Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College will hold on Friday, October 16, a free open-to-the-public online seminar titled “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom”. Speakers will include some of the usual suspects such as David van Reybrouck, Hélène Landemore, Selina Thompson and Peter MacLeod along with some names that are not as well associated with sortition. A PDF file is available for download containing some writings about sortition by the speakers and by others.
The Center has also announced that on the day before the seminar, Thursday, October 15, a debate titled “Should federal officeholders in the US should be determined by lottery instead of election?” will take place.
The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: how can we revitalize our democracy? Hannah Arendt knew that democracy is tenuous. In 1970 she famously wrote:
“Representative government is in crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.”
Continue reading
Filed under: Academia, Sortition | 5 Comments »