Meritocracy as a Category for Historical Analysis: Modern Concept, Ancient Practices Two-day conference, University of Hamburg 7–8 September 2026 Co-organised by Carolin Gluchowski, Universität Hamburg (carolin.gluchowski@uni-hamburg.de<mailto:carolin.gluchowski@uni-hamburg.de>), and Asger Wienberg, Lund University (asger.wienberg@hist.lu.se<mailto:asger.wienberg@hist.lu.se>) The term meritocracy is surprisingly young. Coined in the 1950s and popularised in the 1960s—most famously through Michael Young’s satirical The Rise of the Meritocracy—it belongs to the world of mass higher education, managerial capitalism, social mobility narratives, and expanding regimes of expertise and evaluation. In its application to contemporary societies, meritocracy appears to name a distinctive social and political ideal: a regime in which offices, rewards, and life chances are formally allocated according to individual merit, under conditions that claim to ensure equality of opportunity. At the same time, the concept is built around a deeply contested core. What counts as “merit”—talent, effort, virtue, credentials, character, productivity, contribution, some combination of these—is itself an object of ongoing dispute. In this frame, inequality is not simply taken for granted but is explained, and often normatively defended, as the outcome of performance rather than birth or privilege. The idea that status should in some sense correspond to, mirror, or be proportionate to merit, however understood, is much older than the word meritocracy itself. From antiquity onwards, societies developed rich vocabularies and practices for making merit visible, assessable, and effective. Here “worth” is not a neutral synonym but a composite notion at the intersection of merit and status: it encompasses social recognition, moral evaluation, and institutionalised rank. Classical discourses of virtus and dignitas; medieval languages of meritum, deservingness, and grace; early modern concerns with worthiness, civility, manners, and ingenium (talent); and later grammars of excellence, qualification, and credentials all articulated different ways of relating personal qualities to positions in an ordered society. Long before anyone spoke of meritocracy, colleges, convents, guilds, schools, academies, churches, and civil services organised selection, formation, and advancement around articulated notions of desert and deservingness. These could be attached both to inherited status (for instance, nobility as a marker of “natural” or family merit) and to moral or behavioural criteria (the “deserving poor”), without necessarily presupposing a modern, open-ended meritocratic horizon in which all positions are in principle contestable. Such regimes of merit and worth were negotiated, narrated, and preserved through a wide range of media that made claims to deservingness portable, comparable, and verifiable. Petitions and supplications to rulers, councils, bishops, and administrators; letters of recommendation and testimonial letters; applications for benefices, offices, scholarships, apprenticeships, or guild membership; examination scripts, certificates, and service records; and institutional registers such as matriculation books, ordination lists, promotion rolls, and disciplinary files all served to translate individual qualities into assessable claims. Crucially, they did not simply record merit once it had been measured; they helped to establish merit as a legitimate basis for social positioning and prestige. By framing appeals and justifications in terms of learning, virtue, service, or fitness for office, they contributed to making merit thinkable and actionable as a criterion for distributing honours, resources, and responsibilities. In later periods, these practices crystallised in more standardised application dossiers, including the curriculum vitae as a bureaucratic tool for comparing candidates across institutional settings. Alongside these written genres, merit was also made visible and persuasive through visual, material, and architectural programmes. Founder portraits, mottoes such as Manners Makyth Man—the motto of New College, Oxford—gatehouse inscriptions, seals, stained glass, epitaphs, and monumental inscriptions in churches functioned as technologies of selection, legitimation, and encouragement. By staging exemplary lives, virtues, and careers, they made claims about fitness for honours publicly legible and socially compelling, offering models of formation to be emulated as much as thresholds to be passed. In many pre-modern European contexts, however, such programmes operated within conceptually bounded orders: there were limits, not only practical but normative, to how far merit could lift individuals across estates, orders, or confessional and gendered boundaries. The gradual weakening or removal of such conceptual limits—so that in principle “anyone” might aspire to “any” position—seems to be a crucial precondition for modern meritocracy. Taken together, these written, visual, and material media did more than mirror existing hierarchies of merit. At the level of individual biography, they recorded particular achievements, services, and reputations. At the same time, they actively helped to produce merit as a social fact by translating virtue, labour, loyalty, learning, or accomplishment into legible forms that could circulate across institutions, be evaluated by authorities, and endure over time. They shaped expectations about what counted as evidence of desert, who was entitled to make claims, and how such claims could be ordered and compared. This conference asks what happens if we deliberately adopt meritocracy as a category for historical analysis. Rather than treating it