This chapter shows the essay’s troubled evolution as an academic genre in the nineteenth century, from the norms of classical rhetoric taught in English schools to the professionalising educational practices of Scottish universities and their American counterparts. Aimed to introduce meritocracy to Oxford and Cambridge’s class preferment system, the rise of essay-based public examinations in the 1850s reshaped the academic essay to sustain an informational mastery of the complexities of British imperial rule. Professors of English reacted to the new public-exam essay regime with one of two tactics. One was to strip the essay down to a managerial model that came to be known as the five-paragraph essay, shorn of classical figurality and stressing correct usage. Meanwhile, advocates of liberal education revived the teaching of the literary essay based on Victorian models, setting up a lengthy dispute in the twentieth century between literary and social-scientific protocols of essay writing.

Positive and negative aspects of meritocracy are evaluated, together with the difficulties of realizing it in practice. The notion and the theory of networks are recalled. White (fully legal, socially useful), gray (legal, but morally doubtful) and black (illegal) networks are distinguished. Various examples of networks are considered: the family, associations (cultural, religious, political, sports etc.), mason lodges (among the grey networks) including a deviant secret lodge as the P2 in Italy (the nature of which is illustrated), criminal clans and mafia-type associations (a synthetic history of the mafia is provided).

The chapter deals with three distinct yet interrelated public administration issues in the context of Bangladesh: patronage, civil service politicization, and the ordeals of politicization on individual civil servants. The patronage and politicization are deep-rooted in the governance and political trajectory of the country. Most key actors, politicians, bureaucracy, and business elites, are the beneficiaries of this politicized and patronage system. This chapter argues that the account of professional civil servants ordeal can contribute to the existing literature on public administration. The most perturbing issue is that the current governance trajectory in Bangladesh seeks to continually benefit from this politicized bureaucracy by establishing a monopoly over it. Therefore, it does not seem that the situation will change soon. However, as we know, nothing can stay static; thus, the silver line may emerge from the dialogues between stakeholders who want to see improved governance and professionalism in the bureaucracy. The author of this paper looks to the conscientious politicians, public opinion builders, and professional civil servants to break this vicious cycle.

Singapore’s civil service has been lauded as one of the successful case studies globally. The emphasis on meritocracy has been the hallmark of Singapore’s governance. This principle remains a guiding philosophy for the dominant People’s Action Party (PAP). Political analysts often attributed “the Singapore miracle” to its corruption-free, highly professional, technocratic government. Still, certain segments of Singapore’s civil service bear the institutional and cultural vestiges of politically motivated appointments. In this chapter, we first analyze the process of selecting top public service positions, showing how political considerations are factored into these appointments. Second, using the case of the People’s Association, we explore the “public service” face of para-political organizations and demonstrate how appointments and politics of urban governance are intertwined. The chapter offers us insights on how political interests and concerns persist despite the progress in public governance, and on the role of elite networks and political regime-making in shaping public sector opportunities.

Critics of Rawls’s principles of justice complain that they ignore considerations of merit or desert. As meritocracy is the chief justification for the extremely wide inequalities between workers at the top and bottom today, we need to examine this complaint. I argue that ideas of desert or merit are inherently unsuited to informing principles of justice for the basic structure of society. Moreover, attempts to raise the principle of desert to the systemic level have historically formed the ideological grounds for irresolvable class warfare. Rawls’s principles of justice supply a normative perspective that wisely aims to transcend class warfare. Rawls’s conception of property-owning democracy, culturally shaped by public affirmation of the difference principle, offers a plausible vision of how society may achieve such transcendence.

Rawls’s Original Position, the most influential thought experiment in modern political philosophy, cannot be the justification of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness. The Original Position cannot satisfy Rawls’s own publicity condition, which requires justifications that are accessible to all citizens. I hypothesize that over time Rawls weakened his publicity condition because he saw this tension, but that he could not resolve it. However, Rawls’s work contains a justification for justice as fairness that is publicly accessible: that in a well-ordered society, all citizens can have self-respect. I set up this discussion with Rawls’s critique of meritocracy, which, Rawls fears, sets citizens against each other in a zero-sum competition for self-respect. In a meritocracy, elites display their power and wealth, while the less fortunate may fall into resentment, rancor, and possibly a destructive racial nationalism. A Rawlsian society of self-respect offers a more just and stable model of social unity.

Chapter 1 examines three main historical processes that have framed and provoked my interest in questions of competition. First, the classic problem that has come to be known as ‘the rise of the West’. What caused the rise to global power of Western Europe and its settler societies in the last few centuries? I suggest the domestication of competition must be part of the answer. Second, the domestication of competition is associated with the rise of a particular kind of nation state, the currently dominant model of capitalist liberal democracy. Why is this? And third, does what has come to be known as ‘neoliberalism’ have a special role to play in explaining the current state of competition? One often encounters this idea in critical discussions of neoliberalism, but my argument suggests that the pervasive role of competition in modern society has historically deeper roots, whatever its current transformations.

