All Men Are Equal, but Some
Wrong, Dennis H.
Neither socialists nor sociologists have done full justice to the ambiguities of the idea of human equality. "Socialists," writes Michael Young, "did not see that, as it was applied in...
...c) it makes a contribution toward our understanding of one of the most difficult of all world problems...
...He foresees increased sympathy between classes and greater ease in personal relations within classes...
...The value of this brochure is that: (a) it presents the viewpoint of the nationalist group which has been most neglected and ignored in the world press, that is, Messali Hadj and his MNA...
...Unfortunately, an editorial note informs us that he has been killed in the Peterloo Massacres of the twen ty-first century before he was able to correct the galley proofs of his book...
...This collection of articles is taken from a conference held in May 1958 under the auspices of the Fund for the Republic...
...American intellectuals, whether of the Left or the Right, have tended to resist this debasement in the name of meritocracy...
...The struggle in Algeria has frequently bordered on the edge of civil war, with Frenchmen of Algeria pitted against those of metropolitan France...
...Bullitt is as concerned as the next man over the evils of industrial mass society, but his picture of the coming American meritocracy is far blander than Young's model...
...The sentimental egalitarianism which has been flayed by tough-minded socialists like G. L. Arnold hardly provides the answer...
...The earlier work by Dallin and Nicolaevsky (Forced Labor in Soviet Russia) carried the dismal story of the camps to the midforties, but now Paul Barton docu ments the changes in the camp system, the revolts and strikes which led to a number of ameliorations, the more lenient treatment of the prisoners, and then the gradual dissolution of the concentrationary system in the last few years...
...This book should be translated soon...
...their organizations, the trade unions and the Labor Party, have become hollow shells utterly unable to bargain or compete effectively with their brilliantly directed opposite numbers...
...The editors write: "There is no formal continuity in this volume, no single narrative theme which links all of the papers together...
...By solidly rooting the Meritocracy in English history, Young is guilty of a certain insularity, an insularity that has characterized much of the best work coming from England in recent years—I am thinking particularly of the novels and dramas of Amis, Osborne, and Company and the cultural criticism of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams...
...FRANx MARQUART Not to Be Forgotten L'INSTITUTION CONCENTRATIONNAIRE EN RussIE 1930-1957, by Paul Barton...
...Far removed from the middle brow pot boilers of Howard Fast and John Gates, this book is seriously and passionately concerned with the adventure of ideas of the radical intellectual...
...Morin's impassioned account of the emotions which first drew him to Communism and that repelled him is a splendid achievement...
...And how are industrial societies with growing populations—or how is Britain in particular—to moderate the undeniable pressure toward economic efficiency and a tight technicalbureaucratic hierarchy...
...3...
...It generates its own conflicts and discontents which accumulate to endanger its survival...
...S. P. Position of Labor LABOR IN A FREE SOCIETY, edited by Michael Harrington and Paul Jacobs...
...Parents become attached to their offspring and when, owing to genetic accident, the child of meritocratic parents is consigned to a lower place in the social system, painful emotions inevitably result...
...The imaginary author of the book is a "reasonable" supporter of the regime, anxious to justify it against its new "Populist" critics and to minimize the extent of mass discontent...
...If open civil war between the French has thus far narrowly been avoided, the same can hardly be said for the Algerian nationalists...
...The Rise of the Meritocracy is a brilliant book...
...It makes us aware of that foundation of human misery, waste and exploitation on which so much of the Russian powerhouse has been erected...
...Copies may be had by writing to the Socialist Party of Chicago at the above address...
...But the Meritocracy is not a true Utopia—that is, a society where "people want to do what they have to do...
...I know of no better pages on the attraction and fascination of Stalinist Marxism than can be found in this book...
...it deserves to stand on our bookshelves next to Silone, Koestler and The God That Failed...
...Thus "a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift" to provide the masses with potential revolutionary leadership...
...DENNIs H. WRONG Political Journey AUTOCRITIQUE, by Edgar Morin, Paris, Rene Julliard, 1959...
...But the book as a whole serves mainly to illustrate the weaknesses inherent in the kind of conference—so fashionable in recent years—which tries over a weekend to discuss just about everything...
...The form Young has chosen has advantages over the novel in enabling him to trace through the consequences of a single policy or institution at a time and to show just how the historical transformation leading to the new order has taken place...
...186 pp...
...24 pages, 35c...
...This lucid and transparently honest intellectual autobiography in which the author, now the editor of the French socialist journal Arguments, describes his political itinerary from the late thirties to the present, from his infatuation with the Communist Party and his affair with History and the Hegelian logos to an open, nonmessianic, tentative socialism, ranks with the very best accounts of the radical politics of our times...
...Introduction by David Rousset...
