Reclaiming Freedom for the Left 3--Meritocracy and the Ideology of Freedom

The invocation of freedom remains routine in American politics. But how is freedom defined in contemporary politics, and who defines its meaning? This panel will focus on the ideology of meritocracy as the dominant conception of freedom in America today. The panel will discuss whether and how the ‘meritocratic’ ideology, and the emphasis on legal justice and access to higher education that it entails, has absorbed the energies of the left in a fundamentally anti-utopian project. In particular, it will show how a significant amount of left-wing energy has been absorbed into using courts to enforce meritocratic ‘equal opportunity’ and address the ways in which the ‘rights revolution’ has and has not expanded actual freedom for the majority of Americans. The panel will address the way the limits of the rights revolution is connected to the underlying inegalitarian vision of meritocratic freedom, which presupposes a competitive struggle among the majority to use their ‘equal opportunity’ to win access to deeply unequal positions of social and political power. Understanding the ideas and institutions of meritocracy, and its elite conception of freedom, can help us rethink the way we structure certain basic institutions like the law and public education.