Abstract
Meritocracy has rightly received increasing attention among scholars in recent years, but relatively little has been written about its history. This article traces the history of the idea back to the eighteenth century when Mandeville, Rousseau, and Kant addressed it. Mandeville and Kant made the case for meritocracy; Rousseau worried about its negative social effects. This article sketches that debate, and I argue that Rousseau’s critiques were insufficiently considered by subsequent champions of meritocracy. I conclude with some discussion of a parallel debate that took place at the same time among the American Founders.
Thomas Piketty’s magisterial Capital and Ideology offers an extended analysis of how societies come to justify the inequalities that inevitably arise in them (Piketty 2020, 1). Just regimes need to legitimate their inequality. For Piketty, this is the work of ideology, which he defines as “an attempt to respond to a broad set of questions concerning the desirable or ideal organization of society,” encompassing social, political, and economic dimensions (3). Among the ideologies that Piketty treats through his long work are proprietarian, social-democratic, communist, slaveist, and colonialist ideologies. It is in the context of his analysis of proprietarian societies that he introduces “the invention of meritocracy and neo-proprietarianism” (709–716). He traces meritocracy back to the nineteenth century, when the wealthy came to “justify their position vis-à-vis the poorest: they deserve what they have, they say, because of their talent and effort” (125).
To be sure, Piketty is right that nineteenth-century societies were deeply concerned with justifying their emerging inequalities. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx ([1867] 1976, 873) made special note of meritocracy by describing it as a founding myth of capitalist economies: “Long, long ago there were two sorts of people: one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all the frugal élite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living.” That is, for Marx, capitalism only works when most citizens believe that the rich and the poor likewise deserve their respective fates, as determined by their respective talent and efforts. So long as especially the poor accept their fate as just, the revolution can be staved off.
Less cynically from the same period, John Stuart Mill likewise considered meritocracy to be an essential component of political economy. He described merit as “the clearest and most emphatic form in which the idea of justice is conceived by the general mind,” defining the meretricious person as one who “is understood to deserve good if he does right, evil if he does wrong” (Mill [1861] 2001, 45). Unlike Marx, Mill largely accepts the principle of meritocracy uncritically, but unlike many mainstream political economists of his period, he rejects the notion that financial rewards have been so distributed throughout society. The inequality of wealth in Victorian England was, for him, not so much evidence of radical differences in individual talents and efforts as the artifact of the randomness of the birth lottery (Mill [1879] 1989, 227) and the absence of laws restricting inheritance (Mill [1849–1871] 2006, 221–225). While there was very significant inequality in the nineteenth-century economy, there was little reason to believe it corresponded even remotely to the principle of meritocracy. Those serious about that principle, for Mill, must seek to eliminate the right of heirs to inherit great fortunes with no effort on their own part.
While Piketty traces conceptions of the ideology of meritocracy back to the nineteenth century, he argues that the doctrine picked up momentum in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such that by his own time the self-conception of billionaires was that they “can never be rich enough and that the humble people of the earth can never thank them enough for all the benefits they have brought” (Piketty 2020, 713). The doctrine of meritocracy has, if anything, asserted itself even more boldly since the publication of Piketty’s volume, with President Trump issuing, on April 23, 2025, an executive order demanding universal recognition of the principle of meritocracy. It deemed any deviation from meritocracy “pernicious.”
Despite the full-throated endorsement of meritocracy by the economy’s greatest beneficiaries, scholars have begun to apply greater scrutiny to its doctrines. Notable among these have been Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel and Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits. Sandel properly draws attention to what he calls the “meritocratic ethic,” in which modern market-oriented economies have both winners and losers. According to this ethic, the winners “deserve the outsize rewards . . . lavish[ed] on the successful” (Sandel 2020, 24). The rich, in other words, justly enjoy their rewards. Meanwhile, the poor similarly deserve poverty as punishment for their ignorance and laziness. He rightly addresses the psychic consequences attached to this ethos, where the rich become prone to “hubris” and the poor are demoralized and humiliated (25–26).
Daniel Markovits has found meritocracy equally troublesome, although from a different angle. While acknowledging that meritocracy has been punishing for the poor, he argues counterintuitively and persuasively that it has been punishing for the rich, as well. Whereas earlier generations of wealthy Americans enjoyed inherited wealth relatively stress free, the explosion of the meritocratic ethos over the past 50 years or so has compelled even the wealthiest Americans to work all the time—practically from cradle to grave. As children, they must work tirelessly to attain admittance into the elite universities that help legitimate their wealth and status. And as professionals, they feel compelled to continue working exhaustively to become wealthier than their friends, colleagues, and associates. “The meritocratic elite clings to its industry, stoically accepting that enormous incomes entitle employers to extract almost unbounded effort, and urging that their enormous effort justifies these income” (Markovits 2019, 97).
