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Lecture Description:

Aristocracy and meritocracy are commonly considered opposed, even opposite, ideals. According to the common view, where aristocracy entrenches fixed accidents of birth, meritocracy promotes equality of opportunity. And where aristocracy allocates advantage according to morally arbitrary heredity, meritocracy allocates advantage to track morally meaningful contributions to the social product, or common good.

In fact, the meritocratic achievement that we celebrate today, no less than the aristocratic virtue acclaimed in the ancien régime, is again a sham. What is conventionally called merit is actually an ideological conceit, constructed to launder a fundamentally unjust allocation of advantage. Meritocracy is merely aristocracy renovated for a world in which the greatest source of prestige, wealth, and power is not land but skill – the human capital of free workers. 

Speaker Bio:

Daniel Markovits is Guido Calabresi Professor of Law and founding director of the Center for the Study of Private Law at Yale Law School. He works in the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral economics. He has written articles on contract, legal ethics, distributive justice, democratic theory, and other-regarding preferences.  Markovits concentrates, in each area, on the ways in which legal orderings engage the human instinct in favor of sociability to sustain cooperation even among persons who pursue conflicting interests and endorse competing moral ideals.

Markovits has published in a wide range of academic journals, including in the Yale Law Journal, the American Economic Review, and Science.  He is author of A Modern Legal Ethics:  Adversary Advocacy for a Democratic Age and, most recently, Contract Law and Legal Methods.  He is currently writing one book on the sociology of market relations, tentatively entitled Market Solidarity, and another on economic inequality, tentatively entitled Meritocracy and Its Discontents.

After earning a B.A. in Mathematics, summa cum laude from Yale University, Markovits received a British Marshall Scholarship to study in England, where he was awarded an M.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the L.S.E. and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. Markovits then returned to Yale to study law and, after clerking for the Honorable Guido Calabresi, joined the faculty at Yale.