Meritocracy Ancient and Modern
- sofiapbaker
- Sep 19, 2021
- 1 min read
Old-school historians like me tend to be shy about using modern terminology to describe pre-modern things. The dangers of anachronistic misunderstandings are just too great. If, for example, you describe Machiavelli as a democrat, as some like to do today, you will have to spend a good deal of time clearing away the prepossessions of modern readers, who will inevitably associate the term “democracy” with popular sovereignty, representative government, dignitarian concepts of liberty and equality, and other ideas well beyond the horizon of Machiavelli’s political thinking. In Machiavelli’s time, moreover, the word “democracy” ordinarily was used in its Aristotelian meaning of mob rule, the exploitative rule of the poor over the prosperous. In that sense too, Machiavelli was no democrat. As a matter of historical method, it is less misleading simply to describe Machiavelli as a man of strong popular sympathies and allow the term “popular” to be defined by how that term appeared in Renaissance sources. The possible applications to contemporary democratic theory of Machiavelli’s advocacy of popular power can then be properly assessed without distortions.
But sometimes, as in the case of the word “meritocracy,” the modernity of the term conceals the antiquity of the thing…