Carson, John. The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Summary
This book examines how merit and intelligence came to be linked within French and American conversations about democracy and equality. It traces the shadow language of inequality that parallels the much more visible rhetoric of republican equality in France and America and how each country developed a particular measure of meritocracy. France and the U.S., in toppling aristocracy and replacing it with shared rights and popular sovereignty, turned toward objective measures to justify merit and, in turn, inequality and access to opportunities. Each promoted broad-based education as a means of making opportunity available, yet at the same time, they also emphasized individual differences in the plural – talents, faculties, and abilities – whether understood as products of nature or nurture, or both. By examining the ways in which Americans and French have measured merit, Carson argues that American political culture was more amenable to the unitary view of intelligence, while the French embraced a more nuanced discourse of intelligence (multiple forms).

Example: The are four key distinctions: 1) America's poliitical culture, which celebrated liberal market approaches, embraced a view that encouraged the free play of telents; while in Frace, which believied in the state, favored state centered solutions to equality and difference. 2) American system was hyper-local and private (until the Civil War); while France was national and universal and relied on rigorous examinations. 3) Racial difference a stronger factor in the U.S. than in France 4) Objective measures (e.g. the IQ Test during WWI) were adopted differently: Americans used it to identify the "talented" while the French used it to identify the "deficient."

See Also: Christopher Loss, Benjamin Elman