Both Sandel and Markovits trace their thinking back to the twentieth-century British sociologist, Michael Young (Sandel 2020, 116–119; Markovits 2019, 258–260). Young’s treatment of the subject can be found in his now-famous Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), perhaps the most important book ever written on the subject. This futuristic fictional account traces the transformation of Britain from one form of inequality to another. The original inequality was caste-based, much like feudal Europe’s, with family and inheritance being the predominant determinants of one’s social and economic fate. But due in large part to pressing international competition, policymakers switched to a class-based inequality, where fates were now determined by “merit.” Young ([1958] 1994, 84) defines merit simply as “I+E=M,” where “I” stands for intelligence as measured by IQ scores, “E” stands for effort, and “M” represents merit. Young exposes some of the difficulties associated with caste-based systems—difficulties that were broadly understood by 1958—but his greater focus is on the burdens created by a meritocracy system. For example, while the elites of earlier generations were moderated by “self-doubt,” the upper classes in a meritocracy “know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement” (Young [1958] 1994, 96). Meanwhile, the lower classes learned that “if they have been labelled a ‘dunce’ repeatedly” through repeated IQ testing, “they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering, reflection” (Young [1958] 1994, 97). The main difference between feudalism and meritocracy, for Young, is that, in a meritocracy, everyone can feel more certainty that they deserve their stations in life.
These important works on meritocracy should not, however, obscure the concept’s deeper past, which, in fact, extends back further than the nineteenth century. This article pushes back to another century, to the eighteenth, to explore some of the deeper meanings of meritocracy as it emerged decisively from the feudal world. In doing so, I will focus on two philosophers in particular: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Rousseau makes the case against meritocracy; Kant makes the case for it. In exploring these two thinkers, we can appreciate that our current meritocracy debates aren’t new; they extend back to the era where we might expect it—the time when people were first expected to rely on their talents and efforts to make their living. While Rousseau and Kant are equally committed expositors of their particular visions, I argue that Rousseau’s willingness to consider questions of moral psychology make him the more compelling theorist of meritocracy. This article concludes with some reflections on a parallel debate among the American Founders James Madison and Melancton Smith and a few thoughts about what values societies choose to reward.
Rousseau (and Mandeville)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau knew something about talent and effort—and hence about meritocracy. Born in 1712, he was raised by his artisan father in Geneva with little more than his wits and talents to make his way in the world. Despite having a wealthy uncle, Rousseau was denied much in the way of a formal education and was instead apprenticed to a sadistic engraver at the age of 12. By 1728, he had had enough and fell into a Catholic home for wayward boys in Annecy, France. There, he embarked on a remarkable process of self-education, reading broadly in science, theology, morals, politics, and music. By the mid-1740s, Rousseau had become one of the best-read individuals in the Francophone world as well as an aspiring composer. In 1744, he left the safety and anonymity of his rural life behind for a life of fame and fortune in Paris. As he did so, he later records in his Confessions, he told himself, “Whoever excels in something is always sure of being sought after. Be first, then, in anything at all; I will be sought after; opportunities will present themselves, and my merit will do the rest” (Rousseau [1771] 1995, 242). Thus, a man who had no family money, or even barely a family, and who had spent years of his life dedicated to tireless reading in the library in Annecy, sought to present himself as a man of “merit.” It is a remarkable story of a man who has, perhaps, one of the greatest claims in Western history of being a self-made genius.
This was a precipitous time for such a bold move, as the bonds of feudalism were rapidly breaking. As such, it is worth revisiting the basic features of feudalism, which was built on radically different principles. Status in feudalism was ascriptive, and this system had long been accepted for what it was: Those born to serf parents would become serfs, while those born to noble parents would become nobles. There was really no question of merit—or at least there certainly shouldn’t have been. No nobleman could justifiably claim that he had earned his wealth and privilege. The very origins of the term noblesse oblige are born into this assumption: Because nobles had no real claim to their privileges, they possessed a moral obligation to aid others. And for that matter, no serf could claim to deserve poverty. This was simply the way of the world. People filled their roles largely as fate.
