Introduction

In the last decade, scholars have highlighted a worrisome alliance in Western societies i.e. the one between neoliberal capitalism and meritocratic discourse (Littler, 2017; Rottenberg, 2018; Markovits, 2019; Piketty, 2020; Cruz, 2021; Sandel, 2020). The idea that the more effort you make, the more you will get (i.e., the idea that merit and success are synonyms) places a veil of social justice over the workings of free, unregulated markets, where competition based on natural talents and efforts is enhanced. The meritocratic discourse’s core message is that meritocracy is possible. When allied with neoliberalism, it argues that free markets are, or should be more, meritocratic. The result is a free market society in which there is “an elite group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent” through “a system in which such persons are rewarded and advanced” (Mijs, 2016, p. 15). The worrisome social and economic consequences of neoliberal meritocratic discourse can be grouped into two macro problems:

Problem 1: the legitimization of inequalities by both the people who perpetuate them (McNamee and Miller, 2009; Frank, 2016) and those who sufferFootnote 1 from them (Bénabou and Tirole, 2006; Littler, 2017; Bruni and Santori, 2022);

Problem 2: the reduction of the social value of citizens’ actions, i.e., their contribution to the common good of society, to the market value (Anderson, 1993; Sandel, 2020).Footnote 2

Critiques of neoliberal meritocracy accused its supporters of depicting an illusory society. For a true meritocracy to occur, market institutions should be integrated with social (primarily educational) institutions that allocate rewards while guaranteeing equality of opportunity. Mijs (2016) surveyed literature convincingly showing that Western societies are far from reaching this goal—if possible. United States educational system, for example, is ultimately built on an apparent meritocracy, where inequalities based on one’s socio-economic background, family life, or other factors are maintained in the quality of primary and secondary education received and in the admission systems of some top universities (Karabel, 2005; McNamee and Miller, 2009; Mijs, 2016). Moreover, it is not even clear who decides what counts as a ‘merit’ in a meritocratic society or how the non-meritocratic factors that bring success (luck, help from other people, natural talents, socio-economic background) are weighted with regard to meritocratic ones (Mijs, 2016).

The illusion of meritocratic neoliberal discourse has been thus highlighted as connected to education, socio-economic reforms, and equality of opportunity. Yet, Problems 1 and 2 remain, describing worrisome tendencies in Western societies. This is because the neoliberal meritocratic discourse is not only fostered in public debates (Littler, 2017; Sandel, 2020) but also within academia (Scully, 2002; Sandel, 2020). My paper wants to foster the debate addressing the same problem but from the other complementary perspective. I want to inquire about neoliberal meritocratic discourse independently from the equality of opportunity guaranteed by education and other socio-economic reforms. For the sake of my argument, the reader can even suppose that Western societies can guarantee substantial equality of opportunity to its citizens. I aim to see if, even in those perfect (nonexistent) societies, meritocracy’s principle can fit with free markets to make it a unique and robust discourse. Then, I want to move my critiques to neoliberal meritocratic discourse from a feminist perspective focused on care.

A critique of neoliberal discourse comes from the variegated world of feminist theories. More precisely, scholars working on feminist economics and ethics (Nedelsky, 1992; Tronto, 1993; Nelson, 1995; Folbre and Nelson, 2000; England, 2005; Duffy, 2011; Dengler and Strunk, 2018; Mussell, 2018; The Care Collective, 2020) and feminist critiques of neoliberal capitalism (Oksala, 2018; Fraser, 2022) see a consequence of the reduction of social value to market value (Problem 2) in the exclusion from public life of another fundamental dimension of human and non-human beings, i.e., care. Neoliberalism positions free markets and care as antipodes. The same can be said for care work (Duffy, 2011), as in the neoliberal view paid care work is still considered to be of an inferior rank concerning other work in terms of salaries, as genuine care is usually associated with sacrifice rather than profit (‘getting more by paying less’; Heyes, 2005). The dimension of care is mainly relegated to the private sphere, and its relation to the exploitation of women within the household is often hidden. Feminist scholars (Nelson, 2016) contrast this discourse by arguing that the subject of care providers should include man and that the recipients of care are not limited to the people in households but extends to other people as well as non-human beings (e.g., environment or animals, plants, and inanimate objects). I am sympathetic to these remarks, and I will include them in my own definition of care (see the sub-section “What care?”)

