Middle class, meritocracy and corruption

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to contribute to a theory that explains the material and ideological links between middle class and social groups based on discourse against corruption and for the moralization of politics in contemporary Brazil. For that, I argue that an account on meritocracy should not be reduced to all-encompassing values, such as effort and hard work. In fact, the meritocratic
ideology refers to a specific valuationof competition among individuals, in order to provide a moral justification of the superiority of intellectual activities. As a consequence, this ideology justifies an internal inequality among employees. Furthermore, I suggest that this characteristic of the meritocratic discourse leads the middle class to idealize both the competition among firms in the market and the relationship between the state and the market itself. Finally, I argue that the meritocratic ideology is strenghtened by neoliberal shifts. These theoretical considerations allow us to understand why the middle class is more instrumentalized by political movements based on anti-corruption discourse.