Mijs, Jonathan J.B.2022-10-192022-10-192022J.J.B. Mijs. "Merit and ressentiment: How to tackle the tyranny of merit." Theory and Research in Education, pp. 173 - 181. https://doi.org/10.1177/147787852211068371477-87851741-3192https://hdl.handle.net/2144/45249My contribution to this special issue engages with Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Meritocracy and its significance to the academic conversation about meritocracy and its discontents. Specifically, I highlight Sandel’s diagnosis of the rise of populism and his proposed remedy for the ‘tyranny of merit’. First, building on Menno ter Braak’s writings on the rise of fascism, I explore the sources of ressentiment in contemporary societies as stemming not from disillusionment with meritocracy but from the broken promise of liberalism and democracy more generally. Second, I consider Sandel’s proposals to reform elite university admissions and to ‘recognize work’, explore their wider applicability, and reflect on their limitations to meaningfully change how success and failure is socially experienced and morally understood.p. 173 - 181en-US© The Author(s) 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Article10.1177/14778785221106837758674