...film, "Man on the Assembly Line," put out by the National Film Board of Canada...
...The former, it has been supposed, eliminates both the smoldering sense of injustice aroused by unearned privileges and the gulf between top and bottom levels existing in hereditary class societies...
...In America equality of opportunity has been a deeply-rooted article of faith, and it has usually been recognized that it implies the existence of an unequal order in which effort and ability find their approriate level...
...Gene Debs' "I want to rise with the ranks, not from the ranks" differentiates the socialist conception of collective equality from the individual ambition to rise in the world and also, by implication, from the goal of creating an open society permitting maximum "circulation of the elites...
...Actually, however, the trade union phase of the civil war—which by itself has al ready cost the lives of hundreds through assassination and counter-assassination —cloaks the ctill more bitter dash over political tactics and strategy...
...I found extremely interesting Erich Fromm's paper on "Freedom in the Work Situation" (which, incidentally, should be considered together with a remarkable 16 mm...
...The relentless elevation of all able persons into the Meritocracy has, it is true, deprived the lower classes of leadership...
...High life-expectancy has increased the numbers of the aged, some of whom wistfully recall the old order, while others resent occupational downgrading when their abilities diminish with age (merit has universally replaced seniority and fixed tenure in all occupations...
...The technocratic strain in socialism, converging with capitalist worship of productivity, has triumphed and the Webbs, Shaw, and Stalin's successors in the Soviet Union are hailed as the prophets of the new regime...
...285 pp...
...The book itself, like a good many of its component essays, is much too discursive, given up to the kind of generalities that flourish at this kind of conference...
...This pamphlet tells of one aspect of this civil war within the ranks of the Algerian nationalists, that between the predominant National Liberation Front (FLN) and its rival, the Algerian National Movement (MNA) of Messali Hadj...
...All this would necessarily lead, after a while, to the credo quia absurdum: one is right to be wrong with the Party, one is wrong to be right without the party"—one feels that he has understood the secret springs of motivation on which the Communist party rests...
...He lists footnotes referring to pompously titled sociological articles written by himself in the late 1960's and even tells us what the favorite themes of popular romantic fiction will be after the triumph of the Meritocracy...
...b) it hints at the complexities and difficulties of the Algerian question itself...
...Also, "intelligenic" marriages have taken the romance out of sex and devaluated physical beauty, but women, inexplicably, have remained incurably romantic...
...But enough is enough for one book...
...When he writes, "We believed that we adjusted ourselves to reality when we were subject to the fascination of power," or "Evil was projected upon the outside (of the party), good was projected upon the future" or "This was an ultra-materialism open to the infinite possibilities of the future, but closed to the possibilities of the present"—then we see that Morin has brought back a rich harvest from his "fantastic adventure...
...Parliament, still recruited by popular election, has become a ceremonial institution resembling the Monarchy in today's Britain, while real power resides with the upper ranks of the Civil Service, the heads of industry, and the top educational and research administrators...
...When Morin writes, "The dialectic of the cunning of Reason combined with the reification of the Party, mixed inextricably idealism, religiosity and dialectical intemperance...
...These are the focal questions in the internal civil war which proceeds alongside the national liberation war...
...I have scarcely done justice to the fertility of Young's wit and inventiveness, to say nothing of his dazzling perceptions...
...How shall Algeria win its freedom...
...I HAVE EMPHASIZED the strains and tensions to which the Meritocracy is subject in order to highlight the differences between Young's version of a possible future and the anti-Utopias of Huxley and Orwell with which reviewers have inevitably compared it...
...Their commitment to a narrow and formal notion of scientific objectivity has led them to stress the gains in "efficiency" and "productivity" to be expected from greater mobility, thus giving priority to the very values by which Young's imaginary regime justifies itself...
...At a time when some intellectuals are again succumbing to an ignoble fascination with the power of the Soviet Union, a book of this sort is most welcome...
...L. C. Algeria's Hidden Civil War TRADE UNIONISM IN ALGERIA, A Let ter to the Free Unions issued by the Union des Syndicats des Travailleurs Algeriens, SP-SDF, 400 South State Street, Chicago, Illinois...
...THE MERITOCRACY is the result of three historical forces: the revolt against hereditary privileges led by the socialists, the pressure of international economic competition demanding an economy that maximizes efficiency and technical progress, and the transformation of formal education by improved mental testing into a school system which segregates the intelligent from the dull at progressively earlier ages and irrevocably guides individuals towards their eventual positions in the social order...
...It furnishes a record that the worshippers of the bitchgoddess History will find hard to erase...
...But Young's imaginary monograph has disadvantages as well...
...He offers detailed descriptions of administrative structure, and of changes in that structure, of working conditions and the economic and social functions of forced labor in Soviet society...
