The new ideology of meritocracy competed with two alternative notions of social organization: the egalitarian principle, with its call for complete equality in the distribution of goods between humans; and the hereditary principle, with its belief that titles and posts (and partridge shoots) should be automatically transferred to the children of th

All great artists are, said Arnold, imbued with ‘the aspiration to leave the world better and happier than they find it’.

‘We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire an adequate knowledge of the superficial and futile nature of their thoughts, of the narrowness of their views, of the paltriness of their sentiments, of the perversity of their opinions, and of the number of their errors … We shall then see that whoe

Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), that it might in fact be the savage and not – as everyone had grown used to thinking – the modern worker who was the better off of the pair?

In the United States in 1907, a book entitled Three Acres and Liberty seized the imagination of the reading public. The author, Bolton Hall, began by taking for granted the awkwardness of having to work for someone else, and so told readers that they could regain their freedom by leaving their offices and factories and buying three acres of farmlan

In 1800, 20 per cent of the American workforce was employed by another person; by 1900, the figure was 50 per cent; by 2000, 90 per cent. Employers were also taking on more people. In 1800, less than 1 per cent of the American workforce was employed in an organization with 500 or more employees; by 2000, the figure was 55 per cent.

Rousseau’s argument hung on a thesis about wealth: that wealth does not involve having many things. It involves having what we long for. Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we seek something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as

The great ambition of modern societies has been to institute a comprehensive reversal of the equation, to strip away both inherited privilege and inherited under-privilege in order to make rank dependent on individual achievement – which has primarily come to mean financial achievement. Status now rarely depends on an unchangeable identity handed d

Social Darwinists proposed that all humans began by facing a fair struggle over scarce resources: money, jobs, esteem. Some gained the upper hand in this contest, not because of improper advantages or luck but because they were intrinsically better than those they outpaced. The rich were not better from a moral point of view. They were, intimidatin