The Rise of the Meritocracy is a book by British sociologist and politician Michael Dunlop Young which was first published in 1958.

[2] The narrative of the book ends in 2034 with a revolt against the meritocratic elite by the "Populists".

[3] The book was rejected by the Fabian Society and then by 11 publishers before being accepted by Thames and Hudson.

The word is formed by combining the Latin root "mereō" and Ancient Greek suffix "cracy".

[2] Michael Young is widely credited with coining the term "meritocracy" in the essay,[1] but it was first used (pejoratively) by sociologist Alan Fox in 1956.

[5] The word was adopted into the English language without the negative connotations that Young intended it to have and was embraced by supporters of the philosophy.

Young expressed his disappointment in the embrace of this word and philosophy by the Labour Party under Tony Blair in The Guardian in an article in 2001, where he states: It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit.

It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.

[2]Journalist and writer Paul Barker points out that "irony is a dangerous freight to carry" and suggests that in the 1960s and '70s it was read "as a simple attack on the rampant meritocrats", whereas he suggests it should be read "as sociological analysis in the form of satire".

Curiously, though, half a century later we have a Labour government declaring the promotion of meritocracy as one its primary objectives.

Coming after the rise of populists in 2016 such as Donald Trump in the USA and Nigel Farage in the UK some of the essays suggested that the dire predictions in the book were proving prescient, and earlier than predicted.

The latter "are tested again and again… If they have been labelled 'dunce' repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering reflection.

The narrator wants to explain the rise of the meritocracy in a socialist essay.

Zealots for progress successfully introduced another education system – one that was free and elitist.

When comprehensive schools appeared, a later development, parents were not keen to send their children there.

The problem is the following: if one starts to study too late in life it is too hard to acquire knowledge.

Having a person giving orders just because he is older is useless and so seniority ceased to be a distinguishing feature for those at the top of the social ladder.

Another solution was to make psychological treatment free to help people fulfil their own potential.

A latent crisis is growing and a revolution is coming; the people are rising up, but they are more against the conservatives than for the populists.