Of course, the discovery of the New World and subsequent transformations of the economy changed all of this. Opportunities emerged for people to make money in new businesses, such as shipping, manufacturing, energy, sales, and finance, and with those changes, the old feudal farms began to dissolve, slowly but steadily. This happened in some countries, such as England, more rapidly than in others, such as France. Regardless of the relative pace of the process that marked the transition from a feudal economy to a market economy, status came to be increasingly detached from ancestry. (Not to say that one’s parentage was suddenly irrelevant, but that it was simply less determinative than it had been under feudalism.) In this new environment, those who were once serfs now had to find their own way in the world. And for all the freedom they gained by leaving the feudal estates, at the same time they lost security (an established home and routine access to food and clothing). To the extent that they could secure these necessities, they had to rely on their wits and efforts. And, so the ideology went, the smarter they were and the harder they worked, the greater benefits they would enjoy.
Among the first important modern thinkers to address this new reality was the physician-philosopher Bernard Mandeville, in his Fable of the Bees. Mandeville ([1705] 1988, 184) argued, among many other things, that humanity was largely lazy and disinclined to labor: “Man never exerts himself but when he is rous’d by his Desires.” So long as he has some money and is well-fed, “his Excellence and Abilities will be forever undiscover’d, and the lumpish Machine . . . may be justly compar’d to a huge Wind-mill without a breath of air” (184). There are various winds that can spin the windmill (pride, covetousness, or envy, for example), but for Mandeville, the most reliable of all is hunger: “The only thing . . . that can render the laboring Man industrious, is a moderate quantity of money” (194). In sum, the working class is lazy and should be kept poor to ensure they continue to work. 1
By contrast, Mandeville allows that some people are endowed with other temperaments and talents: the “cunning” and the “industrious.” The cunning, or the intelligent, understand more than most the value of their labor to the economy, and not just to their own personal satiation. He compares the typical “ignorant” worker with those who very much understand the value of their labor: “There are thousand Wretches that are always working the Marrow out of their Bones for next to nothing, because they are unthinking and ignorant of what the Pains they take are worth” (Mandeville [1705] 1988, 240). He then continues, “while others who are cunning and understand the true value of their Work, refuse to be employ’d at under Rates, not because they are of an unactive Temper, but because they won’t beat down the Price of their labour” (240). That is, some workers are smarter than others and, on that basis, can exact a higher salary as they climb the economic ladder.
Still others, Mandeville argues, possess “industry.” The industrious man possesses a “Thirst after Gain, and an Indefatigable Desire of Ameliorating [his] condition” (Mandeville [1705] 1988, 244). This quality can manifest in two different ways. First, in being “Ingenious enough to find out uncommon, and yet warrantable Methods to increase their Business or their Profit” (244). That is, the industrious employ their intelligence to find new ways to make money—by coming up with innovations in manufacturing, in marketing, or in exploiting new markets and the like. While Mandeville categorizes this as “Industry,” the quality shares much in common with “Cunning,” as both the industrious and the cunning use their smarts to outwit their competition and accumulate greater profits.
Second, the industrious can simply worker harder and longer: “If he runs Errands when he has no Work, or makes but Shoe-pins, and serves as Watchman a-nights, he deserves the Name of Industrious” (Mandeville [1705] 1988, 244). That is, some become wealthier than others because they are more willing to take on extra tasks and jobs—or simply work harder.
While society, for Mandeville, requires both rich and poor people, there is little question about the identity of his hero. The efforts of the cunning and the industrious have provided countless new blessings to modern civilization and general improvement for everyone: “Many things which were once look’d upon as the Invention of Luxury, are now allow’d even to those that are so miserably poor as to become the Objects of publick Charity, nay counted so necessary, that we think no Human Creature ought to want them” (Mandeville [1705] 1988, 169). These improvements depend entirely upon the innovations and efforts of the cunning and industrious. And if they grow rich in the process, Mandeville sees no problem—because they have also improved everyone’s circumstances.
This was the world into which Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born and in which he would enjoy his greatest successes. His first celebrated essay, Discourse on the Science and the Arts, scrutinized this world exactingly. Written in 1750, the essay was a response to a contest sponsored by the Academie de Dijon that asked, “Whether the restoration of the Sciences and Arts has contributed to the purification of morals.” This question was likely intended to invite earnest partisans of the Enlightenment to celebrate modern learning. Yet Rousseau had other ideas.
This still-obscure thinker used the essay as an opportunity to address the dangers of learning, especially to its underlying culture. The arts and sciences, he argued, had not so much improved humankind as tapped into and greatly exacerbated a dangerous element of human nature: the need for praise, applause, and distinction. Whereas humanity is naturally, according to Rousseau ([1750] 2018, 20), “simple and virtuous,” modern people possess a “rage for distinction” (18). The arts and sciences had become primary sources of honor in the eighteenth century, where “geniuses” were celebrated for their contributions to philosophy, literature, music, art, and the natural sciences. Indeed, Rousseau ([1751] 2018, 89) concedes that the very contest he won with this essay “greatly contribut[ed] to my glory.” For most celebrated intellectuals, he argues, their muse is less a passion for knowledge and truth than it is pride and vanity: “Every Artist wants to be applauded. His contemporaries’ praise is the most precious portion of his reward” (Rousseau [1750] 2018, 19).
