Michael Sandel is not against success. What he is against is the story we tell about it.

In The Tyranny of Merit (2020), the Harvard political philosopher argues that meritocracy — long celebrated as the fairest way to organize society — has become a source of hubris for those at the top and humiliation for those left behind. The result, he contends, is not just inequality, but a deep moral and political crisis that helped fuel the populist backlash of the 2010s.

The Core Argument

Sandel distinguishes between two ideas that often travel together but shouldn’t: equality of opportunity and the moral desert of outcomes. Even if we could achieve a perfectly level playing field — which we are far from doing — it would not follow that winners deserve their success in any deep moral sense. Talent, drive, and the capacity for hard work are themselves shaped by factors beyond our control: genetics, upbringing, luck. To forget this, Sandel argues, is to fall into what he calls the “rhetoric of rising” — the insidious belief that those who succeed did so entirely on their own merits, and that those who struggle have only themselves to blame.

What Meritocracy Does to Us

The book’s most compelling chapters explore the psychological and civic damage this worldview inflicts. For winners, meritocracy breeds a kind of smug self-satisfaction — a sense that their position is not just fortunate but earned and therefore justified. For those who do not rise, it offers something worse than poverty: it offers failure as a verdict on their worth as human beings. Sandel ties this directly to the collapse of social solidarity and the rise of resentment politics, arguing that the credentialed elite’s condescension — however unintentional — is a real and legitimate grievance.

Strengths and Limitations

Sandel writes with his characteristic clarity, and his historical sweep — from Calvinist notions of divine election to Obama-era optimism about education — is genuinely illuminating. His critique of the college admissions system is particularly sharp.

Where the book is less satisfying is in its prescriptions. Sandel calls for a renewed politics of the “common good” and greater recognition of the dignity of work, but these remain somewhat vague. He gestures at civic republicanism without fully sketching what it would look like in practice. Readers looking for a policy agenda will come away wanting more.

The Marx Problem

Attentive readers will notice that Sandel’s argument runs in territory that is, at its foundations, deeply Marxian — even if Marx himself is conspicuously absent from the book. The structural resemblances are hard to ignore. Where Marx argued that capitalism alienates workers from their labor, their product, and ultimately from their own humanity, Sandel argues that meritocratic ideology alienates the non-credentialed from their sense of dignity and social worth. Both diagnoses locate the wound in the same place: an economic system that strips meaning from work and then tells those left behind that the outcome is their own fault. Marx called this mystification; Sandel calls it hubris. The pathology is recognizably the same.

Sandel’s critique of the “rhetoric of rising” also echoes Marx’s concept of false consciousness — the way a dominant ideology naturalizes arrangements that serve the powerful by making them appear inevitable or just. When meritocracy convinces the struggling that their failure is a personal verdict rather than a structural one, it is performing precisely the ideological function Marx assigned to bourgeois thought.

The Hegel Detour

Rather than engaging Marx directly, Sandel routes his argument through Hegel — and more specifically through the Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth, whose theory of recognition provides a less politically charged vocabulary for making similar points. Honneth, drawing on Hegel’s early Jena writings, argues that human identity and self-worth are constituted through social recognition: we need to be seen and valued by others — as individuals, as members of communities, and as contributors to collective life — to flourish as human beings. Meritocracy, on this reading, is not merely unfair; it is a misrecognition machine, systematically denying dignity to those whose contributions it fails to valorize.

This is a powerful framework, and Sandel deploys it effectively. But the choice to foreground Honneth and Hegel rather than Marx is not purely philosophical — it is rhetorical and strategic.

Why Avoid Marx?

The answer is audience. Sandel is writing primarily for an American readership, and in the United States, Marx remains politically radioactive in a way he simply is not in European intellectual life. To invoke Marx approvingly in a book aimed at mainstream readers and policymakers would be to trigger a set of associations — communism, class warfare, the abolition of private property — that would overwhelm the actual argument and allow critics to dismiss the book without engaging it.

Hegel, by contrast, carries no such baggage. He is difficult and prestigious, associated with German idealism rather than revolutionary politics. Honneth, meanwhile, gives Sandel access to the moral and psychological dimensions of the critique — dignity, recognition, self-worth — without the economic determinism and revolutionary conclusions that come packaged with Marx. It allows Sandel to ask Marxian questions while remaining within the bounds of liberal political philosophy, a space where he can speak to Democrats and disaffected conservatives alike.

This is a legitimate intellectual choice, but it comes at a cost. By sidestepping Marx, Sandel also sidesteps the structural and economic analysis that would give his critique its sharpest edge. Recognition theory can tell us that meritocracy wounds people’s dignity; it is less equipped to explain why the system reproduces itself, who benefits from it, and what it would take to dismantle it. The result is a book that is more powerful as a cultural diagnosis than as a guide to transformation — which may, in the end, be exactly what Sandel intended.

Verdict

The Tyranny of Merit is an important and timely diagnosis of a real cultural malaise. It will make you rethink not just how society distributes rewards, but what values should guide that distribution in the first place. Whether or not you agree with Sandel’s conclusions, his central question — do the successful deserve their success? — is one that democratic societies can no longer afford to ignore.

Rating: 4 out of 5