In The Aristocracy of Talent, Adrian Wooldridge cites the Chinese civil service exams as a forerunner of the modern world. Early European visitors observed the examination halls scattered across China, with throngs of men young and old cramming as each three-year cycle of exams approached, the glittering careers in government awaiting the lucky few, the consolation prizes as a local scribe or teacher awaiting the many who failed. Children would start studying at the age of six for the chance to pass a local exam and go to the provincial centre for the national papers. Estimates suggest that two and a half million Chinese men sat each round of exams, in carefully invigilated centres across the empire. For the successful, further exams determined promotion through the ranks to the very highest offices.

The Chinese imperial exam system was abolished in 1905, shortly before the collapse of the Qing dynasty. There are modern echoes, though, in the gaokao, the extraordinarily competitive exams held in June each year for entry to China’s most prestigious universities.

The traditional Chinese system combined an aristocratic élite – the emperor and family – with government by mandarins, the scholars who administered the largest political entity on earth.

Eventually, a similar mix emerged in the West, as the kingdoms of Europe sought technical skills and more effective administration. Prussia adopted merit-based selection into government office after its defeat by Napoleon in 1806. The French in turn have competitive national exams for high school students dating from the ancien régime, notably the concours généraux. These continue: in 1994 Emmanuel Macron topped the nation in French.

In Britain, concern about corruption and incompetence in government ranks saw the Northcote–Trevelyan report of 1854 recommend that the nation adopt the Chinese system of exams to control entry to the civil service. Reform of the army followed disastrous British leadership during the Crimean war. ‘Someone had blundered’ when ordering the charge of the Light Brigade, as Tennyson pointed out. The practice of buying commissions was ended; henceforth exams and training would govern entry and promotion in the military.

Merit was closely linked to the rise of democracy, a moral claim that the community must find and use the best of its talents, regardless of social standing. Praising hard work, ambition, and education became the platform of liberals in the nineteenth century, then the core value of British socialists throughout much of the twentieth. The Fabians argued that identifying, training, and advancing talent was the single most important role for government. Only in the 1980s, argues Wooldridge, did Margaret Thatcher ‘seize the mantle of merit from the left and attach it to the market rather than the state’. As a universal goal, merit requires selection on the basis of talent, equality of opportunity, an end to discrimination, and open competition. It can be revolutionary, undermining traditional power structures, reshaping society from bottom to top as merit challenges class, gender, and ethnicity as barriers to participation.

The rise of the merit principle encouraged government to invest in education. The stress on talent was accelerated by the invention of IQ tests during World War I. Soon intelligence tests were used to stream children within schools and employed by universities such as Stanford to identify outstanding ability. Students in Singapore, reports Wooldridge, erect faux shrines to the ‘bell curve god’, the distribution of human ability that rules all our lives.

The Aristocracy of Talent includes a critical account of the rise of intelligence measurement – and the dilemma it raised. For if intelligence is distributed widely, then much talent is hidden by poor schooling and economic disadvantage. W.E.B. Du Bois spoke of the ‘talented tenth’ – the African American community excluded from the institutions which mattered in America.

With demands for positive discrimination, the sharp edge of merit became clear. In a famous commencement speech in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson spoke at the historically black Howard University. ‘Freedom is not enough,’ he told the students. ‘You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line and then say “you are free to compete with all the others” and still believe that you have been completely fair.’

The ‘him’ from Johnson is telling – university graduates then were overwhelmingly male. It would be another generation before women competed in equal numbers for a place on campus. The unease about positive discrimination and quotas which followed Johnson’s speech still troubles some.

The final section of The Aristocracy of Talent documents the contemporary pushback on meritocracy from left and right. Some claim that the ideal has been corrupted by privileged access to the key sorting system of the modern age: the university. Others believe that the notion of merit is imbued with cultural biases, a view accentuated by the frequent misuse of IQ tests and dubious claims about inherent differences between races. Yet, concludes Wooldridge, meritocracy does a better job than the available alternatives in ‘reconciling the two great tensions at the heart of modernity: between efficiency and fairness on the one hand, and between moral equality and social differentiation on the other’.

The book closes not with the risk of a second Taiping Rebellion by disappointed exam candidates, but with the cautionary tale of Venice – once the richest city in Europe, famously open to talented immigrants, marked by constant social mobility. Venetians, says Wooldridge, tired of the relentless demands of competition and change. They closed the book of noble families allowed to participate in politics, restricted entry for newcomers, regulated trade, and suffered a long slow decline, becoming, in John Ruskin’s memorable words, the ‘ghost upon the sands of the sea’.

The Aristocracy of Talent is among the best of recent books about the idea of merit, including influential works by Daniel Markovits and Michael Sandel. As in his Bagehot column for The Economist, Wooldridge writes with clarity and authority. He is less concerned about entry to Harvard or Yale as a measure of the Zeitgeist, and offers a wider focus. Wooldridge advocates merit-based societies while underscoring how often the practice falls short. He documents the anger of those who miss out and argues the case for greater inclusion. For the best and brightest are not always all they promise to be, while others remain trapped at the starting line.