Rousseau ([1750] 2018, 24) described a world much like the one Mandeville celebrated, a world in which “People no longer ask about a man whether he has probity, but whether he has talent [talens].” Talent here, of course, is another word for merit. Indeed, Rousseau uses the word, mérite, later in the same paragraph, in which, speaking of the Academie de Dijon itself, he described its vanity in having endowed the essay prize. Why else sponsor an essay contest if not to get people to praise the Academie for its contributions to intellectual culture more broadly?
In Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, it is largely intellectual pursuits that are the source of merit, as one might expect in the vaunted eighteenth-century Parisian salons, where those of great philosophic, scientific, artistic, or literary accomplishments were being celebrated.
But it was not only the literati whom society praised for their talents. Luxury also plays a significant role in the essay: “Luxury is a certain sign of riches [un signe certain des richesses]” (Rousseau [1750] 2018, 18). As a sign of riches, it was also a magnet for attention and praise. Those able to afford the greatest luxuries were, by implication, imbued with talent and merit. By virtue of their wealth, the rich sent signals to the rest of society of their talents and their merit, just as the intellectuals did with their scientific and philosophic treatises. As discussed earlier, in an age where wealth was increasingly attributed to one’s cunning and industry, wealth and luxury were markers of meritorious personal qualities. Rousseau, of course, was having none of that: “What will become of virtue, when one will have to get rich at any cost? The ancient politicians forever spoke of morals and of virtue; ours speak only of commerce and of money” (18).
For Rousseau ([1750] 2018, 24), what made this situation possible was inequality: “What gives rise to all of these abuses, if not the fatal inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents?” Not denying that people have different talents on any number of dimensions, Rousseau nevertheless draws attention to the fact that society was now allocating both unequal praise and wealth upon those varying talents. The better gift they had for poetry, the more praise they would receive in the revered Parisian salons. But perhaps more promiscuously, the more talent they had for commerce, the greater financial rewards they would reap. And the greater those rewards, the more incentive for others to set out to distinguish themselves along similar lines.
He elaborates in his Observations, “The first source of evil is inequality; from inequality arose riches” (Rousseau [1751] 2018, 45). A world marked by inequality is a world of winners and losers for Rousseau. 2 Given the human tendency to vanity, it naturally stands to reason that everyone wants to be a winner. How do people in the eighteenth century become “winners”? By becoming rich. This contest for wealth and esteem is so culturally dominant, however, that it is not only the rich who are corrupted: “Luxury corrupts everything; the rich man who enjoys it, and the poor man who covets it” (46). The moral damage wreaked by this competition for wealth and esteem ultimately corrupts all but the indifferent few who lack power or social influence.
Rousseau develops these thoughts in his next major essay, written for a subsequent Academie de Dijon contest, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, or the Second Discourse (1754). Whereas the first essay spoke to the social effects of meritocracy, the second explores its psychic effects. In describing early society, he depicts a small community gathered around a large tree.
Everyone began to look at everyone else and wish to be looked at himself, and public esteem acquired a value. The one who sang or danced the best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded, and this was the first step at once to inequality and vice: from these first preferences arose vanity and contempt on the one hand, shame and envy on the other; and the ferment caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. (Rousseau [1754] 2018, 170)
In this passage, Rousseau develops the themes of vanity, pride, and the desire for praise but goes further to introduce considerations of contempt, shame, and envy. Those benefitting in these comparisons—the handsomest, the strongest—not only experience vanity but also feel contempt for those below them in the social hierarchy; the lowly deserve contempt, so the reasoning goes, because they are simply less talented or meritorious. At the same time, those failing to distinguish themselves experience shame and envy. It is not simply that they aren’t as talented as others—it’s that they experience their lack of talent existentially. That is to say, they are compelled to reflect on their lack of talent or merit, surely a deflating and depressing self-assessment. Again, as Michael Young ([1958] 1994, 97) would echo Rousseau almost exactly two centuries later, “they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering, reflection.”
