Bernard Manin, 1951-2024

Posted on November 3, 2024 by peterstone

Hello All,

I just received the news that Bernard Manin has passed away. I learned this through Melissa Schwartzberg, one of his many excellent students. Sortition fans probably know that Manin’s book The Principles of Representative Government (1996) was one of the first major works to consider the respective democratic credentials of sortition and election. Contrary to what many suggest, he did not share Aristotle’s view that election was inherently aristocratic; rather, he suggested in his book that election was inherently Janus-faced, with both aristocratic and democratic dimensions. His book also raised the important question how sortition came to be eclipsed by election as a democratic selection mechanism. Beyond this book, Manin made many important contributions to debates about deliberation, representation, and other central topics in contemporary political theory.

I only met Manin once, at a workshop at Sciences Po organized by Gil Delannoi. He had many kind words about my book on lotteries for which I was very grateful. Sorry I did not have more opportunity for conversation with him. RIP, Professor Manin.

Filed under: Books, Elections, Sortition |

6 Responses

Anonymous, on November 4, 2024 at 11:38 am said:

That’s very sad news — we will be running an obituary in the first issue of the Journal of Sortition. I was at the workshop that Peter mentioned and presented a paper arguing that Bernard was wrong about the reason for the triumph of election and demise of sortition (which he dismissed with a Gallic shrug).

https://www.intrasformazione.com/index.php/intrasformazione/article/view/311

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Yoram Gat, on November 5, 2024 at 5:05 am said:

The question of why, contrary to standard electoralist dogma, and contrary to modern “common sense”, elections produce an oligarchy – rule by elite – is the main theoretical social question of our times.

For anyone who is interested in getting the profound, theoretically sound answer to this question, Manin’s “pure theory of elections” (oftern referred to as “The principle of distinction”, although Manin used this term differently), as articulated in his book The Principles of Representative Government is the sine qua non reading material. Most of the verbiage that is being endlessly repeated on sortition is a distraction – deliberate or not – from this concise and perceptive answer.

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Anonymous, on November 5, 2024 at 10:12 am said:

>The question of why, contrary to standard electoralist dogma, and contrary to modern “common sense”, elections produce an oligarchy – rule by elite – is the main theoretical social question of our times.

This has been known since Aristotle and (in modern times) Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy. The question is how best to constrain elite power and make it subject to (informed) public preferences. That is the topic of Manin’s book (which is certainly not a paean to sortition).

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Yoram Gat, on November 7, 2024 at 5:12 am said:

> This has been known […]

What has been asserted before Manin is that elections are oligarchcial. What was missing was a theoretical explanation of this claim.

The view that elections are an oligarchical device was indeed conventional in antiquity. However, no theoretical account of why this is so was provided, or at least none survived. As for Michels – the large number and diversity of the causes that he offers and their circustantial nature make for a poor theory.

Manin’s intellectual achievement is providing a concise theoretical explanation for the oligarchical nature of elections. This had not been done before him.

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Anonymous, on November 7, 2024 at 1:45 pm said:

Yes, that’s true, the assumption being that elections favoured the rich. Manin’s principle of distinction broadens the criteria, as he is clear that it is up to voters to decide which distinctive qualities to privilege. That certainly leads to the rule of the few, but elections allow citizens to choose between the representative claims on offer. To chose a recent example, Trump is vastly richer than Harris, but the Democrats outspent the Republicans by 5-1 (among last minute big donors). So in this example, voters privileged other distinctive qualities, which may even have included policy preferences.

The important consideration is how best to constrain oligarchy — whether for the competing claims to be judged by an “attentive” (mini)public, or by the (attempted) abolition of elite power by some form of lottocracy.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/11/04/trump-vs-harris-fundraising-race-harris-outraised-trump-3-to-1-with-last-pre-election-report/

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Sortition in 2024 | Equality by lot, on December 28, 2024 at 11:08 am said:

[…] Manin, a French researcher who wrote the seminal book The principles of representative government, died in November. Manin set out to problematize elections in the 1990’s, a time when following the collapse of […]

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