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An op-ed piece in The New York Times by Hélène Landemore opens as follows. (Full text here.)
No Shy Person Left Behind
At its core, our political system is a popularity contest. Elections reward those who are comfortable performing in public and on social media, projecting confidence and dominating attention. This dynamic tends to select for so-called alpha types, the charismatic and the daring, but also the entitled, the arrogant and even the narcissistic.
This raises a basic but rarely asked question: Why are we filtering out the quiet voices? And at what cost?
Over the past two decades, my research on collective intelligence in politics, democratic theory and the design of our institutions shows that the system structurally excludes those I call, in my new book, “the shy.” By the shy I mean not just the natural introverts, but all the people who have internalized the idea that they lack power, that politics is not built for them, and who could never imagine running for office.
In what follows, Landemore promotes allotted citizen assemblies as a way to get the voice of “the shy” heard.
This way of presenting things raises two questions. First, why use the term “the shy” to refer to a group for which this label is clearly inappropriate? The category described by Landemore would be much more appropriately described as “the disenfranchised”, “the politically suppressed”, or “the politically oppressed”. The term “the shy” implies an inherent psychological property of the people being so described, while the category Landemore describe is clearly socially manipulated into a sense of political impotence – a manipulation that in all probability is primarily done by constructing society in a way where the sense of impotence is a completely realistic understanding of the political situation.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »
David Gordon, Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review, wrote a review of Hélène Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians. Some excerpts:
Landemore’s disdain for the power hungry is all to the good, but what she says makes me uneasy and, in any case, rests on a false premise. What makes me uneasy is that she distrusts all efforts to stand out from the crowd: How dare you think, she seems to say, that you are better than others just because you possess some specialized knowledge? Isn’t this exactly what José Ortega y Gasset wrote about in The Revolt of the Masses? (1931):
“It is false to interpret the new situations as if the mass had grown tired of politics and entrusted its exercise to special persons. Quite the contrary. That was what happened before; that was liberal democracy. The mass assumed that, in the end, with all their defects and blemishes, the political minorities understood public problems a little better than it did. Now, on the other hand, the mass believes it has the right to impose and give the force of law to its café commonplaces. I doubt that there have been other periods in history in which the crowd came to govern as directly as in our time. That is why I speak of hyper-democracy. […] What is characteristic of the moment is that the vulgar soul, knowing itself to be vulgar, has the audacity to affirm the right of vulgarity and imposes it everywhere. As they say in North America: to be different is indecent. The mass steamrolls everything that is different, eminent, individual, qualified, and select. Whoever is not like everyone else, whoever does not think like everyone else, runs the risk of being eliminated […].”
Filed under: Athens, Books, Press, Sortition | 6 Comments »
A few months ago, I wrote a post about the attitudes that underlie support for elections and lack of support for or outright rejection of sortition. My main point was that the arguments that are often provided for elections and against sortition should not be taken as being the causes of the positions they purport to justify but rather as rationalizations of those positions. The positions themselves are due to underlying pre-existing attitudes that are usually unacknowledged. Unlike the arguments, which are easily debunked, the attitudes are coherent and rational and provide real and reasonable causes for the observed behavior – a positive view of elections (as an ideal rather than in its actually existing manifestations) and an apathetic or negative view of sortition.
In the post I argued that the most common pro-elections and anti-sortition attitude is “conservatism or mental inertia”. I gave two justifications for this attitude. First, electoralism is the status quo and any radical change involves risk, which people wish to avoid. Second, “becoming a supporter of a fundamental political change involves the adoption of a new radical mindset which is never easy”.
Reading Emmanuel Todd’s 2017 book Où en sommes-nous ? [Where are we now?], I came across the notion of the “memory of places [mémoire des lieux]”. This is the notion that societies maintain certain ideas and habits which are quite persistent despite various changes which these societies undergo. This was reminiscent of “conservatism or mental inertia” and therefore sent me back to look at the post. I soon realized that the “attitude” of “conservatism or mental inertia” is actually rather transparently two separate attitudes, “conservatism” and “mental inertia”, which are quite distinct and quite clearly correspond to the two different justifications provided. Conservatism is clearly associated with the perceived risk which radical change involves, while mental inertia is clearly associated with the effort involved in “the adoption of a new radical mindset”.
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Filed under: Books, Elections, Sortition | 2 Comments »
I’m grateful to Yoram Gat for making me a contributor to this website, which has a lot of good stuff about allotment. [ Editor’s note: Welcome, James! I previously linked to James’s very interesting work several years ago here, and much more recently here. -YG ]
One of the things Yoram suggested I might do here is assemble all my introductory Twitter threads on classical Athens’ main democratic institutions. Not all of these institutions involved sortition, but most did, and readers may want to get an overview of how the sortitive institutions functioned alongside other democratic institutions that depended on voting.
Before I share the Twitter threads, though, readers who are completely new to this topic might want to check out this ten-minute video in which I provide an overview of Athens’ Assembly, Council of Five Hundred, popular courts, and city officials, as well as of the curious practice of ostracism.
Now that we’ve had the broad overview of all these institutions, let’s go into more detail, starting with the most powerful of Athens’ democratic institutions, the Assembly:
Next, the second-most powerful institution, and our first allotted one: the Council of Five Hundred.
Next up are the popular courts, staffed by allotted juries:
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Filed under: Academia, Athens, History, Sortition, video | 14 Comments »
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Equality by lot 