A related and important development in Rousseau’s Second Discourse is his growing attention to a meritocracy manifested in economic inequalities. He emphasizes that certain “natural inequalities,” those associated with singing, dancing, eloquence, and the like, were transitory and not prone to extending in spheres or generations. But others—those related to the economy—began to expand into other spheres and to continue into the next generations. This pattern first emerged with the advent of agriculture. Among early farming societies, “the stronger did more work; the more skillful used his work to better advantage; the more ingenious found ways to reduce his labor” (Rousseau [1754] 2018, 174). That is, talent began correlating not only with praise but also with wealth. As the naturally gifted began to separate themselves as more efficient and productive farmers, they became wealthier than their neighbors. As such, Rousseau observes, “the differences between men, developed by their different circumstances, became more perceptible, more permanent in their effects, and beg[an] to exercise a corresponding influence on the fate of individuals” (174).
From here, according to Rousseau, things only grew worse. In a context of growing property inequality, people were increasingly distinguished by their “merit or talents, and, since these are the only qualities that could attract consideration, one soon had to have them or to affect them” (Rousseau [1754] 2018, 175). With talent and merit at the center of the social universe, ambition emerges as a psychic force. Ambition is, for Rousseau, nothing more or less than “the ardent desire to raise one’s relative fortune less out of genuine need than in order to place oneself above others” (175). For the talented, it is not enough to have satisfied one’s own needs. It is not enough even to be better than others. What is needed is for others to recognize their superiority. And in the economic context, this means having so much wealth that others can no longer deny their financial superiority.
The most efficient route to achieving this recognition is to “profit at the expense of others” (Rousseau [1754] 2018, 175). To do so, one might drive one’s competitors out of business, the same way that athletes demonstrate their superiority by vanquishing their competitors on the field. The result leaves no room for questions or doubt. But even this simple economic competition isn’t enough: The meritorious rich ceased to be satisfied merely in luxury and economic “wins” and eventually come to find their greatest pleasure in “domination and subjection.”
The rich, for their part, had scarcely become acquainted with the pleasure of dominating than they disdained all other pleasures, and using their old Slaves to subject new ones, they thought only of subjugating and enslaving their neighbors; like those ravenous wolves which once they have tasted human flesh scorn all other food, and no longer want anything other than to devour men. (Rousseau [1754] 2018, 176)
3
That is, for Rousseau, the contest to be acknowledged the most talented and meritorious inevitably devolves into a despotism in which the rich commandeer all economic and political authority, using their power to devour their subordinates. This savage display of their unrivaled power becomes the ultimate manifestation of their talents and merit.
Immanuel Kant
If there is any thinker we might expect to have learned from Rousseau’s philosophy, it would probably be the eighteenth-century Prussian, Immanuel Kant. Not a man given to ostentation, Kant adorned his home with only one work of art: a portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And Kant famously once explained the Genevan’s influence on his philosophical outlook: I am myself by inclination a seeker after truth. I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless passion to advance in it, as well as a satisfaction in every forward step. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the rabble who know nothing. Rousseau set me right. This blind prejudice vanishes; I learned to respect human nature, and I should consider myself far more useless than the common laborer if I did not believe that this view could give worth to all others to establish the rights of man. (Kant [1764–1765] 1942, 44; translation mine)
That is, before reading Rousseau, Kant confesses to having been intellectually arrogant, assuming his natural brilliance and hard work distinguished him from others. But upon reading Rousseau, he was compelled to rethink this youthful arrogance and consider that every human being, whether an accomplished philosopher or a “common laborer,” was due equal respect and was of equal dignity.
One might assume that this lesson would compel Kant to embrace Rousseau’s forceful rejection of meritocracy. But the story is more complex and surprising. Although Kant would, indeed, learn a great deal from Rousseau, he did not embrace his critique of meritocracy. Instead, following more prominent and powerful intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, Kant would affirm meritocracy as a principle of justice.
Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals introduces his central moral formula, the Categorical Imperative: “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a
The emerging question is why Kant valued talent, as the Groundwork suggests. The answer can be found in his essay, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784). Here, Kant seeks to explain the principles (and trajectory) of social progress. Written in nine propositions, this essay focuses most on the role of talent in the fourth: “The means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, in so far as this antagonism becomes in the long run the cause of a law-governed social order” (Kant [1784] 1991, 44; emphasis in original). He describes humanity in strikingly Rousseauean terms, where the “desire for honour, power, or property . . . drives him to seek status among his fellows” (44). For Kant, as for Rousseau, social creatures are necessarily driven by their vanity to earn their neighbors’ praise and esteem. It is the promise of this reward, he observes, that inspires individuals to cultivate their talents. 5 To be sure, he does not think the desire for honor, power, or property deserves moral praise: It is, if anything, pathological from a moral perspective. Moreover, if humanity had never chosen this path, people would have enjoyed lives of “perfect concord, self-sufficiency, and mutual love” (45). But at the same time, the species would have failed to achieve its enormous potential. Without cultivating its talents, humanity would have been largely indistinguishable from the rest of the animal kingdom: “All human talents would remain hidden for ever in a dormant state, and men, as the good-natured sheep they tended, would scarcely render their existence more valuable than that of the animals” (45). It is only by cultivating its talents—thereby fostering “social incompatibility, enviously competitive vanity, and insatiable desires for possession or even power”—that the species came to distinguish itself. Kant insists that these unsociable tendencies are what inspire people to “abandon idleness . . . and plunge instead into labour and hardships” (45).
