#Resource --- tags: #Books image: Genre: Author: Read: reviewed: --- `Author:` David Van Reybrouck ‘DEMOCRACY IS IN BAD HEALTH. AGAINST ELECTIONS OFFERS A NEW DIAGNOSIS - AND AN ANCIENT REMEDY. Fear-mongering populists, distrust in the establishment, personality contests instead of reasoned debate: these are the results of the latest elections. Yet for most of its 3000-year history, democracy did not involve elections at all: members of the public were appointed to positions in government through a combination of volunteering and lottery. In fact, as this ingenious book shows, the original purpose of elections was to exclude the people from power by appointing an elite to govern over them. Based on studies and trials from around the globe, this hugely influential manifesto presents the practical case for a true democracy - one that actually works. Urgent, heretical and completely convincing, Against Elections leaves only one question to be answered: what are we waiting for?’ ## Summary ## Key Takeaways ## Quotes - ## Notes That's a fascinating connection you're making. Let me clarify what's actually being argued in both cases, as there are some important tensions here worth exploring. **What Van Reybrouck Actually Argues** In _Against Elections: The Case for Democracy_, Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck makes a counterintuitive claim: elections themselves have become **anti-democratic**. His thesis isn't that democracy is bad—it's that our fixation on elections undermines genuine democratic participation. He argues: - Elections were historically designed to _exclude_ ordinary citizens from power by selecting elites to rule over them - Modern electoral systems create short-term thinking, constant campaigning, and voter exhaustion - We've incorrectly conflated democracy with periodic voting - He proposes reviving **sortition**—randomly selecting public officials (like jury duty) as more inclusive and trustworthy This is an institutional critique from within progressive democracy theory, not populist sentiment. **Gove's "Enough of Experts" Remark** Michael Gove's famous 2016 Brexit comment—_"people in this country have had enough of experts"_—expressed frustration with expert opinion (economists, trade specialists, academics) being treated as authoritative during the referendum debate. This was fundamentally different: it wasn't proposing alternative democratic structures, but rather dismissing established expertise as out of touch. **Where They Might Connect** The intersection raises several questions: 1. **Legitimacy crisis**: Both acknowledge declining trust in institutions, but from opposite directions. Van Reybrouck sees exhausted citizens tired of empty electoral theatre; Gove framed it as ordinary people rejecting elite knowledge. 2. **Who decides?**: Van Reybrouck wants random citizens deliberating on policy through sortition—ordinary people, but informed. Gove's statement implied expertise itself should be sidelined. There's tension here: does Van Reybrouck's model require trusting _some_ expertise about how to govern, or would it validate Gove's skepticism? 3. **Elite accountability**: Gove positioned himself against metropolitan elites; Van Reybrouck positions against electoral elites specifically. Sortition could theoretically make politicians more directly accountable (citizens serving temporarily) while requiring some deference to technical knowledge they don't possess personally. **Critical Differences** I'm uncertain whether these truly align because: - Van Reybrouck advocates **more structured citizen participation**, not less engagement with expertise - His solution requires sophisticated processes—deliberative polling, informed assemblies—that demand trusted information sources - Gove's rhetoric undermined institutional epistemic authority without offering alternatives for how complex decisions get made - Van Reybrouck explicitly rejects populism; his sortition model aims to produce deliberation, not majority tyranny **The Counterargument** Some scholars note that if citizens mistrust experts entirely, even well-designed participatory systems could fail—they'd need reliable information to deliberate effectively. Van Reybrouck's approach arguably requires _rebuilding_ trust in certain forms of expertise (how government works, policy impacts), not wholesale rejection. There's another angle: perhaps Van Reybrouck's diagnosis explains why Gove's appeal resonated—electoral democracy feels broken to many—but his solution might not address the underlying distrust Gove tapped into. Would randomly selected officials be viewed as equally disconnected, or would their temporary, ordinary-citizen status restore legitimacy? **What Do You Think?** Are you seeing these as compatible critiques of current democracy, or do you find the expert-mistrust element problematic for Van Reybrouck's proposals? What aspects of his argument seem most compelling to you so far? > [!info] > ## Highlights ‘The people of England deceive themselves when they fancy they are free; they are so, in fact, only during the election of Members of Parliament: for, as soon as a new one is elected, they are again in chains, and are nothing.