Merit: The History of a Founding Ideal from the American Revolution to the Twenty-First Century by Joseph F. Kett (review)

Kett’s dense and detailed history argues that the ideal of merit was vital to the founding and development of the United States, Kett defines merit strictly as a “quality deserving reward.” Yet he well appreciates—and indeed his entire study is concerned to show—that the term is necessarily multivalent, shaped not only by the prevailing understanding of its principal elements and features in any given period but also by those practices deemed incompatible with it, such as advancement by bloodlines, quotas, nepotism, or political spoil. Following the fortunes and tensions of merit from the eighteenth century to the present day, Kett seeks to ascertain the main shifts in the usage and reception of the concept. At the same time, he grounds his cultural and intellectual history in a discussion of how merit has been treated in a number of key institutional settings—the military (where the “merit system” at West Point was born), government bureaucracies and the civil service, universities, and corporations. Thus, his study is at once a long-term conceptual history and an effort to track the social and political practices associated with it in a number of different domains.

Although the ideal of merit was integral to the origins of the United States, the founding fathers who helped to shepherd it into being also elicited a suspicion of it as potentially inimical to the republican notion of equal rights. Styling themselves (and widely hailed) as “men of merit,” the founders were confident in what Kett describes as their “essential merit,” which, like honor, was considered a personal quality worthy of public note. But they were also confident that American society—with its lack of a hereditary nobility and comparative social mobility—would continue to foster men of worth. Others disagreed, concerned that the revolutionary generation might exploit its position, leading to despotism, nepotism, or a new aristocracy (witness the furor over the Society of Cincinnati). Although few doubted that the revolutionary men of merit were deserving of public respect, they wondered how new men with the requisite qualities were to be discovered. This new difficulty of knowing and evaluating merit was further complicated by the paradox that in a society based on equal rights, claims to merit would be subject to suspicion and even skepticism.

Kett follows the rise of what he styles “institutional merit,” discovered and conferred by schools, corporations, armed forces, and the like, often via a battery of exams, as one means to resolve this central problem. But he also notes how the founding paradox re-emerges again and again in American history, most recently with the New Left and the vicissitudes of a relativistic and celebrity-driven culture.

Kett is at his best when comparing American practices with those of other societies—the competitiveness of British examination systems at Oxbridge, the prestige and professionalism of the Prussian civil service, or the “careers open to talents” initiated by Napoleon—which allows him to detect American peculiarities. Too often, however, readers must work to extricate larger themes, continuities, and departures from chapters steeped in copious detail. Nonetheless, merit must be acknowledged where merit is due. This ambitious and wide-ranging book is an apt complement to such indispensable studies of the subject as John Carson’s The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1840 (Princeton, 2006) and Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1996; orig. pub. 1981).