To what extent are employees in the Mexican judiciary – both judges and lower level officials – connected by family ties? Are these family connections used inappropriately to hire or to favor relatives in ways that would not have been possible absent the family connection? This chapter takes advantage of a unique dataset to answer these questions. It documents a departure from the promise made in the judicial reform of 1994, that by removing the administration of the judiciary from the Supreme Court and transferring it to a judicial council, a professional and meritocratic judicial career would be established for all federal judges, making merit and not connections the main determinants of becoming a judge. The sheer magnitude and pervasiveness of family relationships within the Mexican federal judiciary conspicuously show the limitationsof this reform and highlight the challenges Mexico faces to consolidate judicial careers.

This chapter explore some implications of the book for scholarship on Chinese law and politics. Many legal scholars speculate about whether China might adopt “rule by law” without embracing “rule of law.” This stylized discourse, however, assumes that the Chinese government is willing and able to implement “rule by law.” However, because coercive substitutes for the law are often available and preferred, even “rule by law” is optional, and discussions of rule of law norms are on even shakier grounds than legal scholars realize. I suggest that the economic and ideological contests between China and Western countries will increasingly depend not on who better represents the rule of law, but on who has more inclusive institutions. Should the Chinese government maintain its tax capacity and be willing to engage in redistributive social spending on the poor, its domestic legitimacy will strengthen. The book thus suggests that both policy makers and social scientists should pivot away from studying the Chinese state’s predilections for the rule of law and toward its capacity and willingness for inclusivity and redistribution.

In the history of philosophy, two lines can be distinguished, one represented by Plato, Augustine, and Descartes, emphasizing the centralizing movements in the self, another one embodied by Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Freud, proposing decentralizing movements in the self. As an example of present-day centralizing tendencies, the rise of meritocracy is discussed. An example of a contemporary decentralizing trend is the global–local nexus that implies a decentralizing multiplicity of self and identity. Whereas the centralizing movement in the self is focused on the realization of just one main form of positioning (personal excellence or superiority), the decentralizing movement results in the development of a wide variety of positions (full self-expression). Given this bidirectionality, the self is located in a field of tension resulting in an experience of uncertainty, or even stress, which challenges the dialogical self to liberate itself from imprisonment by alternating between centralization and decentralization.

Chapter 4 situates changing immigration and citizenship policies within a larger crisis of liberalism. I defend Francis Fukuyama`s (1989) much-ridiculed claim that the “liberal idea” (yet not practice) is without competitor today. However, internal deficiencies of “liberal meritocratic capitalism” (Milanovic 2019), most importantly the elite-generating and -insulating principle of meritocracy itself, will continue to feed a populist challenge. This challenge, paradoxically, is fought more on the cultural than the economic terrain, and liberals are well-advised not to follow the populists into it too quickly. I close with the question what a “liberal” immigration and citizenship policy, unimpeded by the “nexus”, might look like, and the answer is: not much different from the policies that are in place today.

The chapter draws on The Lion and the Unicorn to argue that Nineteen Eighty-Four, like ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, represents a shift in Orwell’s thought as he critiques a meritocratic social order in a depiction of a dystopian society ordered around intellectual ability. The chapter examines intellectual control in Oceania through two processes: firstly, ‘doublethink’, a process through which the most intelligent members of society must submit themselves more completely to an act of self-hypnosis and secondly, the chapter contextualizes Ingsoc’s slogans against Animal Farm to argue that Orwell identifies political slogans with mind control. The chapter argues that the novel is Winston Smith’s thwarted bildungsroman, analysing how its form is designed to interrogate Ingsoc’s slogans. It examines the scenes of Winston’s self-education as he reads Goldstein’s Book and the children’s history textbook and suggests how the novel’s torture scene is aligned with the pedagogic, as the pupil/teacher relationship is redefined by Orwell as a relationship based upon intellectual manipulation. The tension between the pedagogic form of the novel, which explores political slogans and creates curiosity in the reader, and its criticism of the catechistic model of teaching, renders the novel paradoxically an anti-pedagogic pedagogic text.

Joseph Chan and Franz Mang deploy analytic methods to elucidate Confucian political philosophy and ethics for the twenty-first century, arguing that Confucian ideals offer a pathway toward overcoming modern thought’s neglect of the cultivation of ethical character as constitutive of the life well lived – an idea common to ancient thought in both Western and East Asian contexts. In this chapter, they accept a key challenge of deparochializing political theory: that it forces us out of our intellectual comfort zones to engage with traditions that are new to us. In this spirit, they construct a conversation between Western political thought, Confucianism, and Islam on the idea of popular sovereignty. They develop reconstructive-analytic accounts of mainstream Confucian and Islamic political thought and argue that neither tradition can be reconciled at a philosophical level with the idea of the people as the ultimate source of legitimate political authority. Even though strands of both Confucianism and Islam are compatible with democracy, popular sovereignty cannot serve as a “useful myth” in Confucian- or Islamic-heritage societies, for different reasons. These societies can benefit from projects of democratization and civil liberties but can dispense with the doctrine of popular sovereignty as the foundation for such projects.