Back in 1999, Nicholas Lemann published a remarkable book about the American class system. The first half of “The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy” chronicled how a few idealistic mid-century college administrators sought to use a standardized test to remake the composition of the Ivy Leagues, and thus to replace the New England WASP ascendancy that controlled the country’s ruling institutions with a new national elite made up of bright people from every class, region and ethnicity. He called it a kind of “quiet, planned coup d’etat.”

The new elite thus installed was, according to Mr. Lemann, well-meaning and ostensibly liberal, but in fact risk-averse, self-interested, out of touch with the rest of the country, temperamentally unsuited for democratic politics, and fated to preside over widening American inequality, offering its own achievement as a kind of fig leaf to hide the larger failures of the system. In the second half of the book, Mr. Lemann used a few exemplary life stories to show how the new meritocrats uncritically identified their own progress through an educational hierarchy with the cause of equal opportunity itself, and to gently remind us that these two goals were, in fact, not only not one and the same, but in many respects incompatible.

Mr. Lemann was going after the meritocracy at its strongest rather than its weakest point. Of course his book acknowledges what everybody knows: that an industry exists to help the children of the wealthy game the admissions system; that meritocracy is inevitably compromised by the special exemptions made for athletes, the children of alumni, and set-asides for racial groups that would otherwise be almost entirely unrepresented at elite colleges; and that the twin policies of affirmative action and alumni preference limit the representation of the two groups that would otherwise make up a much larger portion of every freshman class — Asians and Jews. But the real problem with meritocracy, Mr. Lemann argued, is not that we don’t have enough of it, but that the ideal itself might be an empty one. Despite the compromises and hypocrisies built into the admission process, plenty of high-achieving students from modest backgrounds make it into our elite colleges, just as the SAT-boosters intended. The problem was much deeper: Turning education into a race for worldly spoils was, according to Mr. Lemann, “destructive and anti-democratic,” and it “warped the sensibilities” and “distorted the educations” of those who ran in it.

Something of the spirit of Mr. Lemann’s critique of meritocracy presides over “The Runner” (New Press, 192 pages, $22.95), David Samuels’s account of the misadventures of James Hogue, “the Ivy League impostor.” (In truth, Hogue is one of many such hucksters, but his story won special attention after Mr. Samuels detailed it in a 2001 New Yorker article.) Hogue was a 29-year-old drifter, petty thief, and inmate in the Utah correctional system who in 1989 successfully reinvented himself as “Alexi Indris-Santana,” a self-educated half-Mexican-American ranch hand with a 1410 SAT score, who could run a 4-minute mile (as Hogue really could do), and who had abstained from organized education since moving with his mother from Topanga, Calif., to Switzerland in 1978.

Once he arrived at Princeton, Hogue, who had previously attended the University of Wyoming (from which he did not graduate) on a running scholarship, earned straight A’s, and made it into the college’s most exclusive eating club. His peers talked about him as a natural candidate for a Rhodes scholarship. He was, as Mr. Samuels puts it, widely acknowledged to be “easily the most interesting member of the Princeton class of 1993.” Eventually, he was caught and expelled; he went to Colorado to continue conning people, and then back to jail, for a raft of property thefts he committed there.

Hogue begins as an enigma; by the end of the book he is an enigma onto which Mr. Samuels has pinned various portentous epithets. “He exposed the emptiness and pretence at the heart of the so-called American meritocracy.” He was “exhibit A in my personal catalog of reasons why the Ivy League should be abolished.” His lies were “deeply rooted in the Western religious tradition that holds that believers are born in Christ and leave behind their prior sinful nature,” and directly analogous to “what our Founding Fathers did when they declared themselves independent from the authority of King George III.”

Mr. Samuels’s brief against the Ivy League has less to do with a concern for political equality, however, than with his ambivalence about his own passage through Harvard and Princeton. Harvard delivered Mr. Samuels from his parochial fate in Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community; the day he received his entrance into Harvard, Mr. Samuels writes, “the dark clouds of obedience parted and a heavenly finger reached down and touched my forehead. I was transformed into a living, breathing person, an individual with the God-like ability to be whoever I want to be.”

Mr. Samuels seems both enamored with and disdainful of the Ivies’ credentialing power. Again and again, Mr. Samuels indicts the Ivy League colleges for being institutions of privilege rather than citadels of Enlightenment learning, in which the best and brightest are imbued with the highest values. Of course, the schools have always aspired to be the latter — and have accomplished the task for many students — while still ratifying existing privilege with ruthless effectiveness.

Mr. Samuels, like Mr. Lemann, is disturbed by a system that gives a small handful of students, the vast majority of whom began life with advantages, a kind of lifetime membership to a prosperous elite. But he is so hung up on the ways that meritocracy fails to live up to its own equal-opportunity standards that he doesn’t consider the more radical argument: The real difficulty arises not when the system fails, but when it succeeds.

The term “meritocracy” was coined in 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young to name a chilling dystopian future, not a positive ideal. In this future, a cognitive elite would be identified and enshrined by scientific testing, and, confident that the system which exalted them was just, would feel no obligation to the losers in the supposedly free and fair competition. Over time, this elite would grow increasingly remote from the non-elite, and preside over a world ever more polarized between the haves and have-nots. Even if — indeed, especially if — this competition was perfectly fair, Young argued, the results would be monstrous.

Michael Young’s book was a kind of science fiction, of course, and it doesn’t exactly describe our world as we know it. Our economy is open to innovation from anywhere, and still affords space for people with initiative to prosper. Those who rise through corporate America or start new enterprises come from state colleges and the Ivy League alike.

But the Ivy League mania that overtakes a certain class of parents is not without its justification: The competition is intense because the rewards can be vast, and because the penalties for failure can be even greater. The people who make it through this gantlet tend to be smart enough and cynical enough to know what Mr. Samuels knows about the Ivy League and the nature of equal opportunity in America. This produces within the institutions “a somewhat oxymoronic liberal elitism,” as Mr. Lemann called it, “a fierce competitive protectiveness toward their privileged position combined with discomfort over their role as a generator of wondrous economic advancement for their graduates.”

So we have our meritocrats: well-meaning but out of touch, full of amour propre, but weirdly self-loathing, anxious to identify themselves with the virtue of conscience, and yet cynical about everything, especially themselves. Mr. Samuels’ strange book, which chronicles his strong sense of identification with an Ivy League impostor, intends to use his own personal story to illuminate the mind-set of this curious tribe, and manages to do so with even greater fidelity than he perhaps intended.

Mr. Yang is a writer living in Jersey City, N.J.