This paper aims to extend the feminist critique of neoliberal capitalism to a critique of the neoliberal meritocratic discourse. What has not been emphasized (yet) in feminist scholarship is the role that neoliberal meritocratic discourse plays in confining care to the private realm and reproducing gender inequalities. Care activities are not ones for which a person can claim merits and, consequently, social success. Identifying social value and market value (i.e., merit and economic activity), neoliberal meritocratic discourse excludes care from meritorious activities. Furthermore, the ‘getting more by paying less’ logic ensures that people practicing care in the market do not benefit from it in monetary (and, therefore, social) terms.

A feminist response to the neoliberalism-meritocratic discourse alliance could be double-fold. Intuitively, one can advocate for a counter-alliance between care and meritocratic discourse. This would mean eliminating neoliberalism and free markets to transform meritocracy into careocracy,Footnote 3 while still maintaining the ideology of distributing the highest societal positions based on different merit (i.e., care).Footnote 4 Depicting an ideal (and somehow dystopic) society, I will show that while apparently solving Problem 2, careocracy cannot avoid Problem 1.

Therefore, another path is needed. I argue that neoliberal meritocratic discourse can be challenged by a model that, drawing on literature (Bellanca, 2019), I will call an ‘isocracy’ (from the Greek ἴσος ‘equal’ and κρατεῖν ‘to have power’). To address Problems 1 and 2, the isocratic discourse—the idea that an isocratic society is possible and desirable—pluralizes the scope and sources of social values. In this discourse, care is not confined to the private sphere, nor does it totalize the public one (as in a careocracy). In an isocratic society, there is continuous public debate regarding the kinds of social values different institutions (political, economic, and social) reward. The possibility of care in free markets will be the focus to show how an isocracy might look. Isocracy tackles the reductionism and inequalities associated with neoliberal meritocratic discourse, enlarging the scope of the values recognized by society (solution to Problem 2) and delegitimizing inequalities (solution to Problem 1). I suggest an isocratic discourse can succeed in contrasting with the neoliberal meritocratic one.

This paper is structured to provide arguments to sustain all the statements made so far. In the second section, I will consider the link between meritocratic discourse and neoliberalism, the reasons why free markets are not meritocratic, and the annexed Problems 1 and 2. Section “Care and careocracy” will be divided into two sub-sections. In the section “What care?”, I will explain the dimension of care in feminist economics/ethics literature and its marginal role in the neoliberal meritocratic discourse. Then, in the sub-section “Careocracy”, I will depict a scenario where neoliberalism is substituted with the alliance between care and meritocratic discourse (i.e., a careocracy). I will show the pitfalls of careocracy when it comes to Problem 1. This discussion will pave the way for section “Isocracy and isocratic discourse”, where the isocratic discourse will be presented as a fruitful alternative to meritocratic neoliberal discourse. The manuscript will conclude with some final remarks.

Neoliberal meritocratic discourse

Applying the meritocratic discourse to neoliberalism means demonstrating that meritocracy can occur in free markets. The methodology of this chapter (and paper) is not empirical. I do not want to demonstrate that real economic actors populating free markets support meritocratic ideals. Neither I want to provide evidence that markets are meritocratic. Differently, I aim to conduct a theoretical inquiry to see whether the basic principles of neoliberalism and meritocracy fit with each other. Mijs (2016) pointed out three features of the concept of meritocracy: “(1) careers open to talents; (2) educational opportunity matched to natural ability; (3) achievement as the basis for social inequality” (p. 16). While points 1 and 3 are pillars of the neoliberal view of the market as de-regulated and without barriers to individual initiative, point 2 could be problematic if one argues that the state should guarantee the match between educational opportunity and natural ability. However, nothing prevents equality of opportunity from being interpreted in its formal sense, meaning that citizens can have and should have legal rights to protect them from discrimination and barriers to access, but no (or little) redistributive action should be involved to guarantee substantial equality of opportunity. In this formal sense, neoliberalism and meritocracy overlap in their basic understanding of a just society. Otherwise, we can refer to that imaginary scenario I mentioned in the Introduction, i.e., substantial equality of opportunity guaranteed to every citizen of Western society. Again, the discussion here is at the theoretical level. I am not interested in proving that markets are meritocratic (as a matter of fact, they are not, as I will show below). I want to understand if the meritocratic discourse fits well with the neoliberal view of markets and society.

