‘He could neither read, write, nor speak, and he did all three triumphantly’, a Foreign Office mandarin quipped. As Bevin’s biographer, I can report that he was one of the most capable and brilliant men ever to have held office in the British state and was recognised as such by no less than the stratospherically credentialled John Maynard Keynes. These and other working-class and non-graduate appointees are contrasted favourably with those appointed to positions of power by Barack Obama in his first year as president, a quarter of whom were either Harvard graduates or professors. Hopkins, who became Roosevelt’s closest confidant, had been a social worker in Iowa. Bevin left school at eleven and rose through the ranks as a union leader to become foreign secretary. ![]() He argues that the ‘tyranny of merit’ is demonstrated by the prevalence of Oxbridge and Ivy League graduates in recent Labour and Democratic governments in Britain and the United States, in stark contrast to the 1930s and 1940s, when the ‘uncredentialed’ likes of Harry Hopkins and Ernie Bevin ruled the roost. Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland is easier to navigate than Sandel’s discussion of meritocracy and Western democracy. But the dictionary tells us that a meritocracy is ‘a society governed by people selected according to merit’, not one run by those with degrees, whether they come from the universities of Oxford and Harvard or Wolverhampton and Idaho. Dwelling at length on the ever more intense competition for places at Ivy League universities like his own, which leads the rich and brazen to exaggerate or invent exam grades for their offspring and engage in all kinds of other nefarious practices, he aligns merit with the securing of qualifications and top university degrees – which he calls ‘credentialism’. The problems start with Sandel’s definition of ‘meritocracy’. ![]() Presumably his maxim for these revivalist rallies was: ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ ![]() ‘His lecture tours have taken him across five continents and packed such venues as St Paul’s Cathedral (London), the Sydney Opera House (Australia), and an outdoor stadium in Seoul (S Korea), where 14,000 people came to hear him speak,’ boasts the publisher’s blurb. Yet Michael Sandel apparently revels in his trahison des clercs. There is something inherently ridiculous about a Harvard professor writing a book on the ‘tyranny of merit’.
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