I have been reading some secondary literature on John Stuart Mill. He was explicitly against meritocracy, although that term was not available until Young's satirical novel. Here is Mill:
"If some Nero or Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? Is it not, on the contrary, an irresistible claim upon every human being for protection against suffering?" – J. S. Mill
The above is not necessarily an argument for socialism. It is consistent with Mill's investigation of what a society organized around private property might be.
In his autobiography, Mill explicitly says that he became a socialist:
"Our [Mill and Harriet Taylor] ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve. we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert, on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be. or be thought to be. impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to." -- J. S. Mill
Mill is the canonical example of a classical liberal. His short book On Liberty is still read. How can he also be a socialist?
Reference- Helen McCabe. 2021. John Stuart Mill, Socialist. McGill-Queen's University Press.
- Matthew McManus. 2024. The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. Routledge.
- Michael Young. 1958. The Rise Of The Meritocracy: 1870-2033.. Pelican.
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