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762) ### I SYMPTOMS ##### Enthusiasm and mistrust: The paradox of democracy The proportion of the global population that has a positive attitude to the concept of democracy has never been as great as it is today. This degree of enthusiasm is nothing short of spectacular, especially in light of the fact that less than seventy years ago democracy was in a very bad way. As a result of fascism, communism and colonialism, when the Second World War ended there were only twelve fully fledged democracies. [^1] By 1993 they numbered seventy-two and now there are 117 electoral democracies out of a total of 195 countries, ninety of which can actually be defined in practice as free states. if we look specifically at democratic institutions, then it's clear that political parties meet with the greatest distrust of all (they score an average of 3.9 out of 10 among EU citizens), followed by governments (4 out of 10), parliaments (4.2 out of 10) and the press (4-3 out of 10). We live in a world quite opposite to that of the 196os. Then a simple farmer and his wife could be completely apathetic about politics and yet have complete faith in democracy. Sociological research confirms such confidence existed, a faith that characterised large parts of Western Europe. Then there was apathy and trust while now there is passion and distrust. These are turbulent times. ##### Crisis of legitimacy: Support is crumbling Democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, dictatorship, despotism, totalitarianism, absolutism and anarchy: every political system has to achieve a balance between two fundamental criteria, efficiency and legitimacy. **Efficiency** is all about how quickly a government can find successful solutions to problems that arise, while **legitimacy** is about the degree to which people give their assent to the solution… the two criteria usually existing in inverse proportion to each other. A dictatorship is undoubtedly the most efficient form of government (one person decides and that's it) but it rarely enjoys much lasting legitimacy. The reverse, a country that engages in endless consultation with all its residents, no doubt nurtures support for the government, but at the expense of its ability to act. The proud era of the Delta Works, the Afsluitdijk, the TV network and the Channel Tunnel is over. If even building a bridge or a tunnel is no longer achievable, what can national governments still do under their own steam? Very little, as it happens, because they are bound hand and foot by the national debt, European legislation, American rating bureaux, multinational corporations and international treaties. In the twenty-first century, sovereignty, once the basis of the nation state, has become a relative concept. This means that the great challenges of our day - climate change, banking crises, the euro crisis, economic crises, offshore fraud, migration, overpopulation - can no longer be dealt with adequately by national governments. Powerlessness is the key word of our time: the powerlessness of the citizen in the face of government, the government in the face of Europe and Europe in the face of the world. Everyone looks down at the mess below and then looks up, no longer with hope and faith but with despair and anger. Power today is a ladder on which everyone stands and curses. The inability to address structural problems is accompanied by the overexposure of the trivial, fuelled by our insane media that, true to market logic, have come to regard the exaggeration of futile conflicts as more important than any attempt to offer insight into real problems, especially in times of falling media revenues. The interaction between politics and the media certainly seems to be an important factor in creating more and more incidentalism in politics. Media live by news. In our conversations with journalists it was noted that incidents are better at attracting media attention than good debates, which also occur. Democracy has become comparatively toothless but at the same time noisier. Anyone who puts together low voter turnout, high voter turnover, declining party membership, governmental impotence, political paralysis, electoral fear of failure, lack of recruitment, compulsive self-promotion, chronic electoral fever, exhausting media stress, distrust, indifference and other persistent paroxysms sees the outlines of a syndrome emerging. Democratic Fatigue Syndrome is a disorder that has not yet been fully described but from which countless Western societies are nonetheless unmistakably suffering. Let's look at the diagnoses that already exist. ##### It's the fault of politicians: The diagnosis of populism THE AVAILABLE ANALYSES of Democratic Fatigue Syndrome could be seen as falling into four diagnostic categories: it's the fault of politicians, it's the fault of democracy, it's the fault of representative democracy and - one specific variant - it's the fault of electoral-representative democracy. I'll look at them in that order. In the English-speaking world we have seen the spectacular rise of figures like Nigel Farage and, of course, Donald Trump. According to them the remedy for Democratic Fatigue Syndrome is relatively simple: better representation of the populace, or rather more popular representation of the populace, preferably in the form of a larger vote for their own populist parties. The leaders promote themselves as direct representatives of the people, as the voice of the underbelly, the embodiment of common sense. They claim that unlike their colleagues they are close to the man or woman in the street, that they say what they think and do what needs to be done, and that the populist politician is at one with the people. That all this is questionable in the extreme we know well enough, because there's no such thing as one monolithic 'people' (every society has its diversity), nor is there anything that could be described as a 'national gut feeling', and common sense is the most ideological thing imaginable. After all, 'common sense' is an ideology that refuses to recognise its own ideological character, like a zoo that sincerely believes it is an example of unspoilt nature. The notion that someone can be at one with the masses in some organic way, at one with their values and unfailingly conscious of their fickle yearnings, is a belief that tends more towards mysticism than politics: no deep current