ABSTRACT
A meritocracy is a society in which all citizens enjoy equal opportunity, and social goods, like jobs and income, are distributed on the basis of merit. That gives citizens what they deserve, and so justice is done. This book’s primary purpose is to develop and defend that thesis. It also makes clear exactly what we mean by “meritocracy”, and explains how meritocracy can fix our broken, hyper-partisan politics. The United States is now contending with unprecedented inequalities in income and wealth, as well as the worst social mobility in the developed world. But what, if anything, is unjust about this? The egalitarian and libertarian theories which dominate the philosophical debate about justice fail to diagnose the true injustice: Many Americans today are not getting what they deserve. After summarizing the plan of the book, this chapter provides a brief history of meritocratic thought, including its origins in ancient Chinese philosophy and its Aristotelian development. It ends with a call for unity against forces on both the right and the left that threaten the methodological primacy of human reason.