One social institution long standing in the way of people cultivating their talents was hereditary aristocracy. Kant first addresses this issue in another essay, “Perpetual Peace” (1795), where he tackles it while elaborating on his republican principle of equality. His conception of equality is expressly a formal, legal one. Equality on his account means “no one can rightfully bind another to something without also being subject to a law by which he in turn can be bound in the same way by the other” (Kant [1795] 1996, 323n†). That is to say, equality demands that all laws be imposed equally on all citizens. It would, for Kant, defeat the very meaning of law if particular citizens enjoyed exemptions or exceptions to the law. Thus, hereditary aristocracy is problematic, since it had historically conferred unique rights and exemptions.
More troubling, however, is that hereditary aristocracy violates Kant’s very notion of a valid social contract, one in which citizens can only be bound to laws to which they can have given their consent (see Williams 2007). And the fact, for him, is that no one would consent to live under a body of law in which merit played no role in their welfare and lifestyle: “The general will of a people in the original contract . . . will never decide upon this. For a nobleman is not necessarily a noble man” (Kant [1795] 1996, 323n†). That is to say, for Kant, a feudal lord is not necessarily a man of merit. One inherits nobility in aristocracies by virtue of “birth,” but with “quite uncertain merit” (Kant [1795] 1996, 323n†). No one entering into a just state would consent to a system of hereditary aristocracy, where sizable estates and privileges are unquestioningly passed from one generation to another.
Kant develops his thoughts about hereditary aristocracy and merit just two years later in his Metaphysics of Morals: Now the question is whether the sovereign is entitled to establish a nobility, insofar as it is an estate intermediate between himself and the rest of the citizens that can be inherited. What this question comes down to is not whether it would be prudent for the sovereign to do this, with a view to his or the people’s advantage, but only whether it would be in accord with the rights of the people for it to have an estate of persons above it who, while themselves subjects, are still born rulers (or at least privileged) with respect to the people. . . . What a people (the entire mass of subjects) cannot decide in regard to itself and its fellows, the sovereign can also not decide with regard to it. Now an hereditary nobility is a rank that precedes merit [Verdienste] and also provides no basis to hope for merit. . . . For if an ancestor had merit he could still not bequeath it to his descendants: they must acquire it for themselves, since nature does not arrange things in such a way that talent and will, which make meritorious service possible, and also hereditary. Since we cannot admit that any human being would throw away his freedom, it is impossible for the general will of the people to assent to such a groundless prerogative. (Kant [1797] 1996, 471)
As Kant explains here, no one would agree to establish institutions of hereditary aristocracy because such a system would impose an unjust restriction upon their freedom. Everyone wants to be as free as they can be, consistent with equal freedom for others. Hereditary aristocracies interfere with this freedom insofar as they would eliminate citizens’ incentives to cultivate their talents. Only a merit-based system, grounded in the free cultivation of talents and pursuit of esteem, power, and property, is consistent with that freedom and thus makes it the proper choice for those seeking a just state. As he argues in his “Idea for a Universal History,” this freedom is also what advances humanity toward its perfection.
This line of thinking explains why in his “Theory and Practice” Kant ([1793] 1996, 292) is comfortable with disparate property holdings or economic inequality: “This thoroughgoing equality of individuals within a state, as its subjects, is quite consistent with the greatest inequality in terms of the quantity and degree of their possessions, whether in physical or mental superiority over others or in external goods and in rights generally (of which there can be many) relatively to others.”
In this respect, Kant is more the heir of Bernard Mandeville than of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was Mandeville, after all, who celebrated individuals for their “cunning” and “industry.” Nearly a century later, Kant affirms the same attributes for the just system, especially when compared with rewarding people simply for having noble and wealthy parents. Mandeville had made the case that merit was a stimulant to the economy, but Kant has now added the additional virtue of it being just.