...But Young's intent is of course fundamentally the same as that of ,he novelists: to describe a possible, though not necessarily probable, new order representing the ruthlessly logical fulfillment of present tendencies and values...
...Applied to America this view has a certain plausibility, but the examples of the Catholic Church and professional armies, not to speak of contemporary Communist parties and regimes, cast doubt on its general validity...
...The documentation is ample for the author makes full use of the numerous eyewitness accounts which the International Commission Against the Concentration Camp Regime has gathered over the years and also uses with great skill other published documents and accounts of former inmates...
...To what degree are these the result of British "inevitability of gradualness," of the slowness of the transition from feudal aristocracy to industrial society and the continuing steepness of a status hierarchy which even today makes it possible for the notion of an "Establishment" recruited partly by merit to be used as a virtual synonym for ruling class and for "scholarship boys" from workingclass homes to feel utterly cut off from their origins...
...A not-too-bright reader might take the book to be a brief for the at least partial retention of hereditary classes...
...L. C...
...Does the difference reflect differences in national traditions...
...University of California Press...
...But if the masses have thus been politically castrated, the Meritocracy itself throws off a certain number of malcontents...
...Paris, Librairie Plon, 1959, 519 pp...
...Young is, after all, a sociologist, though an uncommonly imaginative one, and he declines to resort to Huxleyan science fiction devices or Orwellian nightmares to eliminate the possibility of reform and rebellion...
...And that is exactly the trouble...
...a few Tory intellectuals in England have indeed made just such ideological use of the specter of meritocracy (see Peregrine Worsthorne's suggestive article, "The New Inequality," Encounter, November, 1956...
...This struggle takes place mainly within the framework of the Algerian trade union movement, in which two rival organizations battle for influence over the numerous if largely unskilled Algerian working class (particularly that section of it living in France...
...This book presents the most thoroughly documented account of Russian concentration camps available in any language...
...And American sociologists, good liberals anxious that their society live up to its professed ideals, have been preoccupied with the rate of mobility and with exposing the barriers to opportunity...
...And Archibald Cox's "The Role of Law in Preserving Union Democracy" is useful in regard to the Landrum-Griffin Management-Labor Act...
...The late Sumner Slichter's article on "The Position of Trade Unions in the American Economy" provides a helpfuI introduction for discussing the decline in the public position of unions in the recent period...
...William Morris, Tawney, G. D. H. Cole, and Orwell are remembered as quaint sentimentalists who were willing to sacrifice equality of opportunity and efficiency to full-fledged equality...
...Neither socialists nor sociologists have done full justice to the ambiguities of the idea of human equality...
...We are compelled to ask whether any meritocracy would necessarily have the effects Young imagines...
...Equality of opportunity has been extended to the sexes also, but women find that their skills rust during periods of retirement from work for childbearing, thus confronting them with an unpleasant dilemma...
...Socialists," writes Michael Young, "did not see that, as it was applied in practice, equality of opportunity means equality of opportunity to be unequal...
...The only detailed account of a possible American meritocracy I have seen comes, not from the pen of a sociologist, but from a young West Coast lawyer and Sunday school teach...
...Still, a few of the papers have value...
...er, twice an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress, named Stimson Bullitt, who last year published a penetrating little book on American politics called To Be a Politician...
...And now Michael Young, a British sociologist and 'former Labor Party research director, has written a book to demonstrate that the full realization of equality of opportunity in an industrial society would subvert not merely liberty, as has often been claimed before, but also fraternity, perhaps the most cherished and distinctive ideal of classical socialism...
...What shall the new Algeria be like...
...The Rise of the Meritocracy be longs to the genre of negative Utopian literature...
...But unlike Brave New World or 1984 it is cast in the form of an historical interpretation written in the year 2033 'for the purpose of illuminating the causes of recent uprisings and demonstrations against the Meritocracy, the relatively benevolent despotism which has gradually evolved in Britain since the closing decades of the nineteenth century...
...Among them a bitter, largely unknown and silent struggle has raged since the opening days of what now promises to be the most tragic, drawn-out and disastrous nationalist struggle of our time...
...Both European socialist and American sociologists have usually assumed that a hierarchy based on differences in ability is more humanly tolerable than one based on birth...
...YouNG's cxoicx of Utopian satire as a form permits him to avoid answering some of the questions he provokes...
...1650 Francs...
...But American sociologists, reflecting the credo of their society, have devoted far more time and attention to social mobility than to the different kinds of hierarchy within which mobility may occur...
...Would a meritocracy look the same in America where populism rather than working-class socialism has been the chief source of egalitarian ideals and where, debased by commercial and political flattery of the "common man," it has encouraged cultural and intellectual mediocracy...
Vol. 7 • April 1960 • No. 2
