remedies rooted in the past, his vision also neglects the increasing diversity of workers by race, gender, and immigration status.
The peculiarity of Sandel’s argument is that, despite his talk of a common good, he locates that good in private institutions such as the Ivy League rather than in public ones. A public, widely accessible merit-based system such as the University of California seems to have no prominent place in Sandel’s vision, yet I would argue that such a system is our best hope ... I just don’t think it matters much to the world how the roughly 1,600 Harvard students in a given year feel about their admission to the university, and I don’t think most of the rest of the 3.7 million American high school graduates in that year spend much time thinking about Harvard’s admissions process. I applaud Sandel for showing that a theorist’s perspective on our intimate problems (stressed-out teenagers) and structural ones (class rigidity) can shed light and bring hope. But by placing Harvard’s and other elite private colleges’ admissions practices at the center of his story, Sandel overstates their significance both as a cause of the problem and as a source of the solution.
... a cogent, penetrating critique of meritocracy, which, he argues persuasively, has trammeled our sense of community and mutual respect ... Sandel’s proposals for change are less convincing than his deeply considered analysis ... A stimulating examination of a divisive social and political problem.
... [a] bracing sociopolitical treatise ... tart prose ... the book’s centerpiece is a stinging attack on universities as temples of meritocracy that nevertheless reinforce upper-class privilege rather than helping the disadvantaged. Sandel, however, only makes a few concrete suggestions for dethroning meritocracy, including college admissions by lottery. Still, he offers a rich, incisive analysis of how the meritocratic ideal contributes to contemporary political crises.
