A Meretricious Meritocracy | 4 of 5

Corruption of the Professions.

This is the fourth of five posts relating to the modern American meritocracy. The first examines the rise of the postwar meritocracy. The second considers ‘the bureaucratization of everything.’ The third reviews the class consciousness of the professional managerial elite. The fourth surveys the ongoing corruption of the professions. The final installment focuses on the reserve army of the over-credentialed that serves as the praetorian guard for our oligarchy. This series diagnoses American national challenges. Recommendations for reform will be presented in future installments.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity. —George Bernard Shaw

The professions occupy the summit of the meritocratic hierarchy. Intensive training, followed by licensing, is intended to fuse ethics and expertise. Members of professions are shielded from competition. In turn, they are expected to uphold norms higher than those of an unchecked market.

Professional expectations are integral to accounting and finance, health care, architecture and engineering, and the military. Bureaucratization engenders professional pretensions of its own. Continuing education for public, private, and not-for-profit management has become de rigueur.

At the pinnacle of the professions is the law. Its preeminence arises from our founding. Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Marshall, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams are recalled as great lawyer-statesmen. Lincoln was quintessentially American: the self-made man as lawgiver. The legal profession was viewed as having unique obligations, setting formal and informal standards in service of our highest ideals.

Michael Traynor | The State of the Lawyer-Statesman Ideal

The lawyer-statesman tradition is dead as a doornail. Such pillars of the profession were always exceptional—now they are all but extinct. Most Americans would echo the sentiment of Shakespeare’s timeless line: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”