The Rise of the Meritocracy is a satirical book by British sociologist and politician Michael Dunlop Young which was first published by Thames and Hudson in 1958. It is written as an essay from 2033 and describes a dystopian society in a future United Kingdom in which intelligence and merit have become the central tenet of society, replacing previous divisions of social class and creating a society stratified between a merited power-holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less meri