Paradise Lost, Paradise Found: The True Meaning of Democracy, by Arthur D. Robbins (Review)

Posted on November 27, 2012 by keithsutherland

Take me down to the paradise city
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Oh won’t you please take me home
Guns ‘N Roses

This fascinating book is unique amongst radical theories of democracy in that it’s written by a clinical psychologist with a particular interest in psychopathology – as such his primary emphasis is on the (two-way) relationship between political systems and character. Whereas most books focus on the institutional level, Dr. Robbins constantly reminds us that entities like ‘governments’ and ‘nations’ are merely abstractions, by adding (in parentheses) ‘person or persons in power’ every time he uses the word ‘government’. History is ‘nothing but a vast battlefield after the battle is over – a mountain of the corpses of men, women, and children from around the world and across time who have been slaughtered to satisfy the warriors in their quest for blood and glory’ (p.229). Political leaders are subjected to psychoanalytic scrutiny and are (with the exception of a small number of Athenian statesmen) mostly diagnosed in terms of psychopathy – not just the obvious cases (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) or even the usual suspects (Alexander of Macedon, Genghis Kahn, Napoleon), but also less extreme examples like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Dr. Robbins explains the development of psychopathy in terms of dysfunctional childrearing and early maternal relationships, so history is, in effect, reduced to the psychiatrist’s couch. Strangely enough (given his idolisation of Athenian democracy) this explanation is derived from Greek literature, forcing him to conclude that the dysfunctional relationship between mother and son is limited to the Greek aristocracy (p.303). Given that such psychopathic individuals – ‘a special subset of men’ – are fundamentally different from ‘us’ (p.309), then the goal of democracy is not so much ‘power to the people’ as making sure that the bad guys don’t get hold of the reins. Rotation of office (and/or mass participation in government) is not so that we may all, as Aristotle put it, ‘rule and be ruled in turn’ but simply to reduce the likelihood of handing power to a psychopath.

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Filed under: Books, Elections, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Obligation and Consent

Posted on October 31, 2012 by keithsutherland

The last Paris sortition meeting was devoted to Bernard Manin’s argument that sortition was replaced by preference election on account of the natural right theory of consent. I challenged Manin on this with an argument based on Fishkin’s claim that the decision process of an allotted assembly modelled on a Deliberative Poll would be a proxy for the informed consent of all citizens. During the report presented to the recent Dublin meeting Peter Stone returned to this point by arguing, with Bentham, that the whole social contract theory of consent was just nonsense on stilts.

Peter recently referred me to Hanna Pitkin’s two-part paper on Obligation and Consent. The paper is hard work, but could be boiled down into just two claims:
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Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition, Theory | 51 Comments »

Political Studies Association: “The Party’s Over”

Posted on September 29, 2012 by keithsutherland

The theme for the (UK) 2013 PSA conference (Cardiff, 25-27 March) is The Party’s Over. Oliver Dowlen is organising a sortition panel under the auspices of the PSA specialist group on deliberative and participatory democracy. The deadline is tight (abstracts need to go to Stephen Elstub, the group convenor by October 5), so anyone interested please contact ollydowlen@yahoo.com

Filed under: Academia, Ballot measures, Participation | 1 Comment »

Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: The True Meaning of Democracy

Posted on September 19, 2012 by keithsutherland

Has anyone come across this new book by Arthur Robbins:

At a time when people around the world are rising up to demand self-determination and Americans are locked in debate about the role of government in society, PARADISE LOST, PARADISE REGAINED: The True Meaning of Democracy offers a fresh look at what democratic governance really means.

The story begins in ancient Athens and then turns to Rome and the Italian City States. Democracy in the United States, prior to the signing of the Constitution, is explored in detail. There is a section devoted to the effects of war on emergent democracy in the Middle Ages and in France at the time of the Revolution. The book concludes with a review of recent experiments in democracy, especially in India and Latin America.

Early Americans have much to teach us. We study some of the essays, letters, and articles written by the Anti-Federalists, those who were opposed to ratification of the Constitution. They were articulate and impassioned on the subject of democracy. They understood the nature of political power and of those who would abuse it.

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Filed under: Athens, Books, History, Initiatives, Participation | 2 Comments »

Popular Sovereignty Network

Posted on July 8, 2012 by keithsutherland

I attended the first meeting of the Popular Sovereignty Network yesterday at Queen Mary, University of London. The first talk, by Melissa Lane (politics, Princeton) was on Athenian democracy. Professor Lane took issue with the assumption that the Athenian franchise for office-holding was open to all male citizens over 30, drawing attention to the Solonic prohibition on the thetes holding office (as opposed to participating in the assembly and courts). The source for the Solonic prohibition is Aristotle’s Politics, VII 3. Scholars like Hansen and Sinclair claim that by the 4th Century the prohibition had become a ‘dead letter’, but there is no real evidence for this.

Her talk then took an unusual turn when she shifted the focus to the election of (some) officeholders, on the basis of universal (by Athenian standards) suffrage. I questioned her on the number of elected offices and she claimed it was 100 (out of around 700); nevertheless she used this to argue that Athenian democracy was not so different from its modern Schumpeterian form, in which all citizens elect officeholders and then hold them to account.

