Meritocracy: the Third Way and the Effervescence of Capital

The paper discusses the contribution of the left, in their historical-social evolution, to the construction of a meritocratic principle in Europe, and investigates the political process that led the left to choose the renunciation of the struggle against capitalism and the accommodation to the logic of the Market, among the other possible options for renewal. These choices take place on values and interests shared by political actors and theoretically supported by third-way intellectuals, which converge together to the political space of social democracy. They proclaim themselves the only real alternative to neoliberal wave. Since the dismissing of communist utopia and the appropriating of the idea of well-being founded on the production-consumption cycle, the electoral competition is burning out in the common arena of the capitalist economy, and the political cleavage shifted from the class conflict to the regulation of markets. On the social front, the removal of this cleavage has freed the spirit of capitalism that has been able to settle even more pervasively in the symbolic relations between people. A new philosophy of money triggers a social game played on competition and the reward mechanism derived from it. In this sense, meritocracy is the criterion for governing this new order of capitalism.