Working translation. This page is an English translation of the French page at meriquite.com/comparaisons/. It has not been adopted in English. In the event of any divergence of meaning, the French text prevails. The only English text adopted by the Conférence Nationale d'Expression Citoyenne is the founding doctrinal text, at Debt and Merit.
Facing the doctrines
A doctrine is understood as much by what it rejects as by what it affirms. Five side-by-side comparisons, without polemic: what the other doctrine holds, what is shared, and the precise point of divergence.
Mériquité and liberalism
What liberalism says. Born with Locke, Smith, Montesquieu and Mill, liberalism makes individual freedom its first principle: property, contract, the rule of law, the market. Justice within it is primarily procedural — equal rules for all, and not a guaranteed outcome. The individual is treated within it as the starting point of political analysis.
What they have in common. Attachment to law, the requirement of impersonal rules, the defence of individual effort against arbitrariness.
Where the divergence lies. Mériquité rejects the individual as the starting point. “No one comes from nowhere”: the subject is constituted by what they have received before choosing. Formal freedom without real capabilities is not freedom — “they merely make the child responsible for their own failure”.
Mériquité and socialism
What socialism says. From the utopian socialisms of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Proudhon to Marxian critique, socialism makes inequality a social product and not a fate, and seeks, through collective ownership or redistribution, to correct what the market produces.
What they have in common. The idea that inequality is manufactured, the debt owed to the person who can give nothing in return, the refusal of a society reduced to a market.
Where the divergence lies. Mériquité holds redistribution to be insufficient and at times counterproductive: “redistribution through a captured State only feeds that capture”. It protects merit as a right, where doctrines of solidarity alone dissolve it into the collective.
Mériquité and conservatism
What conservatism says. Since Burke, conservatism has thought of society as an inheritance handed down across the generations, is wary of abstract overhauls and values prudence, continuity, and institutions that have stood the test of time.
What they have in common. Inheritance as the primary political fact, responsibility towards the generations to come, mistrust of the abstract human being.
Where the divergence lies. Mériquité makes receiving a critical act and not an act of fidelity: “To receive is not to obey; to receive is to judge.” The inheritance obliges us to correct and to abolish as much as to preserve. Nothing is improved by mere repetition.
Mériquité and ubuntu
What ubuntu says. Formulated in the Bantu languages of Southern Africa and theorised in the 20th century, ubuntu holds that a person exists only through others — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. It has nourished South African restorative justice and has been taken up in legal texts and by courts.
What they have in common. The relational conception of the person, obligation towards the community, the preference for reparation over revenge.
Where the divergence lies. Mériquité adds a second term that ubuntu does not thematise: merit as a right protected by criteria that are written and verifiable. It also refuses forgiveness as a public policy: “Moral forgiveness belongeth unto the victim—never unto the State”.
Mériquité and humanism
What humanism says. Humanism, a long and plural tradition, places the dignity of the person at the centre and refuses to reduce that person either to an isolated atom or to a cog in a whole that goes beyond them.
What they have in common. Dignity independent of birth, wealth, origin, religion and social condition.
Where the divergence lies. Mériquité situates itself within it rather than opposing it: it restores “the human person as a subject at once free and indebted, able to choose and to judge what they receive, yet never detached from what made them able to choose”.