Brains, Breeding, and Knowingness: The Politics of Meritocracy in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract

Abstract This article re-studies fifty-seven interviews with working-class voters conducted between 1958 and 1960 for Robert McKenzie and Allan Silver’s Angels in Marble: Working Class Conservatives in Urban England (1968). It uses these interview transcripts as a window into aspects of the mid-twentieth-century vernacular, specifically vernacular understandings of the social order. It argues that a powerful meritocratic ideology runs through the interviewees’ responses, articulated through the concept of ‘brains’. This discourse revered academic and professionalized forms of knowledge, arguing that they should form the currency of social mobility and the criterion of good political leadership. Hierarchies premised on class, race, and gender could be reinforced if they were perceived to reward those with ‘brains’ and criticized if they did not. However, this vernacular ideology was circumscribed by two other vernacular concepts: ‘breeding’ and ‘knowingness’. ‘Breeding’ celebrated the knowledge that came from elite experiences associated with family and upbringing. ‘Knowingness’ celebrated the knowledge that came from the experience of working-class life. These two concepts set a limit on the appeal of a vernacular meritocracy that based itself around ‘brains’.