exists, only marketing. Populists want to combat Democratic Fatigue Syndrome by means of one simple but drastic intervention; fresh blood in Parliament, a blood transfusion, as complete as possible, and the rest will take care of itself. Opponents wonder whether this will do anything to increase efficiency and doubt if government will improve because a few new people have been taken on board. To them the problem is not the people who staff our democracy but democracy itself. ##### It's the fault of democracy: The diagnosis of the technocracy An obvious solution would appear to be technocracy, a system where experts are charged with looking after the public interest, people whose technical know-how will pilot the country through today's troubled waters. Technocrats are managers who replace politicians, so they don't need to worry about elections but can concentrate on long-term solutions and announce unpopular measures. In their hands policy becomes a matter of civic engineering, of problem-management. The argument for technocracy builds to an important degree on the 'post-political thinking of the 1990s. In that era of the Third Way in politics, of the Neue Mitte and la cohabitation, there was a belief that ideological differences were a thing of the past. After decades of conflict, left and right suddenly walked arm in arm. The solutions were there, people said, they only had to be implemented and it was simply a matter of 'good governance'. Ideological struggle gave way to the TINA ('there is no alternative') principle, and the foundations for a technocratisation of politics had been laid. But technocracy comes about in countless other less visible places. In recent years a huge amount of power has moved from national parliaments to transnational institutions such as the European Central Bank, the European Commission, the World Bank and the IMF. Because these are not democratically elected, they represent a far-reaching technocratisation of decision-making: bankers, economists and monetary analysts have got their hands on the levers of power. In the short term a technocracy can give fresh impetus, in the long term it is not a viable form of government. Democracy is not just government for the people but government by the people. Technocrats work in precisely the opposite way to populists. They try to relieve Democratic Fatigue Syndrome by giving efficiency priority over legitimacy in the hope that good results will eventually win the approval of those they govern, in other words, in the hope that efficiency will spontaneously generate legitimacy. That may happen certainly, but politics is more than simply a matter of good government. Sooner or later, moral choices have to be made, choices which require consultation with society. But where can such a consultation take place? "In Parliament' is the standard answer, but it is an answer which many are beginning to question and which brings us directly to a third diagnosis. ##### It's the fault of representative democracy: The diagnosis of direct democracy In Congress, there is a claim that there is the united goal of serving the American people, but in reality there is a power war between political parties. Also, our elected representatives are not reflecting the perspectives of all their constituents. They are only representing the perspectives of those in their preferred political party and the monied elite who fill their campaign coffers - in reverse priority of course. This gets to the core complaint of the 99%. Our representatives aren't representing us. Sarah van Gelder (ed.), 2011: This Changes Everything: Occupy It is clear that many of those protestors consider Democratic Fatigue Syndrome the result of our current representative democracy, with its decaying structures and rituals. They agree with the technocrats that contemporary democracy has many faults, but they don't want to replace it with something else, as the technocrats advocate: they want to improve it. How? Certainly they do not believe that injecting new people into parliament, as the populists suggest, is a solution. A blood transfusion is not a guaranteed cure for a body that is at death's door. Moreover, they are not as enamoured of the cult of the leader as are the populists: it's far too vertical for them, and it remains a form of delegation. What, then? The efficiency of the technocrats doesn't appeal to them either. Their own peculiar, roundabout way of conducting meetings shows that they regard legitimacy as a good deal more important than rapid results. If you take a close look at Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados, what is striking is the movement's strong anti-parliamentarianism. 'Our representatives aren't representing us they said in New York while in Madrid it was put like this: In Spain most of the political class doesn't even listen to us. Politicians ought to hear our voice and make political participation by citizens possible by a direct route, so that society as a whole is involved, instead of thriving at our expense and focusing all their attention on the dictatorship of big economic powers. Occupiers and Indignados feed on adjectives: new democracy, deep democracy, horizontal, direct, participative, consensus-driven democracy. In short they hunger for true democracy and believe that parliaments and parties have had their day. They set consensus against conflict, consultation against voting, respectful listening against theatrical quarrels. They refuse to have leaders, make no concrete demands and distrust the outstretched hand of existing movements. When the Indignados marched through the streets of Brussels, flags of political parties and even trade unions were unwelcome. Those were all considered to be part of the system. When Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zižek