Merit to the test of comparatism

The abundance of tests that the notions of merit and meritocracy arouse is characterized by a double bias: the predominance of studies on the Western world and the importance given to the United States, even if the French case, quite different from the latter, is not neglected. Also, we must be delighted with the publication of the work published by Tarun Khanna, professor of economics and management at the Harvard Business School (United States) and Michael Szonyi, professor of history of China at the University of Harvard, who offer us a decentering of the question of merit by addressing it to Chinese and Indian societies, and that in the very long time.

The book brings together 13 articles written by 22 authors of social sciences (historians, anthropologists, economists, political scientists) supervised by an introduction and a afterword that complete a bibliography and an index. The book is organized in 4 parts, respectively: political philosophy, history, present, future. Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi note in the introduction that their interest in the questions of merit in China and India has been aroused by the debates that this notion raises in the United States. Recognizing that the measure of merit is not universal, they refer to the dystopia of Michael Young, The Rise of the Merritocracyand adopt as a working environment, highlighted by the book, the opposition made by the latter between family and merit. They then support that “ In most societies, merit is considered to be a function of capacities and efforts (P. 3). I will first summarize the arguments of the different authors and then I will wonder about the limits of this comparative work.

Chinese meritocratic bureaucracy

In an inaugural article ambitious by the extent of the subject, Michael Puett presents a socio-historical model which wants to account for two trajectories of the concepts of justice and merit in China and in the West (“ Political Theologies of Justice: Meritocratic Values ​​from A Global Perspective »). On the one hand, he opposes China whose debates on the merit and values ​​of the literate official, inherited from Confucius, informs the establishment of an anonymous anonymous bureaucracy ; on the other, the West whose establishment of the free market in the classical age would be underpinned by a Pelagist Christian vision, named after the Pelage monk (Iv^e-V^e century) for whom man owes his salvation only to his action in the world without the help of the grace of God.

All the authors dealing with China at the various moments of its history agree on the permanence of a model of state bureaucracy whose recruitment principle is based on “ The idea that the political system must aim to select and promote civil servants with higher capacities and virtues “, As Daniel Bell maintains, even if it is a question of comparing the ideal of the model referred to in its practice (“ Political Meritocracy in China: The Ideal vs. The reality », In particular p. 65).

Imperial bureaucracy, XIV^e–XX^e century, has indeed the recruitment of its officials by means of an anonymous examination (keju) which makes it possible to obtain, at the national level, the highest grade (jinshi) Among the scholars. As part of classical China and Moghole India, gathered in the same article, Sudev Sheth and Lawrence Lc Zhang (“ Locating Meritocracy in Early Modern Asia: Qing China and Mughal India ) Show that the modes of selection and social success are not ordered by the elementary opposition between family heritage and skills acquired by people. Besides that these two principles complement each other, other factors intervene, for example, the bonds forged in military sociability.

If the model of the meritocratic bureaucracy is maintained in the long term, the bases of its social recruitment were upset under the Republic of China from 1912, according to the article by James Z. Lee, Bamboo Yunzhu Ren, and Chen Liang (“ Meritocracy and the Making of the Chinese Academe Redux, 1912-1952 »). Firmly established by a quantitative study relating to nearly 200,000 students, this work attests that at the imperial era the elites were the sons and grandsons of civil officers from the rural gender. But under the Republic of China, the sons and daughters emerge from the shopping and professional fractions of major cities and the richest regions in the south-east of the country. Women, excluded from the imperial bureaucracy, enter all disciplines, humanities and sciences, with the exception of engineering studies. This democratization of higher education has further accentuated in communist China, a subject of which Zachary Mr. Howlett deals with (“ The National College Entnence Examination and the Myth of Meritocracy in Post-Mao China »). At the start of XXI^e century, around 80% of an age class succeeds in the entrance exam to higher education, the gaokao. This development has led to the diversification of the university system which has become very segmented and hierarchical. Spatial and social inequalities for the benefit of the cities of the rich regions inherited from the republican period, underlines William C. Kirby, are maintained in contemporary times (“ The Merits and Limits of China’s Modern Universities »). To remedy these inequalities, the communist power has established regional and social quotas that some compare to the quotas of caste in India.