If we analyze the logic at the basis of meritocracy, the connection with neoliberalism seems evident. By the logic of meritocracy, I mean its contractual feature. The idea that merit deserves a reward can be expressed as follows: X has the right to receive Y because they have done Z, and the contract states that Y must be given to whoever does Z. While meritocracy refers to a generic social contract (the idea that society should reward merit), mutually advantageous contracts between individuals in free markets could be included in it. Not surprisingly, merit fits well into performance-incentive schemes based on (neo)liberal economic theory (Grant, 2011; Cowen and Tabarrok, 2015; Bruni et al., 2019). The Latin etymology of merit, meritus, means ‘wage’ and is related to the verb mereri, ‘to earn, deserve, acquire, gain’ (Arrow et al., 2000). And there is more. The contractual logic of meritocracy also fits with one of its main goals (i.e., to ‘incentivize effort’; Mijs, 2016, p. 17). Supporters of unregulated markets, such as Hayek, explain the importance of incentivizing effort through meritocratic belief: “few circumstances will do more to make a person energetic and efficient than the belief that it depends chiefly on him whether he will reach the goals he has set for himself” (Hayek, 1998, p. 74). Meritocratic discourse seems the ideal ally of the neoliberal view of markets.

Enough with the theoretical compatibility between meritocracy and neoliberalism. All these elements of similarity, in fact, hide a profound difference that can potentially undermine the neoliberal meritocratic discourse. I am referring to the fact, mentioned multiple times in this paper, that markets are non-meritocratic places (Bruni and Santori, 2022). This is true for at least two reasons. On the one hand, the logic of meritocracy is not the only one that rules the market, as individual success is also tied to non-meritocratic factors (luck, circumstances, and/or cooperation; see Frank, 2016). Success and merit are not synonyms. If you are running a successful business, this might be due in part to your effort and other factors beyond your control. On the other hand, “the illusion of the logic of merit brings people to believe that the object of merit in the market is the individual effort or the worth of individual actions. However […] the object of merit consists more of the benefits we can procure to others rather than the intrinsic worth of our actions” (Bruni and Santori, 2022, p. 423). In other words, in economic agents, neoliberal meritocratic discourse produces the false belief that their actions will be rewarded according to their individual efforts. However, in the market, the value of my actions can be valued only by the recipient of the good or service I am producing/selling and vice versa. As Hayek (1998) noted in his chapter on social justice, the query regarding a ‘just price’ or ‘just wage’ that acknowledges and rewards individual effort is often frustrated in a market society. Free markets work with the logic of mutual advantage, as signaled by the spontaneous order of the price mechanism: it is not my individual effort but rather the value that you give to it that determines the degree of my success (and, therefore, the social value of my actions).

Neoliberal meritocratic discourse provides moral legitimization for free markets, arguing that merit is always rewarded, while this is not the case. Problems 1 and 2 are the products of this dyscrasia. Problem 1 is about the legitimization of wealth inequalities. This happens because of the deserving status attributed to the few ‘meritorious’ owners of big fortunes and their interest in legitimizing it: “The discourse of meritocracy and entrepreneurship often seems to serve primarily as a way for the winners in today’s economy to justify any level of inequality whatsoever while peremptorily blaming the losers for lacking talent, virtue, and diligence” (Piketty, 2020, p. 2). Additionally, as a direct consequence of meritocratic discourse applied to markets, ‘people will tolerate major inequalities of material positions only if they believe that the different individuals get on the whole what they deserve […] they support market order only because (and so long as) the thought that the differences in remuneration corresponded roughly to the difference of merit’ (Hayek, 1998, p. 74). In economics (Bénabou and Tirole, 2006) and social psychology (Jost et al., 2003), this has been described as the ‘meritocratic deficit’ (Littler, 2017). The market’s meritocratic game’s losers are more willing to accept inequalities because they consider them fair game outcomes.

Problem 2 relates to the reduction of social value to market value. Nobel laureate for economics Amartya Sen wrote that “the idea of meritocracy has many merits, but clarity is not among them” (2000, p. 5). As Mijs (2016) showed, the meaning that societies have attributed to merit has changed constantly. Today, as the market sphere is invading other social spheres (Sandel, 2012), to say that free markets reward merit implies that the content of meritorious actions lies mainly in their economic dimension. Problem 1 aggravates this phenomenon, showing that the wealthy meritorious are interested in supporting neoliberal meritocratic discourse—they decide what merit and social value are—and the non-wealthy non-meritorious tend to accept it. It is difficult to judge the magnitude of this tendency within Western societies but looking at the literature, many scholars observe this as a growing and worrying phenomenon (Littler, 2017; Rottenberg, 2018; Sandel, 2020; Piketty, 2020).