spoke to the Occupiers in New York, he asked them not to fall in love with themselves, but unfortunately that is exactly what happened. In a damning essay, American journalist Thomas Frank describes how the movement became devoted to the cult of participation, of"direct democracy, and how the means became an end in itself: There can never be too much cultivation of civic virtues, especially when parliament and the media no longer set a good example. But how that process might be extrapolated to echelons that can truly make a difference was unfortunately never explored. Stéphane Hessel, the French diplomat and former resistance hero whose pamphlet Indignez-vous gave a name to the Indignados, stressed repeatedly that indignation without engagement is not enough and that real attempts to influence governments are needed: ‘We must not become engaged at the margins but at the heart of power.’ ##### Crisis of efficiency: Declining vigour ### II DIAGNOSES ##### It's the fault of politicians: The diagnosis of populism ##### It's the fault of democracy: The diagnosis of the technocracy ##### It's the fault of representative democracy: ##### The diagnosis of direct democracy Each of the three remedies I have discussed so far appears to be dangerous, in that populism endangers the minority, technocracy endangers the majority and anti-parliamentarianism endangers freedom. ##### It's the fault of electoral-representative democracy: A new diagnosis Yes, Democratic Fatigue Syndrome is caused by the weakness of representative democracy, but neither anti-parliamentarianism nor neo-parliamentarianism will turn the tide, as neither has properly investigated the notion of representation. One rejects it, the other still believes in it, but both unquestioningly assume that the representation of the people in a formal consultative organ is inextricably bound up with elections. We need to take a closer look at that assumption. Democratic Fatigue Syndrome is caused not by representative democracy as such but by a specific variant of it: electoral-representative democracy, the democracy that produces a body of representatives through elections. This requires further elucidation. The words 'elections' and 'democracy' are nowadays synonymous for almost everyone. We have become convinced that the only way to choose a representative is through the ballot box. After all, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states as much: "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures? That 'shall be expressed' is symptomatic of our way of looking at the issue: to say democracy is to say elections. But is it not remarkable that such a general document - the most universal legal document in human history - defines so precisely how the will of the people must be expressed? It would appear that the fundamental cause of Democratic Fatigue Syndrome lies in the fact that we have all become electoral fundamentalists, despising those elected but venerating elections. Electoral fundamentalism is an unshakeable belief in the idea that democracy is inconceivable without elections and elections are a necessary and fundamental precondition when speaking of democracy. Electoral fundamentalists refuse to regard elections as a means of taking part in democracy, seeing them instead as an end in themselves, as a holy doctrine with an intrinsic, inalienable value. That elections can have all kinds of outcomes in states which are fragile, including violence, ethnic tensions, criminality and corruption, seems of secondary importance, and that elections do not automatically foster democracy but may instead prevent or destroy it is conveniently forgotten. We insist that in every country in the world people must traipse off to the polling stations, no matter how much collateral damage may result. Our electoral fundamentalism really does take the form of a new, global evangelism. Elections are the sacraments of that new faith, a ritual regarded as a vital necessity in which the form is more important than the content. focus on elections is actually rather odd. For almost three thousand years people have been experimenting with democracy and only in the last two hundred have they practised it exclusively by holding elections. Yet we regard elections as the only valid method. Why? Force of habit is at play here, of course, but there is a more fundamental cause, based on the fact that no one can deny that elections have worked pretty well over the past two centuries. Despite a number of notoriously bad outcomes, they've very often made democracy possible and they've brought order to the laborious quest for a credible balance between the contrasting demands of efficiency and legitimacy. However, what is often forgotten is that elections originated in a completely different context from that in which they have to function today. Fundamentalists generally have little historical insight, assuming their own dogmas always held good, and electoral fundamentalists therefore have a poor knowledge of the history of democracy. This is orthodoxy without retrospection. In fact we badly need to take a look back. When the supporters of the American and French revolutions proposed elections as a way of getting to know 'the will of the people', there were as yet no political parties, no laws regarding universal franchise, no commercial mass media, let alone social media. Political parties emerged only after 1850. Of course there were already fault lines in the young democracies. such as between city-dwellers and provincials, between the money-rich and the land-rich, between Liberals and Catholics or between federalists and anti-federalists. But only towards the end of the nineteenth century did these groups evolve into clearly defined, formal groupings. There were still no mass parties, only executive