Michael Sandel: 'The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit'
The
philosopher believes the liberal left’s pursuit of meritocracy has betrayed the
working classes. His new book The Tyranny of Merit argues for a politics centred on dignity... .In the closing section
of his book, Sandel recalls the story of Henry Aaron, the black
baseball player who grew up in the segregated south and broke Babe Ruth’s
record for career home runs in 1974. Aaron’s biographer wrote that hitting a
baseball “represented the first meritocracy in Henry’s life”. It’s the wrong
lesson to draw, says Sandel. “The moral of Henry Aaron’s story is not that we
should love meritocracy but that we should despise a system of racial injustice
that can only be escaped by hitting home runs.”
Fair competition does
not constitute a just vision of society. Even if Trump is defeated in November’s
presidential election, this is a truth, Sandel says, that Joe Biden, and his
counterparts in Europe, must take on board. For inspiration, he says, they
could do worse than turn to one of his intellectual heroes, the English
Christian socialist R.H. Tawney:
“Tawney argued that
equality of opportunity was at best a partial ideal. His alternative was not an
oppressive equality of results. It was a broad, democratic ‘equality of
condition’ that enables citizens of all walks of life to hold their heads up
high and to consider themselves participants in a common venture. My book comes
out of that tradition.”
