Meritocracy in America, 1885–2007

Abstract

This dissertation is the first history of meritocracy in the United States. Despite its roots in the eighteenth century, and its growth in the nineteenth century, the family of discourses and practices that would become known as meritocracy remained limited in the United States into the 1930s. Between the 1940s and 1970s, as equal opportunity rose to dominance in US public ideology, 'meritocracy,' a term coined in 1958 to describe a society ruled by intelligence and knowledge, became imagined as both the operative principle in educational and bureaucratic selection and the banner under which the resulting hierarchy could be imbued with legitimacy. Nowhere was this clearer from the 1960s to the 1990s than in the self-declared headquarters of the new meritocracy, Silicon Valley. Based on work in the corporate records of Intel and Apple, as well as the Stanford University archives and the papers of intellectuals like David Riesman and Daniel Bell, this dissertation reveals how this radically inegalitarian worldview first took hold in Cold War universities and businesses, how social movements challenged the resulting regime, how liberal writers and officials responded by promoting a meritocracy based in charisma as much as standardized tests, and how this shift underwrote the rise of a new political economy and subjectivity centered around a form of entrepreneurialism ostensibly available to all that effectively worked to reinscribe whiteness and masculinity under the name of meritocracy.