Merit and democracy: the Indian case

Sumit Guha extends the Mughal case presented previously by the study of the British colonial bureaucracy in India (“ Meritocratic Empires ? South Asia CA. 1600-1947 »). In independent India, according to Ashutosh Varshney, the debate would be structured around the binary opposition between meritocracy and democracy (“ Merit in the Mirror of Democracy: Caste and Affirmative Action in India ), A polarity which is also questioned about Communist China. By its constitution, India has a political regime of the democratic type based on individual franchise, while all discrimination based on the caste were abolished. However, when people enter the education system and the job market, they are assigned, in fact, to a collective social identity of caste before being recognized for what they are individually. Indeed, to remedy ancient structural inequalities, India has implemented in the public sector a reservation policy based on quotas granted to caste blocks defined by the State, which Anshwini Deshpande Analysis (“ The Origins and Effects of Affirmative Action Policies in India »). This policy has enabled the emergence of an elite within the low castes, dalits and others. But Ajantha Subramanian shows that the high castes which are almost excluded from reservations, have appropriated a unilateral definition of individual merit by returning the bass caste to an undeserved success because dependent on the policy of quotas (“ Merit and Caste at Elite Institutions. The case of the Iit »).

For their part, D. Shyam Babu, Chandra Bhan Prasad and Deveveh Kapur underline cognitive biases which hinder the social success of people from castes, and they call for a more contextual redefinition of merit (“ Reimagining Merit in India: Cognition and Affirmative Action »). Varun Aggarwal, for his part, defends the idea that meritocratic policies can use modern technological tools, in the education system as in the world of work (“ Meritocracy Enabled by Technology, Granded in Science »).

Between China and India, Singapore offers a unique case presented by Vincent Chua, Randall Morck and Bernard Yeung (“ The Singaporean Meritocracy: Theory, Practice, and Policy Implications »). Despite the implementation of a strict egalitarian policy for the independence of this city state, 50 years later, the meritocratic elites resulting from this policy tend to reproduce their privileged position.

Merit, a notion without anthropological anchoring ?

The informative wealth of studies gathered in this book on China and India is to be emphasized. But the frequent comparative reference made in the United States, without the place of this third party being objectified, raises an interrogation which is as a dead angle of this work: the notion of merit is without anthropological anchoring ? To illustrate this question, I will take two examples.

First, in what language does it mean to be said ? What are the actors about merit when they are expressed in Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Udu, so many languages ​​to which we can relate to studies combined in this volume ? Philological light would have been welcome to understand how merit says in these languages ​​and to question the categories of thought that actors mobilize in the past and in our present. Are we certain to universally share the same ideas on merit on the pretext that English has become an utility idiom worth in a space of teaching and international research to which China and India, which welcome Western universities, are integrated ?

Then, the theological-political questioning initiated by Michael Puech, who leaves aside the Indian case, this perhaps not entering his model, is hardly followed by the other authors. The religious dimension outcrops certainly in some contributions on China which teach us for example that students preparing the gaokao can make rituals in the temples, accompanied by their teachers. But we would have liked to know more about these practices, in particular with regard to Buddhism and Taoism whose ways of salvation are associated with the accumulation of individual merit. The authors could have been inspired, for example, of the research of the American historian Cynthia J. Brokaw relating to the “ Meritis and Demerites registers »Surprised in Imperial China at XVII^e century. Indeed, it shows that people of all social and religious conditions write these registers with a view to supporting their status acquired in a economic and social upheaval conjuncture.

Merit, seen from the Universalist Christian West, is a notion that speaks to us, to us Westerners, and that we seem satisfied to find all over the world, especially in Asia. However, reintroducing the cultural and religious anthropological dimensions of merit in the case of China and India would be a means of protecting itself against a weak understanding of this notion.