Michael Young: social entrepreneur Asa Briggs Palgrave, 432pp, £52.50 ISBN 0333750233

In his marvellous compendium of the higher gossip, Our Age, Noel Annan argues that Michael Young was "the most original and influential sociologist of Our Age . . . [he] resembled Cadmus. Whatever field he tilled, he sowed dragon's teeth and armed men seemed to spring from the soil to form an organisation and correct the abuses or stimulate the virtues he had discovered." Summing up his view of Young, Annan writes: "He knew neither what a groove was nor the meaning of orthodoxy."

Annan did not exaggerate. By any standard, Young must count as one of the most fecund and versatile figures of British life. As head of the Labour Party's research department and one of the people who drafted its manifesto in 1945, he helped craft the terms of the postwar settlement. His seminal study of family and kinship in London's East End gave social inquiry a new direction. He was a prime mover in the development of the Consumers' Association, the Open University, the Social Science Research Council, the University of the Third Age and, most recently, the School of Social Entrepreneurs. For nearly 60 years, Young has fertilised British life with new ideas and new institutions. Yet he is also one of the authors of a reactionary orthodoxy that lies on British politics and education with the weight of a corpse.

For all his other achievements, it is a fair bet that Young will be remembered for his dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958). It is a book that has had a huge - and hugely malign - influence, and not only on the left. It is routinely cited by Labour's left-wing critics, who bemoan the party's departures from the supposedly egalitarian politics of the past, such as comprehensive schooling and high levels of income taxation. But Young's satire on meritocracy was also greatly admired by the New Right. It is cited with approval in F A Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty and, in conversation with me, Hayek mentioned it more than once as a brilliant lampoon against contemporary ideals of social justice. Hayek was delighted by Young's skit because he saw it as supporting his opposition to any attempt to correct the semi- random income distributions thrown up by free markets. For the right as a whole, Young's argument that meritocracy could turn out to be a demoralising tyranny, more damaging to most people's self-esteem than the unequal societies of the past, was manna from heaven. Hayek's admiration was echoed by traditional Tories, whose slogan had always been "No damn nonsense about merit". That slogan also captures the ruling philosophy of the soft left. For the past 30 years, the left has been strongly influenced by the Harvard philosopher John Rawls and his theory of justice as fairness, according to which it makes no sense to reward merit, since it is the luck of the draw that makes some people cleverer or more hard-working than others. In England, the left and right may disagree about some things, but they speak with a single voice when it comes to the evils of meritocracy.

Young's book has helped make meritocracy the most unfashionable idea in British politics. It is rarely discussed seriously, and even more rarely defended, and the central role of meritocratic ideas in recent Labour thinking has provoked paroxysms of indignant lament. This reveals a good deal about how far Britain still is from being a normal modern society. Meritocracy is simply another term for the liberal idea of equality. Only in England is schooling paralysed by a po-faced resistance to selection on merit. (I say England, because Scotland has never shared this English obsession.) In having yet to accept fully the core modern ideal of a career open to the talents as one of the foundations of public policy, the English are unique among advanced societies.

In one of the liveliest and most engrossing biographies of a living public figure to have been published for some time, Asa Briggs suggests at several points that Young's attitude to meritocracy may be more complex than most of his readers have supposed. He cites an interview in which Young appears to have defended it, as well as several statements in which he seemed to hint that the book was meant more as a jeu d'esprit than anything else. None of these protestations needs to be taken very seriously. We have Young's own word for it that his book was intended as an attack on meritocratic values. Writing in the Guardian in June this year, Young described it as "a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded)" and went on to take Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to task for using a term he had coined in scorn as a description of a worthy social ideal. Young concludes his lament by citing his imaginary author, "an ardent apostle of meritocracy", as defending wholesale education selection. "No longer is it necessary to debase standards," Young's author writes, "by attempting to extend higher civilisation to the children of the lower classes."

Young's opposition to meritocracy chimes with his lifelong support for comprehensive schooling. Like other supporters of the comprehensive ideal, he has chosen to ignore how rising social inequality and the attack on meritocratic selection in schools go hand in hand. Although flawed, the grammar schools were a window of opportunity for a great many people. Comprehensive schooling slammed that window shut by making the neighbourhood where families can afford to live the main criterion for selecting children in state schools. In other words, under comprehensive schooling, places have been rationed by house prices. At the same time, the rise of comprehensives increased the advantages of the fee-paying sector. As a result, access to the best jobs in later life is skewed against people from low-income families more severely than it has been for generations.

In many ways, this is a state of affairs that suits the English rather well. The anti-meritocratic consensus is a wonderful alibi for a society terrified of change. The right can continue to send children to private schools. The middle-class left can suffer exquisite agonies of high-minded guilt while, whenever it can, it does the same. United by their horror of competitive selection, left and right are free to oppose any attempt - such as the government's mild but praiseworthy efforts to promote specialist schools - to "extend higher civilisation to the children of the lower classes".

The peculiar English resistance to meritocracy has the effect - if not always the intention - of keeping people in the place that class and chance have ordained for them. The result is a disabling but evidently not too uncomfortable social sclerosis. Young has undoubtedly been a great innovator. But in sowing the dragon's tooth of an anti-meritocratic orthodoxy, he will go down in history as one of England's greatest conservatives.

John Gray is professor of European thought at the London School of Economics

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