This was all a little odd (why focus on the minority of elected officials?), and not particularly convincing, so perhaps she was just trying to stir things up. But I did find her contrast between office-holding and assembly/courts to be illuminating. She disputed Hansen’s claim that ‘ruling and being ruled in turn’ referred to rotation in office, claiming that it referred more to the assembly and the courts. Jury service did involve very significant rotation and, with the 4th century innovation of the nomothetai, serious legislative power was involved. Membership of the council was a collegial office, so Aristotle’s remark could have referred to this (Hansen claims that most eligible citizens would have served on the council at least once), but note her earlier comments on the Solonic prohibition.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Juries, Participation, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Jeremy Clarkson calls for sortition in the House of Lords

Posted on July 4, 2012 by keithsutherland

And Your Premium Bond Prize is . . . A Seat in the Lords

In his column in the current issue of the Sunday Times, Jeremy Clarkson argues the case for appointing members of the Lords by sortition. Although the piece is written in Clarkson’s customary jocular style, it’s a serious response to Nick Clegg’s proposal for an elected house. Clarkson argues that this will attract ‘the sort of people who you’ll find in any large organisation, the sort who go to a lot of meetings and when there they eat all the biscuits . . . they go on marches but half the time they have no idea what they’re marching for.’ Clarkson refers to these political types as ‘Colins’:

Suffice to say, I have a better idea. It goes like this. Instead of filling a House of Colins with a bunch of biscuit-eating nonentities, who left to their own devices would struggle to wire a plug, we use the computer that’s used to pick premium bond winners to select eight people at random each week from the electoral list. Of course, it would be a nuisance for them to take a week off work . . . but all that will be asked of them is that they have a quick look over the bills being discussed in the House of Commons . . .

Seriously. Who would you rather have doing the job: [hereditary peers] or your mate Jim from the builder’s yard? Quite. We trust randomly selected juries on the important business of a person’s liberty, so why wouldn’t we trust a similar system to apply the checks and balances in government? . . . Certainly I’d rather have a government’s ideas checked by a small, cheap group of ordinary people than by 450 expensive Colins.

Unfortunately the article itself is pay to view.

Filed under: House of Lords, Sortition | 3 Comments »

3rd Paris Sortition Conference

Posted on May 7, 2012 by keithsutherland

The third sortition conference will take place on May 24-25 at CEVIPOF, Science-Po, Paris. Programme:

Gil Delannoi, Update on the research programme
Bernard Manin, Principles of Representative Government revisited
Keith Sutherland, The triumph of election: Natural right or wrong?
Andrei Poama, Virtues and limits of judicial luck: Reasons for randomising the choice of jurors and verdicts

Programme
Registration

I’d greatly appreciate advance feedback on my own paper which challenges Manin’s central argument as to why sortition hasn’t been considered as a candidate for representative government.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, History, Juries, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Rousseau’s general will and sortition

Posted on March 2, 2012 by keithsutherland

Along with its famous opening sentence: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’ Rousseau’s Social Contract is best known for its clear distinction between sovereignty and government. The latter was a delegated administrative function: the ‘Prince’ could either be single, few, or many (monarchy, aristocracy or democracy) but was a mere servant of the sovereign popular will. Although Rousseau argued that democratic government was more suitable for small states, he had no problem in principal with the notion of elected delegates administering government under the watchful eye of the sovereign people and subject to their dismissal if the delegated mandate was breached.
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Filed under: Ballot measures, Distribution by lot, Elections, History, Sortition | 44 Comments »

Democracy and Social Justice

Posted on January 12, 2012 by keithsutherland

The new special issue of the journal Studies in Social Justice may be of interest to this forum, although only one of the papers (my own) is specifically on sortition. Full text freely available on line.

VOL 5, NO 2: SPECIAL ISSUE: DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Guest Editor: Bob Brecher

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Democracy and Social Justice, Bob Brecher

Articles

Property, Propriety and Democracy, Mark Devenney
Jürgen Habermas and Bush’s Neoconservatives: Too Close for Comfort?, Vivienne Matthies-Boon
Inclusion and Participation: Working with the Tensions, Gideon Calder
The Two Sides of the Representative Coin, Keith Sutherland
The Dilemma of Democracy: Collusion and the State of Exception, Mark McGovern
Derrida, Democracy and Violence, Nick Mansfield

Filed under: Sortition | 6 Comments »

Statistical Sampling

Posted on December 8, 2011 by keithsutherland

On many occasions I have argued that the representativity of political assemblies constituted ‘descriptively’ (i.e. by statistical sampling) only applies at the collective level, and that this requires members of such an assembly being limited in their function (in contrast to the mandate of elected members). This argument has failed to persuade some participants in this forum, so this post makes the point in a rather stark manner, in the hope that it will challenge my opponents to refute it or else accept it – ‘ to put up or shut up’ – as opposed to merely ignoring it. I’m puzzled as to the continuing necessity to labour this point, as its veracity derives from the meaning of the word ‘statistical’, nevertheless I will seek to hammer the nail in one more time.

Statistical sampling via random selection is widely used for proportionate opinion polling, but the problem with using random selection for relatively complicated issues like political representation (as opposed to preferences over different brands of washing powder) is that such surveys are inevitably of ‘raw’ (unconsidered) opinion. Nevertheless the representativity of the proportional sampling techniques used is hard to deny, hence James Fishkin’s attempt to seek to establish a ‘deliberative’ assembly using random sampling techniques, which combines representativity with informed deliberation in order to represent the ‘considered judgment’ of the whole population. However this requirement leads Fishkin to advocate a very thin form of the deliberative ideal, in which members effectively listen to balanced pro–anti arguments and then decide the outcome via secret ballot, as opposed to the rich active deliberation preferred by Habermasian deliberative theorists. Why should this be?
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Filed under: Sortition | 143 Comments »

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