For Marie Duru-Bellat, merit is both a topical issue and a necessary ideology for democracies. It embodies a certain conception of justice which, between inequalities of individual merit and inequalities of place in society, makes a choice: the latter can be considered fair as long as the former prevails. But is merit fair? Marie Duru-Bellat began by questioning the justice of the meritocratic selection process at school. But it is also necessary, she explains, to question the school's claim to produce a ranking that has real relevance outside the school world, in the world of work. In other words, is it relevant and justified to calibrate professional merit by academic merit? Finally, the perverse effects of meritocratic logic and the exacerbated competition it entails are well known in the world of work. For Marie Duru-Bellat, however, merit cannot be dispensed with, and we must undoubtedly accept a combination of several principles of justice. Thus, we can both defend the merit system for job allocation, seeing it as a guarantee of efficiency, and at the same time, dissociating efficiency and justice, not base ourselves on merit alone to distribute wealth and determine everyone's resources, since its origin is uncertain and we can therefore never be sure of deserving our merit.
Marie Duru-Bellat is a professor at the IEP in Paris and a researcher at the Observatoire sociologique du changement (OSC-CNRS). She recently published Le mérite contre la justice (Presses de Sciences-Po, 2009).
