3 - Merit
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2023
Summary
‘I prefer the Republic’s exams, they’re meritocratic’, said Macron in 2016 in relation to his alma mater, the ENA (Pedder 2018, 77). Macron is fond of equality. It is a feature of his programme, put together in his autobiographical work Révolution (Macron, 2016), as well as a recurrent theme in his speeches and addresses to the nation. For those who maintain that Macron is a politician of both left and right, equality is the value that underpins his pragmatism and his desire for social justice. It is indubitable that equality plays an important part in Macron’s ideology, but the argument I put forward in this chapter is that it is a very specific type of equality that Macron defends, an equality in the face of luck, an equality against discrimination, and an equality of opportunity. This type of equality is better described as merit – the desert and worth of a particular individual independently of circumstances around them. This makes Macron sensitive to specific types of inequalities (those due to race and gender, for example), but also puts together a particular vision of the individual as someone responsible for their own fate – and ultimately their own failures and experience of the vicissitudes of life. In the first instance, I will show that Macron’s liberal-libertarian compromise is the blending of two types of liberalism found in Rawls and Nozick. I then move on to show that it is in the philosophy of Dworkin that this attitude towards equality comes together in a form of ‘luck egalitarianism’, which is the culmination of Macron’s thought on equality. This lays open the question of the vision of the individual developed by Macron, and its roots in a very specific, responsibility-driven conception of the person with specific theological roots. For this, we will turn to Weber’s seminal work on the Protestant ethic and the concepts of grace and the calling. A secularized version of these concepts is central to Macron’s ideology, although their roots in particular conception of Christianity cannot be avoided altogether. I then show that this secularized political theology can be understood alongside what Sandel defines as ‘the meritocracy’, before providing a critique of the notion of responsibility using Nietzsche.
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- The Macron RégimeThe Ideology of the New Right in France, pp. 60 - 76Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2022