CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Yuan, Ye |
|---|---|
| Title | Meritocracy and Political Authority Legitimacy |
| Summary | Meritocracy is a persistent value cherished by human beings throughout history. When it comes to political authority, meritocracy is also an important guideline people follow in order to achieve the best outcome of human resource and personnel arrangement for positions controlling authority and implementing policies. Even modern liberal societies embrace the value of meritocracy, despite the fact that liberal political account opposes negative effects of the overemphasis of meritocracy. This thesis explores the puzzle of the persistence of meritocracy from the perspective of meritocracy’s role in legitimatizing political authority. The function of power-forming contributes to meritocracy’s firm relationship with political authority, namely that the utilitarian feature makes meritocracy indispensable to political authority acquiring legitimacy, regardless of the type of political authority – ancient or modern authority, autocratic or liberal authority. However, in the framework of modern liberal political obligation, legitimacy of authority greatly depends on the realization of equality-based justice, so meritocracy’s role in liberal societies is determined by its adapting to the comprehensive legitimacy – the combination between utilitarian function of authority and equality-based justice. In this regard, natural duty theory asks meritocracy to further discharge individuals’ duties among each other by reaching a compromise between its utilitarianism and justice consideration. By setting principles for meritocracy from the perspective of egalitarianism, this thesis argues that it is possible to arrive at a compromise between the need of meritocracy and the appeal of social justice. Eventually a merit-based society featured with self-restraint of meritocracy can be achieved, contributing to both the performance-oriented and justice-focused legitimacy of political authority. |
| Supervisor | Miklósi，Zoltán |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/yuan_ye.pdf |
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