The simple recognition that the merit is reduced to the economic dimension does not suggest a unique response from scholars. There are those, such as Sandel (2020), who integrally oppose the economic sphere to save the social sphere. If the market is meritocratic (and we know it is not), let it be: what we need to do is preserve social spheres from the invasion of neoliberal meritocratic discourse. Another response is to render the market more equitable, where merit is recognized as one of the many other factors contributing to economic success (Frank, 2016). In this sense, Bruni and Santori (2022) proposed a more comprehensive notion of merit for markets, drawing on Rawls’s idea of legitimate expectations. The subsequent sections will explore a feminist response to Problems 1 and 2 caused by neoliberal meritocratic discourse.

Care and careocracy

What care?

The main critique advanced by feminist scholars of neoliberalism concerning care can be divided into three sub-critiques: neoliberal theories (1) separate care from serious economic activities (work), (2) romanticize care and care work, de-emphasizing the efforts related to care activities and overemphasizing their gratuitous and spontaneous nature, and/or (3) reduce care to an activity whose feminine traits make it unsuitable for men. According to Nelson (2016), some feminist economics scholarship, while rightly trying to foster the social value of care, is still trapped within the neoliberal discourse:

Much feminist work so far on the economics of care, while extremely important and revolutionary in its own right, risks implicitly reinforcing an association of care with only women and with only women’s traditional activities. The central image has been one of ‘mothering’ (Ruddik, 1989; Noddings, 2012). The focus has been on hands-on care of children, the sick and the elderly. Men who participate in hands-on carework, then, while they may be recognized, are treated as somewhat anomalous. What is more, an implicit—and sometimes explicit—belief is expressed that the traditionally masculine realms of business and commerce (as well as sports and warfare) are in some essential way orthogonal to or inimical to care. (p. 1)

Without pretense of originality, I claim that the neoliberal logic can not only be contrasted when highlighting the importance of care but also primarily when inquiring into what care is. This also avoids identifying care with self-sacrifice, an association that historically hid the exploitations suffered mostly by women (Nelson, 2016).

No agreement has been reached in the literature about the definition of care. Is care a dispositional attitude (Noddings, 2012), a practice (Tronto, 1993), a relational labor (Ruddik, 1989), a motivational virtue (Slote 2001), or a moral theory alternative to virtue ethics (Hamington and Sander-Staudt, 2011)? To avoid entering into the controversy, Cambridge Dictionary more prudently defines care as the protection of someone or something and the provision of what that person or thing needs. Even within this broader definition, it is not clear if care pertains to interpersonal relations or an element that should be considered within social, political, and economic institutions. The latter understanding was advocated in The Care Manifesto (The Care Collective 2020). This manifesto was written by scholars (The Care Collective) working in different disciplines and aimed to place care at the center of the political and social debate. They argue for reconsidering the neoliberal narrative, which excludes and undermines the role of care in our societies. Putting aside the recipes proposed (they included scales ranging from the global to the local, showing which institutions present obstacles to care and what alternative fostering care would look like), the manifesto made a significant theoretical point: “We want to show how our capacity to care is interdependent and cannot be realized in an uncaring world” (The Care Collective, 2020, p. 6). However, if care is a human capacity or activity, this should not prevent us from seeing the institutional contexts in which care activities occur.

Disentangling the interpersonal dimension of care from the institutional one would create a problem of inequality and one of exclusion. If care is considered without its institutional background, then wealthy people could be said to care more than non-wealthy ones because of philanthropy, beneficence, or, for the supporters of neoliberalism, the trickle-down mechanism. In this version, care would further legitimize the inequalities produced within free markets (notwithstanding that the term care would be too broad to detect gender inequalities within and outside the household). On the other hand, when the institutional perspective is considered without an adequate interpersonal account of care, the risk is that someone will decide who and what kind of care are worthy of consideration (and who and what are excluded).Footnote 5

All things considered, I will provide my own tentative definition of care with some caveats:

Definition: To care for someone or something means to be intentionally concerned for its well-being and to act accordingly.

Caveat 1: The concern above implies gathering as much information as possible about the care recipient. In the case of caring for people, including oneself, this means trying to obtain subjective (Kahneman and Krueger, 2006) and objective (Sen, 2008) information regarding their well-being (Folbre and Nelson, 2000; Bruni and Porta, 2005).

Caveat 2: As far as possible, the care recipient should be actively involved in the caring activity.

Caveat 3: Care cannot be an impersonal activity. The caregiver and care receiver should be capable of reciprocal recognition.

Caveat 4: Care does not pertain exclusively to the private sphere (household) or a category of people (women).

