Dean Blackburn's Penguin Books and Political Change: Britain's Meritocratic Moment, 1937–1988 arose out of the valuable Penguin Books Archive Project (2008–2013) and will contribute to the unlocking of that significant archive, still underused for Britain's recent cultural and intellectual history. But Blackburn's book is a much more ambitious enterprise, redefining Britain's postwar political history in relation to ideas of meritocracy. Following Harold Perkin on the rise of the professional ideal (The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 [1989]) and Guy Ortolano's exemplification of debates over meritocracy in the “two cultures” controversy (The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain [2009]), Blackburn argues that meritocratic ideas became dominant in British political culture in ways that cut across conventional narratives defined by social democracy and neoliberalism.

By confining himself largely to books and authors that Penguin published—and sometimes more narrowly still to the sporadic series of Penguin Specials—Blackburn makes it harder on himself to develop his political and intellectual history to its fullest potential. The first half of the book traces through various Penguin texts the emergence of what Arthur Marwick once famously dubbed “middle opinion” in the 1930s (“Middle Opinion in the Thirties: Planning, Progress and Political ‘Agreement,’” English Historical Review, 79, no. 311 (1964): 285–98), cutting across party lines and drawing together growing strata of professional and technical men (nearly all the protagonists of this book are men) around ideals of science and technology, reason, planning, and equal citizenship. Such men tended to be “meritocratic” in the sense that they scorned distinctions of birth and felt that both social progress and individual rewards would be better advanced if merit—ability or intelligence combined with hard work—were better recognized. They did not necessarily agree on what constituted merit, or on whether the point of meritocracy was to advance social progress or to allocate individual rewards, or indeed whether meritocracy aimed at creating a new ruling elite or simply at breaking up an older, illegitimate one based on birth.

Some of the most influential commentators on these new strata did not happen to be Penguin authors and so do not figure here—George Orwell, for example, who singled out “people of indeterminate social class” with technical skills as avatars of modernity (“The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius” [1941]), or J. B. Priestley, who likewise saw such people as representing a third, modern England, displacing aristocracy and industrialism (neither particularly liked what they saw). Conversely, some of the most celebrated Penguin authors were dead set against meritocracy to the extent that it challenged democracy. These critics of meritocracy included revisionists around Tony Crosland, whom Blackburn tends to classify as meritocrats on the grounds of their advocacy of classlessness, while perhaps slighting their emphasis on fellowship and solidarity and their hostility to the idea of a new elite displacing the old. After all, it was roughly out of this milieu that the Penguin author Michael Young derived his swinging critique, The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), which had the ironic effect of putting into circulation that very term, embraced as a positive ideal by many people who had not read or understood him. Similarly, as Blackburn notes, those he calls (following Alan Sinfield) “left-culturalists” (18) were not so enamored of meritocracy either, on quasi-Leavisite grounds favoring established cultural traditions, while squaring them with democracy. One of them, Richard Hoggart, was anti-meritocratic on grounds both of “left-culturalism” and of fellowship and democracy, and yet he was Penguin founder Allen Lane's choice to guide Penguin after his death—a burden Hoggart declined.

Blackburn is at his best when a concentration of Penguin authors allows him to probe these tensions within the “meritocratic moment,” and especially when he addresses a group emerging in the early 1960s, whom he dubs “centre-left declinists” (160)—men like Michael Shanks, John Vaizey, and Hugh Thomas. For these men, meritocracy was also seen as a necessity to avert Britain's relative economic decline. They went along with Harold Wilson as long as they thought he was serious about elevating a technocratic elite—more science, more reason, more planning, but comprising people like us—to fuel the white heat of his technological revolution. They soon discovered otherwise. They were discouraged by the faltering of Britain's growth over the course of the 1960s. In a long tradition of Fabian rationalism, they were appalled at the influence of the trade unions (not “people like us”). As Blackburn shows, they began to recraft their understanding of ability to emphasize enterprise, more individualistic, more exciting, and (they came to think) essential for economic dynamism.

As Blackburn takes his story through Thatcherism, he argues that this reorientation to the market represented one end to Britain's meritocratic moment. Did it? Or did it not instead represent a sharpening of the definition of merit that had been left fatally ambiguous so long as everyone was agreed on opposing hereditary privilege? If anything, Thatcherites—perhaps most of all Thatcherites like Vaizey and Thomas who had been Labour supporters earlier—used the language of meritocracy more rather than less, portraying trade unions, civil servants and chartered professionals now as the ranks of privilege that needed to be broken up by proven ability and hard work.

As original as this book's structure and organization are—spanning so many moments, linked by such an elastic term as meritocracy and by one publisher's output—the real political-intellectual debates over class, education, and elite formation might be better served by a more conventional intellectual history. The trajectory followed by Vaizey and Thomas—much like C. P. Snow's trajectory in Ortolano's book—deserves elaboration as one of the key transitions in late twentieth-century intellectual life. Books like Ortolano's, Ben Jackson's Equality and the British Left (2007), Mike Savage's Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940 (2010), or the influential article by Emily Robinson et al. (“Telling Stories about Post-war Britain: Popular Individualism and the ‘Crisis’ of the 1970s,” Twentieth Century British History 28, no. 2 [2017]: 268–304)—all of which Blackburn properly draws on—offer some tempting models. If he is looking for a subject for his next book, I would give a lot to read a Blackburn collective biography of the likes of Vaizey and Thomas, who used meritocracy as a bridge from left to right, showing, as he seeks to do in Penguin Books and Political Change (and as Robinson et al. likewise seek) that social democracy and neoliberalism are not two mutually exclusive categories and that both change as the culture, political economy, and public discourse change around them.