Equality by lot

Octave Larmagnac-Matheron writes in the French magazine Philosophie [Original in French. Below is an English version generated by Google Translate with my touch-ups]:

In one of his characteristically thought-provoking Facebook posts, the philosopher Valentin Husson wrote a few days ago: ‘When the world tips towards illiberal democracies and authoritarianism, political courage would dictate that we propose a radical democracy. The only worthwhile one would be sortition (as with lay juries).’ I readily agree with both the observation and the proposal.

Sortition is, I believe, one of the first political ideas I defended in my short life. I remember quite well how I first arrived at this idea, during a high school lesson on Athenian institutions, which offered an overview of the workings of this unique system where members of the legislative and judicial assemblies — the Boule and the Heliaia — were chosen by lot, using a machine called the kleroterion. I was surprised that we used the same word — democracy — for both this system of chance and our own, elective system. Discovering philosophy two years later, I came to the same conclusion. Aristotle wrote that “it is considered democratic for magistracies to be assigned by lot and oligarchic for them to be elective” (Politics). Centuries later, Enlightenment philosophers wholeheartedly agree. Montesquieu wrote: “Suffrage by lot is in the nature of democracy. Lot is a way of electing that offends no one; it leaves each citizen a reasonable hope of serving their country” (The Spirit of the Laws). Rousseau agreed: “The way of lot is more in the nature of democracy” (The Social Contract).

Intrigued by these short phrases, which didn’t seem to bother many people, I then embarked on further reading. Allow me to mention two works that particularly struck me at the time. First, Bernard Manin’s Principles of Representative Government (1995). The philosopher recounts the rise of an electoral system that conquered the world following the great revolutions and clearly explains the aristocratic character of this regime that usurped the name of democracy. Next came Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2005), whose impassioned prose undeniably sparked enthusiasm in my young alter ego. Democracy, Rancière emphasizes, is a scandal: “Democracy means first and foremost this: an anarchic ‘government’” — without any claim to distinction — “founded on nothing other than the absence of any right to govern. […] The scandal lies there: a scandal for distinguished people who cannot accept that their birth, their seniority, or their knowledge should have to bow to the law of fate.” Isn’t impartial chance the best option for every citizen to participate in the exercise of political power — a guarantee that this power will not be monopolized?

My questions were perceived at best as whims, at worst as dangerous suggestions. The less politically engaged of my friends, to put it somewhat bluntly, rejected these questions with this argument: “We’re not going to give power to just anyone! It’s madness! People are stupid. Have you seen the numbers of the far right?” My more committed fellow travelers — mostly Marxists and revolutionaries — were a bit more measured but much less concerned with political participation than with the redistribution of wealth and the socialization of the means of production. I shared their condemnation of a harmful economic system but remained nonetheless dubious about their tendency to indefinitely postpone the truly political question: “Democracy,” they told me, “can’t work in an unequal world, where the socio-economic balance of power favors capital.” The main challenge, for them, was to dismantle the capitalist infrastructure to build a better world where, perhaps, democracy would have meaning. I nuanced this by arguing that individuals as they are here and now — albeit alienated — are already participating in the construction of a still undetermined future, a promise that democracy is supposed to embody.

This double distrust bothered me, and still bothers me. It seems anti-democratic to me. The demand for “more democracy” is constantly being postponed. If you look hard enough, you can always find reasons not to give people power: too lazy, too radical, too incompetent, and so on. Ultimately, the conditions will never be right to trust them. From this perspective, if we want to be democrats, it seems to me that we have to reverse things: start by trusting people. It’s a gamble. I don’t believe — it would be naive optimism to do so — that everyone is inherently good. On the other hand, I am quite convinced that when people are entrusted with a responsibility, when they are given a significant decision to make, they act in a much more responsible, thoughtful, and measured way than their words would suggest. It seems to me that it is rather the lack of accountability and the frustration born of powerlessness that fuel the symptomatic radicalism of our electoral regimes, brandished as a pretext for refusing the common citizen the right to participate in power.

Does sortition resolve this obstacle? In some respects, undoubtedly. However, I would be careful not to see it as a miracle solution to the chronic problems of our electoral regimes. Chance is one tool among others, as is the logic of consensus, which, on the self-managed digital encyclopedia Wikipedia, to which I contribute on my modest scale, plays a much more central role than voting. On all sides, avenues are emerging to foster a democratization process that we, in the general opinion, need. In this area, the lack of political imagination has been patently evident for far too long.

Filed under: Athens, Books, Elections, History, Sortition |