Caveat 5: Care is not something done instrumentally (to obtain something) or prudentially (I care about you today because I might need you tomorrow), but it is also compatible with some form of reward (even monetary, such as in paid care work).

Caveat 6: Care implies effort, but not (necessarily) self-sacrifice.

Caveat 7: The value of care is not quantitative (the more recipients there are, the higher the value of the care).

Caveat 8: Care can be received and provided at any institutional level.

My definition of care fits with the ones mentioned in the literature. Moreover, its caveats bridge the interpersonal and institutional perspectives, overcoming the gender problem emphasized by feminist economists. More importantly, it becomes more evident how today’s neoliberalism and neoliberal meritocratic discourse hampers care. First, the merit rewarded by free markets is precisely quantitative: “Our technocratic version of meritocracy severs the link between merit and moral judgment. In the domain of the economy, it simply assumes that the common good is defined by GDP and that the value of people’s contribution consists in the market value of the goods or services they sell” (Sandel, 2020, p. 28). Second, merit in free markets is tied to individualism and impersonal/instrumental relationships (see the logic of merit described in the previous section). Third, non-paid and paid care activities are respectively considered non-economic or second-order economic activities and, therefore, non-meritorious or less meritorious ones. Fourth, neoliberal meritocratic discourse assigns primacy to the subjective and well-being over the objective; that is to say, the economic agents know what is good for them, and every objective judgment makes the market less ‘free.’

All things considered, a feminist response to neoliberal meritocratic discourse could be the replacement of neoliberalism with my notion of care. In the following sub-section, I will show how careocracy and its discourse can only partially solve the problems they want to address.

Careocracy

Like the neoliberal meritocratic discourse that aims to convince that meritocracy is possible in free markets, the care meritocratic discourse should prove that meritocracy is possible in a society grounded on (my definition of) care. The term I use for this scenario is careocracy. To imagine what a careocracy might look like and if and how it can solve problems 1 and 2 related to neoliberal meritocratic discourse, we might think of a society in which free markets and the dimension of work no longer take center stage.

Recently, Nedelksy and Malleson (2021) argued in favor of the profound rethinking of the relationship between work and care and, therefore, of those between men and women, young and old, and rich and poor. This is not only an essential theme in a world with more older adults living longer but also an exigency due to the rapid advantages of Industry 4.0, which eliminates traditional jobs and leads to the slow requalification of workers. In her ongoing work, Nedelsky (2017) depicts a society where each citizen spends 30 h at work and 30 h on care. The motto is “work part-time for all, care part-time for all,’ but for the change to be real and effective, she argues, it should not be imposed as a top-down governmental measure enforced by the law. Conversely, it has to emerge as a new social norm among the many: ‘informal norms […] public and shared […] enforced by informal sanction […] conformity to a social norm is conditional on expectations about other people’s behaviors or beliefs” (Bicchieri, 2005, p. 8). This social norm should foster the idea that care is not a second-class activity with respect to work but has the same importance and therefore ‘deserves’ the same social respect. In Rawlsian terms, the social basis of self-respect (Rawls, 1993) is grounded not only on work and participation in political life but also on the care activities of each individual.

To understand the features of careocracy, I push further the imaginary society depicted by Nedelsky. As Keynes stated in his famous Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), in 100 years—today we are seven away according to Keynes’s dating—the economic problem will be solved, and we will live in a society of abundance in which there will be no need to work, and free markets will disappear, but the need to care will remain. Will the problems of neoliberal meritocratic discourse survive in such a society?

In this type of society, the logic of merit (see the section “Neoliberal meritocratic discourse”) will be reformulated as follows: X have the right to receive Y because they take care of W, and the contract states that Y should be given to whoever takes care of W. Care will be the cornerstone of public life. The social value will be identified in terms of caring activities, and social (dis)approval will be given to people who (do not) care.

Problem 2 seems to be solved, as social value is not anymore determined by market value. One might see an improvement in terms of this transformation. The logic of merit in careocracy, in fact, will always refer to an action toward others whose hoped-for effects are an improvement on the other’s situation. While neoliberal merit is associated with individualism, as is typical of the rhetoric of the self-made man and homo oeconomicus (which are not by chance both men), care is associated chiefly with the other-oriented perspective, which, as I have argued above, should not be based on sacrifice. It would be a forced inference to argue that the spread of other-oriented perspectives makes people more concerned about social justice and fighting inequalities (i.e., addressing Problem 1). Still, it is fair to argue that the logic of merit expressed in the ‘I care about you’ formula is equally focused on the ‘you’ and ‘I’ rather than on the action and performance of the isolated ‘I.’ On the other hand, the careocratic discourse would reinforce this positive effect of care through an informal social sanction on people who do not value care activity. As neoliberal meritocratic discourse today places social and moral blame on the non-meritorious (i.e., those deserving their unsuccess), the same would happen in a careocracy. This would imply a transition from a society where care is a second-rate activity to one where care is widespread and socially recognized. However, inadequacies emerge regarding the ability of careocracy to adopt my definition of care (see section “Careocracy”) and address Problem 1 generated by the neoliberal meritocratic discourse.

