Michael Young and the perils of meritocracy

While Kwame Anthony Appiah’s celebration of Michael Young’s life (The myth of meritocracy, The long read, 19 October) is long overdue, it fails to place the idea of meritocracy in the contexts either of neoliberalism or of recent British history.Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy was a warning against a system of political rule, not a plea for opportunities for all.Appiah also ignores the complexity of Young’s political and sociological interactions in the 1950s