Careocracy or isocracy? A feminist alternative to the neoliberal meritocratic discourse

The message of neoliberal meritocratic discourse, prevalent today and spreading throughout Western societies, is simple: free, unregulated markets are meritocratic. This is a way of placing a veil of social justice (i.e., markets reward merit) over neoliberal ideas. The worrisome consequences attached to it are the moral legitimation of inequalities and the reduction of social value to market value. The dimension of care is among the many values sacrificed to the altar of neoliberal meritocratic discourse. While feminist scholarship has criticized neoliberalism for its marginalization of care (primarily unpaid household activity performed by women) and care work (poorly rewarded to attract intrinsically motivated care providers), little has been done to address neoliberal meritocracy. This paper aims to fill this gap by sustaining three theses: (1) free markets are not meritocratic domains; (2) a counter-narrative advocating for a society grounded on careocracy (meritocracy of care) fails to address problems of neoliberal meritocratic discourse; and (3) a fruitful counter-discourse is the isocratic one, with an isocratic society being one where the sources of social value are plural and discussed by citizens.

Paolo Santori