During the transformation from care to careocracy, the dimension of care is imbued within a contractual logic typical of meritocracy. To specify in what sense this happens, let us return to the formal definition of the logic of merit as applied to care: X have the right to receive Y because they take care of W, and the contract states that Y should be given to whoever takes care of W. The fact that caring for W gives the right to Y implicitly questions X’s motivation for performing the act of care. The contractual logic somehow undermines the act of care, placing some degree of instrumentality and prudentialism within a dimension that should not be instrumental and prudential (see caveat 5). To see if this is the case, I step for a moment outside careocracy and I will now consider the debate on the motivations of agents practicing a specific form of care (i.e., care work).

Social psychologists have distinguished intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to categorize the main reasons people make choices and act on them (Deci, 1975; Ryan and Deci, 2000). Due to the neoclassical turn in economics, which is the science behind neoliberalism, economists mostly rely on extrinsically motivated behaviors—“those that are executed because they are instrumental to some separable consequence’ (Ryan and Deci, 2000, p. 65)—whereas they tend to ignore intrinsically motivated behaviors that ‘are performed out of interest and satisfy the innate psychological needs for competence and autonomy” (Ryan and Deci, 2000, p. 65). Economists only consider monetary incentives as appropriate tools for interacting with human actions grounded in extrinsic motivations. As pointed out by Bruni and Santori (2018), “incentives tend to control or even manipulate individual actions, undermining (crowding-out) human autonomy and intrinsic motivation (i.e. the internalized reasons for action)” (p. 639; see also Frey, 1997). If one associate care with intrinsic motivations, then careocracy seems to place extrinsic motivation within the act of care, which inevitably undermines it.

The crowding-out effect (Frey, 1997) has been examined within the debate on people’s motivations in the care services market (Folbre and Nelson, 2000; Bruni and Sugden, 2008). Despite an internal debate between them, in two joint papers (Folbre and Nelson, 2000; Bruni and Sugden, 2008), Bruni, Folbre, Nelson, and Sugden rejected the idea of ‘getting more by paying less’ (Heyes, 2005) and letting more intrinsically motivated people enter the job market of care services. According to Folbre and Nelson (2000, 2009), this idea excludes intrinsically motivated women and men who want to work in the care sector and achieve other purposes, such as sustaining their families. Similarly, Bruni and Sugden (2008) refused the dichotomy of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations when applied to a market exchange: intrinsic motivation can also flourish within the exchange, where the buyer and the seller intentionally look at the common benefit as the aim (telos). Their message is simple: people can be sincerely concerned for the well-being of the recipient of care even when there is a reward in the form of either a payment, esteem (Brennan and Petit, 2004) or a high social and/or political position.

What has just been presented is in line with caveat 5. The logic of merit applied to care work does not undermine the non-prudential and non-instrumental dimensions of care activity. However, this focus on care work activities only looks at the interpersonal level of care, ignoring the institutional background. We are back to careocracy, which represents an insurmountable obstacle for care (but not for care work, which will disappear) as I defined it. In a social context ruled by careocratic discourse, in fact, extrinsic motivations occupy a too big part of the social sphere to avoid the crowding-out effect. In other words, if the dominant social discourse supports careocracy, people will be naturally driven to think about the rewards (or penalties) they can receive from performing care. Hence, if the consequences are a huge increment in care practices and, expectably, a betterment of the quality of life, the quality of care services will be lower because they will lack that degree of authenticity and intrinsic motivation (the opposite of prudentialism and instrumentality), which, as explained, are essential features of care.