Evaluating Kant and Rousseau on Meritocracy and Inequality
In his later political works, Kant is particularly focused on this question of right, or justice, and approaches it from a distinctively formal perspective. That is, he seems fundamentally disinterested in questions concerning the empirical or material circumstances related to meritocracy. Most fundamental, as Kant himself frankly admits, he is indifferent to the question of whether meritocracy leads to economic inequality. As Benjamin L. McKean (2022, 536) has observed, Kant is unconcerned about the empirical or material consequences of economic inequality: “Kant’s a priori argument . . . leaves little conceptual space for the claim that states with such inequality are unjustifiable because of a merely probable dependence stemming from an unequal distribution of good.” McKean’s observation about Kant on inequality also applies to considerations of moral psychology. It does not matter from Kant’s perspective whether meritocracy tends to inflame pride or vanity, and he even suggests in his Universal History that this inflammation can produce beneficial effects. What matters is whether rewarding people for their talents and efforts is something they would choose in a social contract. And for him, the matter is clear: People want to be rewarded for their efforts.
But what if Mandeville is right that only a few people are truly “cunning” and “industrious”? What if most people are lazy and unintelligent? Would they necessarily choose the society that rewarded the people least like them? That seems improbable. Perhaps they would prefer a society that distributed rewards on other principles, more egalitarian in nature. Of course, this consideration is likely irrelevant to Kant because in choosing an egalitarian society, they would be choosing to surrender an inalienable right. As he explains in his Metaphysics of Morals, “Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity” (Kant [1797] 1996, 393). Presumably for Kant, redistributive systems run the danger of violating freedom in this way, by transferring the goods of one citizen to another. So, even if the majority of citizens preferred egalitarian redistributions of property according to some principle other than merit, they would be constrained from doing so by the principle of freedom.
Of course, Rousseau views things very differently. Instead of viewing redistributive measures promoting equality as a threat to liberty, he viewed them as a virtual necessity. Contrary to Kant, he understands equality as mutually supportive of liberty. For the Genevan, like Kant, “the end of every [just] system of legislation . . . comes down to two principal objects, freedom and equality” (Rousseau [1762] 2019, 80). But unlike the Königsbergian, Rousseau insists that liberty can only exist with material or economic equality “because freedom cannot subsist without it” (Rousseau [1762] 2019, 80). Drawing on an argument found in Plutarch’s account of Solon, Rousseau argues that civil liberty (or in Kant’s language “external” liberty) is meaningless where vast economic inequalities grant significantly more liberty to the rich and none at all to the poor (see Williams 2024b, 120, 125–126). 6 It is meaningless to speak of the poor’s “liberty” where the wealthy can leverage their fortunes to dominate them.
Because economic equality is essential to meaningful civil, or external, liberty, Rousseau places it among the highest of legislative priorities: What is most needful and perhaps most difficult in government is a strict integrity to render justice to all, and above all to protect the poor against the tyranny of the rich. The greatest evil has already been done when there are poor people to defend and rich people to restrain. . . . It is, therefore, one of the most important tasks of government to prevent extreme inequality of fortunes. (Rousseau [1756] 2019, 19)
That is, for Rousseau a commitment to liberty implies a necessary commitment to equality—and not just a formal or legal equality, as Kant proposes. Rousseau’s approach considers the empirical fact that in unequal societies the rich use their wealth to attack and deprive the liberties of the poor—and as such, it proscribes the vast inequalities that were becoming increasingly common in the eighteenth century. That this pattern cannot be demonstrated a priori but only from history (a posteriori, in Kantian terms) frees Kant to foreclose on such considerations in forming his theory of justice.
Meritocracy and Equality in the American Context
This eighteenth-century debate can inform our deliberations today. Are meritocracy and the inequality that follows from it to be assumed as inflexible founding social rules? Or should we regard them as principles subject to being outweighed by other considerations?
In pondering this, we might consider another eighteenth-century debate—one conducted in the United States. In his celebrated “Federalist No. 10,” James Madison addresses the problem of factions for republics. To understand them, he locates their source in inequality and meritocracy: “The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate . . . [is] an insuperable obstacle to the uniformity of interests” (Madison [1787] 2003, 41). Echoing Mandeville and Kant, Madison assumes that some are more intelligent and industrious than others and, further, that those talented few will end up with the lion’s share of property and wealth. This inequality born of meritocracy will result, he maintains, in distinct and destabilizing factions.
Madison, however, does not share Rousseau’s solution. Because, for him, liberty and meritocracy are nonnegotiable first principles, he accepts that factions as innevitable. His solution is not to equalize estates through redistributive policies but, rather, to pit the factions against one another through competing political institutions, especially the House and Senate. Those two legislative bodies will, he assumes, correspondingly represent the relatively poor and the rich and effectively cancel one another out.
