Equality by lot

Drawing Lots: From Egalitarianism to Democracy in Ancient Greece, a new book by Irad Malkin and Josine Blok, has just been published by Oxford University Press. The book is a major landmark in the study of sortition and its association with democracy. The book aims to show, via a review of the history of the application of allotment in the ancient Greek world, that Greek democracy grew out of an egalitarian mindset, a mindset that was expressed, as well as presumably reinforced, by the widespread application of allotment in different contexts over a centuries-long period.¹

Before the lot became political, drawing lots and establishing a mindset of equal chances and portions were already ubiquitous during the centuries before Cleisthenes laid the foundations for democracy in 508. They touched upon a whole spectrum of life and death, both private and public. They expressed values of individuality, fairness, and equality.

Malkin considers his new book as the first comprehensive treatment of classical allotment. He points out a rather astounding fact – allotment, “a significant institution that permeated the lives of Greeks during the archaic period and impacted how they saw human society and structured their expectations and behaviors”, has received very little attention by classicists.

Although classics is the oldest academic discipline, no one to date has written a comprehensive study of the drawing of lots in ancient Greece. Faced with much fewer sources of knowledge than other historical disciplines and taking note of the continuous and exhaustive work to extricate the maximum from them, one would think that no new fields are left to explore. Our dialogue with the past is ever-changing, but here we have an entire field of inquiry that has never received sufficient attention or recognition. The last word on the subject in book form was Election by Lot at Athens, the first draft of which had been written before the discovery of the “Constitution of Athens” (Athenaion politeia, a fundamental text about the Athenian regime). This excellent monograph by James Wycliffe Headlam was published in 1891 and was chronologically restricted to Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries. The studies that followed Headlam, such as those by Mogens H. Hansen and Bernard Manin, never attempted anything comprehensive. They, too, are restricted to politics while entirely missing out on centuries of the use of the lot before it became relevant to democracy.²

For those whose main interest is in political theory, Malkin’s emphasis on the value of equality as underlying the entire Greek democracy and which both feeds and is nourished by the institution of sortition is the book’s most important contribution. While modern electoralist societies are torn between an overt egalitarian mindset (one-person-one-vote) and an elitist mindset which lies in the shadows (gotta-keep-the-riff-raff-in-check), the Greek hoi polloi seem to have fully committed themselves to political equality³. The Greek elites, who kept arguing that the ship of state needs the most qualified pilot, found, it seems, that this argument had very little resonance with the masses.

Thus Malkin hits the mark when he writes:

We need to understand the Greek world of values, the frame of reference, and the egalitarian mindset associated with the lot. These features made its wide-ranging use possible and desirable in antiquity, as it may be today.

However, the argument here could have been more incisive. Today, as with the Greeks, the main carriers of the elitist mindset are (naturally enough) the elites. Thus the main barrier to widespread adoption of the egalitarian mindset in electoralist society is the control those elites have over this society. Sortition in the modern world should fulfill both its functions in the Greek world that were identified by Malkin. It should be seen both as a decision-making tool for increasing democratic power in society and as an ideological tool for increasing the adoption of democratic values in society.

In particular, it is crucial to note that the lack of an egalitarian mindset is not limited to those who reject sortition, but is in fact shared by most modern sortition advocates. The general spirit of those who do advocate sortition-based reforms of the modern elections-based system, including those whose work is mentioned approvingly by Malkin, is very far from the radical egalitarian Greek spirit which Malkin documents and highlights. Those proposed reforms do not reject the “top-down rule […] drawing its authority from “the bottom”” of electoralism. Their aim is not to eliminate top and bottom and replace electoralism with an egalitarian – i.e., democratic – government. Rather, due to concerns about the stability of the top-down rule, the proposers aim to shore up the top-down rule by “giving people a voice”, and in this way alleviate the frustration of those at the bottom with those at the top and with the electoralist system that generates those strata.

Therefore as a matter of tactics, “reintroduc[ing] the lot into politics merely as a mechanism à la grecque“, a tactic that Malkin disapproves of, may very well be the best way to proceed. Such reintroduction may very well be the best way toward establishing the egalitarian mindset that Malkin calls for. And indeed, various attempts or proposals for “adapting sortition” to the modern situation or creating a mixed electoralist-sortitionist system are in fact no more than attempts to undermine sortition’s potential as a tool for radical democratization.

¹ This very brief review is based on the introduction to the book, sent to me by Prof. Malkin. (The book itself is unfortunately priced at an absurd $104.30, after 30%-off discount.)

² I will note that, as excellent as Headlam’s classical scholarship may have been, his political analysis in On Election by Lot at Athens is far from persuasive and is clearly encumbered by his own aristocratic prejudices.

³ But not to economic equality. In this context it is interesting to see Malkin mentioning work by Marxist classicists on equality in the Greek world – work that Malkin says was unduly ignored.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Sortition | Tagged: democracy, greece, History, politics |