solely as a contemporary political slogan or a self-contained ideal, we invite historically grounded and conceptually ambitious contributions that test how far modern notions of meritocracy can travel across periods—and how earlier regimes of merit, worth, and deservingness might in turn sharpen, complicate, or destabilise contemporary understandings of the term. What We Are Looking For We are particularly interested in work that situates meritocracy at the intersection of phenomena often treated separately: capitalism and market society; individualisation and the making of subjects; financialisation and cultures of credit and risk; the expansion of education and credentialing; changing practices of evaluation and measurement; and processes of state formation and bureaucratisation. At the same time, we seek to keep in view longer genealogies of merit embedded in theological, philosophical, legal, and pedagogical traditions, as well as in the lived practices of institutions that sought to “make persons” through training, discipline, recognition, and exclusion. Particular attention to pre-modern and early modern contexts—often structured by estate- or order-based societies in which merit operated within clear social and conceptual bounds—is especially welcome. Possible contributions might explore conceptual histories of merit, desert, deservingness, and worth; institutional regimes and practices of selection, formation, and promotion; examinations, credentials, petitions, applications, and careers; visual, material, and architectural cultures that render merit legible; the relationship between older grammars of virtue and desert and newer logics of performance, metrics, and comparison (including challenges to this dichotomy); or the entanglement of merit with other principles of stratification, such as birth, patronage, wealth, gender, or confession. Papers that move between pre-modern and modern settings, trace longue durée transformations, or place European cases in comparative or global perspective are particularly encouraged. We also welcome historically grounded engagements with contemporary debates around meritocracy—its promises, failures, and role in legitimising inequality—where these debates are illuminated by historical material rather than simply echoed. A central concern of the conference is methodological. To what extent can historians legitimately use meritocracy as an analytical lens for periods that did not possess the term, but did articulate and institutionalise ideas of merit, desert, and deservingness? When does the concept clarify historical dynamics, and when does it risk blurring distinctions that mattered to historical actors themselves? How do different regimes of merit relate to changing conceptions of justice, agency, fortune, predetermination, and the common good? The conference also foregrounds the media of meritocracy. While modern analyses often focus on examinations, grades, rankings, and dashboards as instruments of sorting and legitimation, historical research shows that images, buildings, inscriptions, petitions, applications, curricula vitae, and spatial arrangements have long functioned as diagrams of merit. We invite papers that take seriously these visual, spatial, and material dimensions: how do portraits, monuments, mottoes, honour rolls, application practices, league tables, admissions brochures, or contemporary data visualisations stage and stabilise particular orders of worth? How do such devices operate as thresholds that both open and filter, promising formation while testing conformity? We are not primarily seeking presentist position papers that simply celebrate or condemn meritocracy in the abstract, nor empirical studies that use “meritocracy” merely as a loose synonym for qualification, competition, or fairness without probing its conceptual and historical specificity. Normative and theoretical reflections are welcome, but they should be anchored in concrete historical materials—texts, images, institutions, and practices—and attentive to historical difference and the risk of anachronism. What to Expect The conference will bring together approximately ten to twelve participants for a two-day event at the University of Hamburg, held on 7–8 September 2026. The programme will combine standard papers (20–25 minutes), shorter lightning contributions (5–10 minutes) for work in progress or conceptual provocations, and extended discussion sessions. A short excursion in Hamburg may be included, subject to feasibility. Selected papers will be considered for publication as a themed issue in a peer-reviewed international journal such as Journal of the History of Ideas or Cultural History. We anticipate being able to cover accommodation and at least part of participants’ travel and subsistence costs from external funding (details to follow). Scholars at all career stages are invited to apply; early-career researchers are particularly encouraged. The working language of the conference is English. How to Apply Please submit a single PDF including an abstract of 300–400 words outlining argument, sources, period, and engagement with meritocracy as an analytical category, together with a short biographical note (max. 150 words, including affiliation and up to five relevant publications or projects). If you have a preference for a full paper or a lightning contribution, please indicate this. Proposals should be sent to the organisers by 15 February 2026 (carolin.gluchowski(a)uni-hamburg.de; asger.wienberg(a)hist.lu.se) Applicants will be notified by 28 February 2026. Draft papers (approx. 3,000–5,000 words) should be submitted by 31 July 2026. [cid:5D90EC23-C402-466F-9848-DFDDEF33E0C8] [cid:765F6198-248F-4E94-BEA6-09552631669A]