I remind the reader that we are using Keynesian examples of a society of abundance in which care substitutes for work. I am theoretically suggesting that careocracy would not be a desirable feminist response to neoliberal meritocratic discourse. The impossibility of solving Problem 1 provides further proof for my thesis. Enforcing an etiquette of social disapprobation on people who do not take care seriously or on people who consider it a second-order activity can help transform contemporary work-driven societies into care-driven ones. However, as explained in Luigi Einaudi’s (Bobbio, 1983) theory of critical point (punto critico), after a certain threshold, each social and economic policy, even those that emerge from the bottom, brings unintended consequences, including the opposite to those it was expected to realize. Regarding the careocratic discourse, harsh blame placed on the non-caring would correspond to high social praise for caring. However, in such a case, care would become another instrument to separate the few from the many, the successful from the losers, and legitimize inequality. This is the same process described by Young (1958): in the transition from old aristocracy to bourgeois meritocracy. Young’s dystopia convincingly characterizes merit as the battering ram of the bourgeoisie that broke down the walls of the aristocratic–feudal hierarchical world before becoming a veil that concealed the aristocratic temperament of the bourgeois elite. The theory of the elite (Pareto, 1935; Mosca, 1939) explains that a class of the few rules every social group over a class of non-elites: this very same dynamic might be expected to play out when neoliberal meritocratic discourse is substituted with the careocratic one. Problem 1, deeply connected to meritocracy, will remain. Speculatively, it can also be argued that this elite will decide what counts as care and what does not, what should be rewarded and what should not, and what social value is and what it is not, re-proposing the exclusion and inequality problems.

Something more can be said about how careocracy addresses Problem 2. I showed how Sandel (2020) criticized contemporary neoliberal meritocratic discourse because social value (i.e., the object of merit) is reduced to market value. While I agree with the structure of Sandel’s critique, I disagree with its content. The problem is not the inference that social value equals market value; rather, it is the reductionism implied in confining social value to one dimension. If you substitute market value with care value, as in my example of careocracy, the problems still endure. Careocracy, while denying the nexus of social value equals market value, promotes the nexus of social value equals care value, recalling the reductionism of Problem 2. This, in turn, brings back Problem 1.

Therefore, if one wants to look for a feminist alternative to neoliberal meritocratic discourse, careocracy, as expressed through my fictional society, is not the path to follow. What is left then? As I will show in the next section, the clue to solving this conundrum is in pluralizing the mono-dimensional nature of the term associated with cratos, refusing both meritcratos (meritocracy) or carecratos (careocracy). We should rather advocate for an isocratos (isocracy).

Isocracy and isocratic discourse

When related to power (cratos), both neoliberal merit and care fail to avoid Problems 1 and 2. Luckily, we are not forced to accept the’either/or’ perspective. We only assumed that was the case because I placed Nedelsky’s example within extreme consequences (i.e., a world without free markets and work). However, we live in pluralistic societies, so we are not forced to choose between free markets and care; we can select both to undermine the problems related to neoliberal meritocracy discourse. We are looking for a narrative/discourse that maintains free markets while renouncing neoliberal meritocracy and, consequently, including care. To observe this narrative, I will draw a parallel between my inquiry and Bellanca’s recent attempt regarding isocracy (2019). According to Bellanca (2019), a society where freedom and equality are realized the most is an isocratic society where people share equal power. About a concrete utopian project, Bellanca (2019) stated the following:

We need therefore to imagine and design a type of society where the citizens are endowed with as much equality of power as possible in any situation. This type of society is what I call ‘isocracy’. In an isocracy, we still have institutions like the market, organizations like the state and the firm; we still have conflicts between groups, individuals and institutional spheres, inequalities, resistance to shared improvements and unsustainable environmental situations. But if the power in its main expressions is levelled, anything which is negative for somebody is especially prone to being modified. (p. 4)

To achieve this aim, democracy is not sufficient. In ancient Athens, the inequalities in political power were compensated by inequalities in economic or juridical power, so the wealthiest could control the courts or the assembly (Bellanca, 2019, pp. 102–106) and vice versa; similarly, according to Bellanca, we should imagine a system of balances and counterbalances that constantly pushes society toward isocracy. Why is the discourse of isocracy interesting when understanding my inquiry into feminist critiques of neoliberal meritocratic discourse?

To me, the most convincing point of Bellanca’s isocracy is that it acknowledges pluralism in the realms of power. Work and care taken together avoid the risk of reductionism in social value (Problem 2). The isocratic discourse not only advocates for a social value that is the combination of how different institutions attribute social values and distribute social rewards (balances and counterbalances). More importantly, societies should be organized in a way in which what their institutions regard as social value is discussed by its citizens (and not arbitrarily decided by some groups or the elite). The topic of care in free markets is an example. If presented with arguments from feminist scholarship (including the ones advanced in this paper), citizens might decide that work, paid care work, and unpaid care have the same (or similar) social value. Contemporarily, care activities outside the market could be seen and rewarded not as second-rate activities but as an important dimension of social life that deserves more recognition. In general, isocratic discourse needs citizens to discuss how power and social value are conceived and distributed between and within institutions.

