"Unfailingly entertaining, effortlessly drawing on a wealth of anecdote and statistics." --Times Literary Supplement

"This unique and fascinating history explains why the blame now being piled upon meritocracy is misplaced--and that assigning responsibilities to the people best able to discharge them really is better than the time-honored customs of corruption, patronage, nepotism, and hereditary castes. Wooldridge upends many common assumptions and provides an indispensable back story to this fraught and pressing issue."--Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University

"Wonderful...The Aristocracy of Talent provides an important and needed corrective to contemporary critiques of meritocracy. It puts meritocracy in an illuminating historical and cross-cultural perspective that shows how critical the judgment of people by their talents rather than their bloodlines or connections has been to creating the modern world. Highly recommended."
--Francis Fukuyama, Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

"This is an important, fascinating and superbly written book. The Aristocracy of Talent pulls the rug out from under the current assault on meritocracy. How quickly we forget that reformers struggled for centuries to displace privilege of birth with merit-based judgments. Rejecting merit in favor of equal outcomes, Adrian Wooldridge persuasively argues, is like handing the keys of the future to China and other cultures focused on results. Does the assault on core values leave you at a loss for words? Read this book."
--Philip K Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and founder of Common Good

"Wooldridge... makes intelligent contributions to the fraught cultural debate about the value--or lack thereof--of meritocracy." --Brooke Allen, The Hudson Review