Although Madison’s solution is certainly subject to criticism today, as inequality has enabled wealthy parties to seize control of both houses of Congress simultaneously, it would have been more reasonable in late eighteenth-century America. Back then, his generation was focused on permanently restricting the kind of inequality that also concerned Kant—namely, institutionalized aristocratic inequality grounded in mandatory primogeniture. Moreover, economic inequality at the time was not nearly as significant as it later became in American history, particularly in the Gilded Age and in the twenty-first century.
This being said, there were others among the framers who understood the problem very differently. One was the lawyer and New York delegate to the Continental Congress, Melancton Smith, who acknowledged a kind of “natural aristocracy” at the New York Constitutional ratification debate. For him, it was a truism that “every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others—birth, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and as of much influence as title, stars and garters” (Smith [1788] 1993, 760). This much Smith shared in common with Madison, Kant, and even Rousseau. But more like Rousseau, and less like Madison and Kant, Smith was particularly concerned about how those talents—and the advantages they conferred—interact with the social and economic world.
While most Americans were well attuned to the problems of an “artificial” aristocracy grounded in feudalism, Smith argues that the Constitution’s defenders were less aware of the problems of a “natural” aristocracy. And he insists that the problems the latter creates are evident for all to see in America already by 1788: “Common observation and experience prove the existence of such distinctions. Will anyone say, that there does not exist in this country the pride of . . . wealth, of talents; and that they do not command influence and respect among the common people?” (Smith [1788] 1993, 762). Meritocracy’s “winners” will eagerly use their wealth and status under the Constitution as proposed to dominate all the political offices—even those thought to be reserved for the middle and lower classes, such as members of the House of Representatives. And once these politicians are ensconced in office, Americans will learn the hard way that the rich and meritorious lack “sympathy with their constituents which is necessary to connect them closely to their interests” (762–763). In fact, according to Smith, “The great consider themselves above the common people – entitled to more respect – do not associate with them – they fancy themselves to have a right of pre-eminence in everything. In short, they possess the same feelings, and are under the influence of the same motives, as an hereditary nobility” (761). Only a more equal nation ruled by its middle class can be responsive to the people’s true interests and needs.
Smith’s Rousseauean retort to Madison is also a retort to Kant at precisely the same time that Kant himself was working on his defense of the meritocracy in East Prussia. Kant thought he was making an important distinction between an unjust hereditary aristocracy and an emerging, just class of intelligent and hardworking citizens. But if both Smith and Rousseau were right, the distinction on the origins of wealth had very little effect on wealth’s social effects. And if Rousseau was right, meritocracy could have only emboldened the aristocratic class.
Is Wealth the Measure of Merit?
Throughout this article, I have taken for granted a definition of meritocracy that presupposes material wealth to be the measure of merit—and applied that definition to my discussion of Mandeville, Rousseau, and Kant’s respective analyses. But as Amartya Sen (2000, 5) has argued, conceptions of merit vary according to what societies themselves value: “The concept of ‘merit’ is deeply contingent on our views of a good society.” For Plato and Aristotle, for example, what mattered most was virtue. So, insofar as the ancient thinkers could be concerned with merit, they sought to reward the virtuous (with public praise or political power). But as Europe transitioned to a market economy, wealth increasingly became the measure of merit. As Rousseau ([1751] 2018, 18), again, confirms in his First Discourse, “The ancient politicians forever spoke of morals and virtue; ours speak only of commerce and of money.”
Like Sen, Rousseau situated his analysis of merit in the values of the respective societies he discussed. But, at the same time, he sought to effect a change in the values of his own, money-oriented society. He understood that, in such a world, meritocracy would become debased and toxic, and he saw something more noble and desirable in a meritocracy based on the values of the ancient world. And, so, he urges Poland, for example, to abandon “material luxury” as a basis for a good society because it will inevitably foster “the two extremes of misery and opulence” (Rousseau [1762] 2019, 229). Obsession with money will inevitably produce a malevolent meritocracy that honors and rewards the “scheming, [the] intense, [the] greedy, [the] servile, and [the] knavish” (229). Citing the example of the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus, who changed his city’s currency from gold to iron, Rousseau urges Poland to remove the social value of money, insofar as possible. He imagined replacing a meritocracy of money with a meritocracy of civic virtue, where meaningful honors are accorded to citizens according to their dedication to Poland itself. The more they sacrifice on behalf of their republic, the greater public honors they should enjoy. “This treasury of honors is an inexhaustible resource for a people with a sense of honor. . . . Happy the nation that can find in its breast no further possible distinctions for virtue” (232). Such is the kind of merit Rousseau champions—and one that remains elusive some 250 years later.