Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite is an investigation of the sources and structure of hierarchy in the United States today, and a moral argument to undo it. According to Markovits, meritocracy no longer undoes hierarchy but grounds it and allows for its reproduction. And he provides an unprecedented national case study of how the new meritocratic system of ascendancy and subordination has come to work, with brilliant sociological detail.

Elements of Markovits’s analysis, notably his use of “middle class” to describe white-collar workers, and the potential progressive agency he ascribes to “meritocratic elites” will no doubt be thoroughly rejected by most Jacobin readers. But The Meritocracy Trap is still a provocative attempt to examine an ethos that influences much of the society in which we live.

Samuel Moyn spoke to Markovits about what led him to write this book, as an inhabitant (indeed, product) of the system he describes, and to what extent his book is relevant to the American left.