Equal opportunities in dispute. Egalitarianism and meritocracy in postneoliberalism
Keywords:
equality, meritocracy, equal opportunities, egalitarian, ethos, difference principleCopyright (c) 2024 César Rendueles
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
In the last fifteen years, theoretical and practical problems related to social inequality have gained public visibility, both in the media and in academic research, on a scale barely imaginable before the start of the Great Recession. However, this new interest in social stratification has been blocked by the dominant meritocratic paradigm: the equal opportunities model has a great capacity to generate consensus and is usually perceived as the only egalitarian horizon compatible with a modern democracy and a complex society. This article uses an interdisciplinary methodological background to trace the social and moral spaces in which this meritocratic common sense is rooted and explores, in turn, the power of other more deeply egalitarian positions.
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