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 »

Thomas Fleming: Down With Democracy!

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Thomas Fleming, editor of the American monthly Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture, author of several books on ethics (The Morality of Everyday Life) and politics (Socialism, The Politics of Human Nature), contributor to newspapers, magazines, and academic journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and formerly a professor of Greek and Latin at several universities, is again proposing following the Athenian example.

It turns out that the American political system had been in reasonably good shape until Martin Van Buren copied the party system from the UK, and in doing so put the US government on the path of corruption. The final nail in the coffin, Fleming asserts, was the institution of primaries, replacing the corrupt but still useful party leaders as the determinants of party candidates.

Taking a break in dispensing dubious historical synopses, Fleming moves to the present:

If this is democracy, I am ready to try an alternative.  Whenever anyone dares to criticize democracy, he is inevitably slapped down with Churchill’s witticism that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.  What neither Churchill nor his millions of quoting admirers have ever explained is what they mean by democracy. Indeed, after decades of studying political theory–and discussing such matters with the learned and the wise–I still have no clue as to what people mean when they use the word, other than their opinion that democracy is decidedly a good thing.

Cheerleaders for democracy, the American way of life, and my sweet old etcetera tell us that the principles of one man/one vote and representative government are the essence of our democratic liberty. Interestingly, the people who are credited with inventing the institution and certainly gave us the word–I mean of course the Greeks–did not regard elections as particularly democratic.

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Filed under: Academia, Athens, Elections, History, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Lanni and Vermeule: Precautionary Constitutionalism in Ancient Athens

Posted on August 25, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Harvard Law school professors Adriaan Lanni and Adrian Vermeule discuss sortition among other Athenian political mechanisms. They write:

In the ancient Greek world, selection of magistrates by lot was nearly synonymous with democracy. One of the most important functions of the lot in the Athenian democratic structure was to prevent any individual magistrate from amassing too much power and thereby threatening the sovereignty of the popular Assembly. We argue that the lot, taken together with the principles of rotation and collegiality, operated as precautionary measures against individuals gaining too much influence. Continue reading →

Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Sortition, Theory | 2 Comments »

Scialabba: Plutocratic vistas: America’s crisis of democracy

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Yoram Gat

George Scialabba writes in the LA Review of Books and in Salon about the history of plutocratic control of elections in the U.S. and offers sortition as an alternative.

Scialabba has the following excerpt from the 1897 book Equality by Edward Bellamy:

“But why did not the people elect officials and representatives of their own class, who would look out for the interests of the masses?” […]
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, Fiction, History, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

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 »

Nissani: Cheers for Direct Democracy

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Yoram Gat

Dr. Moti Nissani writes in The Dissident Voice:

Revolutionary strategists must ask themselves: How can we best structure our own movement? And: What kind of political framework should we aim for, once we relegate the Banking-Militarist Complex to the dustbin of history? The answer to both questions is the same: genuine (or direct) democracy.

Democracy, for the Greeks who coined the word, meant “power of the people” or “rule of the people.” Perhaps the best-known example of a genuine democracy in a highly-advanced, highly-literate, polity, is Athens and its sister democracies of Ancient Greece. There, all significant political, legal, and judicial decisions were made directly by the people. Democratic Athens went to war if, and only if, the majority so voted; a man was exiled, or condemned to death, if, and only if, his fellow citizens so decreed.

It is a typical reformist treatment of the Athenian system. Sortition is discussed in the context of juries, but its application to political offices is given barely a mention:

The Athenians knew that power-seekers could not be trusted, so they filled many important public offices by lot. Moreover, most office holders maintained their positions for extremely short durations. Athens thereby bypassed, to a certain extent, a key problem in all other extant political systems: The ascendancy of the psychopaths.

Filed under: Athens, History, Participation, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Sintomer: Tirage au sort et démocratie délibérative

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Yoram Gat

An article by Yves Sintomer discusses, among other things, reasons for the avoidance of sortition by 18th century revolutionaries. English translation by John Zvesper.

Bernard Manin first raised the question of why with modern revolutions sortition disappeared from the political scene. His answer was based on two observations: first, the founding fathers of modern republics wanted elective aristocracies, and for this reason they rejected random selection, which Plato and Aristotle had connected with democracy. Second, the theory of consent, deeply rooted in theories of natural law, was so widespread that it seemed difficult to legitimize any political authority that was not formally approved by the citizenry.

Both of these arguments are important, but they do not explain everything. […]

The unavailability of the statistical concept of the representative sample (even though probability calculus was already well developed by the time of the American and French Revolutions) is the key to understanding why political sortition seemed useless in modern democracies, whose size – as almost no political writer in this period failed to point out – made it impossible to have self government similar to that of the ancient democracies. In this conceptual world, drawing lots meant arbitrarily giving power to someone. Lacking the idea of the representative sample, the proponents of descriptive representation were forced to choose other tools to advance their ideals.

Filed under: Athens, History, Sortition | 11 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 »

“Direct democracy” and mass politics – part 1

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Yoram Gat

The reformist idea of “direct democracy” is a recurring theme among critics of the dominant modern elections-based system of government. However, “direct democratic” systems, when considered as systems for representing popular interests, suffer from much the same problems that afflict elections-based systems.

The promise of “direct democracy”

The standard description of the Athenian democracy emphasizes the role of the Assembly. According to this description having thousands of Athenians assemble 40 times a year to discuss and vote on policy decisions was the main democratic mechanism in Athens. This institute, supposedly, distributed political power widely within the group of Athenian citizens. Wikipedia puts it this way:

It [Athens] remains a unique and intriguing experiment in direct democracy, a political system in which the people do not elect representatives to vote on their behalf but vote on legislation and executive bills in their own right.

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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Initiatives, Participation, Proposals, Sortition | 65 Comments »

Machiavellian Democracy

Posted on March 30, 2012 by peterstone

John McCormick’s recent book Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2011) has already attracted some attention on this blog. Interested readers might like to know that the journal The Good Society has published a symposium on it.

Filed under: Elections, History, Sortition | 1 Comment »

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