Moreover, isocracy helps us understand why pluralism in social value sources reduces inequalities’ legitimization (Problem 1). The most interesting part of an isocratic point of view is not that it eliminates inequalities (this would be utopian) but that it erases the moral reasons for the endurance of inequalities. It is not utopian to argue that a discourse that delegitimizes inequalities activates moral energies and social, political, and economic mechanisms to contrast them. Isocracy, in fact, places under discussion the first part of the logic of neoliberal meritocracy and careocracy: X has the right to receive Y. To be isocratic, the formula should look like this: according to the citizens’ discussion regarding institution A, X have a right to receive Y from A, as long as they perform some action Z/care of W/… This implies that isocracy within a single institution legitimates differences (X can be given Y for different reasons), but not inequalities. The pluralization of the sources of social power and social legitimization between and within institutions brings horizontalization in contrast with the vertical and separative ideologies of neoliberal meritocracy and careocracy.

I claim that isocracy can disentangle free markets from neoliberal meritocratic discourse, including the dimension of care. What are the advantages of this transition? In addition to providing adequate answers to Problems 1 and 2, let me consider two additional elements mostly related to economic theory and practice. First, an anthropological view that recognizes care as an essential dimension of the human being overcomes the picture of the economic agent as exclusively driven by self-interest. While homo oeconomicus has been disempowered by many studies in behavioral economics (Thaler and Sunstein, 2003; Thaler and Ganser, 2015), psychology (Akerlof and Shiller, 2010), and feminist economics (Nelson 1995, 2016; Fineman and Dougherty, 2005), his presence is still thunderous and bulky in the academic sphere and in the social imaginary. Adding the non-prudential and non-instrumental concerns associated with care to the contractual logic of markets makes the description of economic agents and their primary motivations more realistic and accurate. To employ a feminist economics expression, this is a way to go ‘beyond the economic man’.

There is a second advantage that the isocratic discourse would bring to the economic discipline and practice. In contemporary economics dominated by neoliberal discourse, common goods (commons), goods that are not excludable but rivals, are devoted very little space, while their importance is inexorably growing concerning the endurance of our societies.Footnote 6 While important research has been conducted on this topic (Coman, 2011; Hardin, 2009; Ostrom, 1990; Nordhaus, 1994; Dasgupta, 2021), it mostly started from economic anthropology that relies on Homo oeconomicus. It is unsurprising to find people in favor of trusting the management of the commons to the most ‘deserving’ or those more ‘capable’ of avoiding tragedy and free-riding (Hardin, 2009). However, Coman (2011) and Ostrom (1990) taught that there is no definitive solution or model to follow. Neither are there ‘experts’ to whom we can trust commons. Conversely, among some studies on managing and collectively preserving the commons, the interpersonal and institutional dimensions of care are indicated as possible solutions (Rotondi and Santori, 2023). Therefore, I argue that a society in which care is legitimized and socially recognized within free markets will also be well equipped to govern the commons. However, this is not the place to further explore the pattern generated by the interaction between isocracy and the management of the commons.

Final remarks

This paper puts forward a feminist critique and alternative to neoliberal meritocratic discourse. Isocratic discourse, advocating for movement toward an isocratic society, is a counter-narrative that attaches social value to the dimension of care within free markets. More generally, it is an isocracy when citizens start to discuss what counts as social value and how it should be rewarded in the main institutions of society.

My contribution is theoretical, working on abstract ideas and concepts. It might be argued that it shows a tendency for abstractness: general concepts, imaginary societies, and somewhat vague remarks concerning public discussion. These dimensions are too broad and vague to be captured, measured, or used to design a social policy. That said, the discourses we choose to understand and structure our social lives significantly impact the social space in which we coexist.

Scholars who approach neoliberal meritocratic discourse recognize that its most powerful force lies in the attempt to occupy people’s social imaginaries and narrations. From this, it becomes necessary to propose alternatives that bring biodiversity (Dasgupta, 2021) into the social public debate, which, in some countries more than others, is ideologically dominated by a few ideas. To move toward an isocratic society, we need to enlarge our moral vocabulary of the social sphere. This paper attempted to do so by introducing isocracy to overcome the marginalization of care by the neoliberal meritocratic narrative. Future research should bring more terms to the debate (human dignity, needs, digital citizenship, gender equality, intersectionality, ecologism). The only way to deal with cratos while avoiding annexed problems is to pluralize its sources.