Abstract

At present, the critical views of meritocracy have spread to the point that it has come to identify itself both in the academic sphere and in the media with the expression of a kind of unsupportive rhetoric on the part of those privileged people who carry it out the idea of individual merit to avoid moral and legal obligations related to equality. Two examples of this trend are The Tyranny of Merit according to Michael Sandel, and in Spain, the recent essay by César Rendueles Against Equal Opportunities. This article tries to place such criticisms in the narrow field of the meritocracy’s perceptions regarding a certain “arrogance” as a matter of “style”, refuting the substance of these critical views of merit. At the same time, some measures are pointed out to resolve the tension between the principles of merit and equality.