parties with a modest number of members and the ambition to govern, but this soon changed, and although most constitutions do not mention them at all, they quickly became the most important players on the political pitch. Socialist parties, for example, became the greatest advocates of universal suffrage. Its introduction (in 1917 in the case of Belgium and the Netherlands, in 1918 in the United Kingdom, although in each case only for men) represented a structural transformation of the electoral system. Elections became a battle between different interest groups in society, each trying to gain the support of as large a segment of the electorate as possible. Elections, originally intended to promote unanimity, now became arenas for candidates who fought each other fiercely. The clash of the parties had begun. The equilibrium came to an end as a result of neoliberal thinking, which reshaped public space radically in the 198os and 1990s. Not civil society but the free market was now the main architect and this applied to countless domains of public life, especially the media. Party newspapers disappeared or were bought up by media concerns, commercial broadcasters entered the field and even public broadcasters increasingly adopted market thinking. There was a true explosion of media. "It would be hard to find someone who wasn't cynical about the nature of these media-corporate spectacles that are presented to us as elections,' said American theoretician Michael Hardt a couple of years ago,50 'Elections are just a beauty contest for ugly people,? was the sarcastic comment doing the rounds on the internet. In 2004 British sociologist Colin Crouch came up with the term 'post-democracy, to describe the new order controlled by the mass media: Under this model, while elections certainly exist and can change governments, public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams. The mass of citizens plays a passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given them. Behind the spectacle of the electoral game, politics is really shaped in private by interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly represent business interests. Since the end of the twentieth century, citizens have started looking like their nineteenth-century predecessors. Because civil society has become weaker, a gulf has opened up again between the state and the individual. Who now translates grass-roots complaints into policy proposals at the top? There is pejorative talk of individualism', as if it's the fault of the citizen that collective structures have fallen away, while in essence this is all about the fact that the people have become the masses again, the choir a cacophony. For radio and television, national politics has become a daily soap, a radio play with free actors, and while editors determine to some extent the framing, the script and the typecasting, politicians, with varying degrees of success, try to slant things this way or that. The most popular politicians are those who succeed in altering the script and reframing the debate, in other words bend the media to their will. The collective hysteria of commercial media, social media and political parties has made election fever permanent and has serious consequences for the workings of democracy. Efficiency suffers under the electoral calculus, legitimacy under the continual need to distinguish oneself, while time and again the electoral system ensures that the long term and the common interest lose out to the short term and party interests. Elections were once invented to make democracy possible, but in these circumstances they would seem to be a definite hindrance. If the Founding Fathers in the United States and the heroes of the French Revolution had known in what context their method would be forced to function 250 years later, they would no doubt have prescribed a different model. Imagine having to develop a system today that would express the will of the people. Would it really be a good idea to have them all queue up at polling stations every four or five years with a bit of card in their hands and go into a dark booth to put a mark, not next to ideas but next to names on a list, names of people about whom restless reporting had been going on for months in a commercial environment that profits from restlessness? Would we still have the nerve to call what is in fact a bizarre, archaic ritual 'a festival of democracy"? Dutch professor of transition management Jan Rotmans said recently: We go from centralised to decentralised, from vertical to horizontal, from top-down to bottom-up. It has taken us more than a hundred years to build this centralised, top-down, vertical society. That whole way of thinking is now being turned upside down. There is a great deal we need to learn and unlearn. The greatest barrier is in our heads.’ Elections are the fossil fuel of politics. Whereas once they gave democracy a huge boost, much like the boost that oil gave the economy, it now it turns out they cause colossal problems of their own. If we don't urgently reconsider the nature of our democratic fuel, a huge systemic crisis threatens. If we obstinately continue to hold on to the electoral process at a time of economic malaise, inflammatory media and rapidly changing culture, we will be almost wilfully undermining the democratic process. How did we reach this point? 'First, the participation of citizens was direct, in contrast to our current system in which representatives of the people are specialists to a far greater degree. Today only a jury in a criminal case is truly made up of ordinary citizens. Second, important decisions were taken by very large crowds in the Ekklesia or People's Assembly, where thousands came together. The Heliaia or People's Court had six thousand members and some juries consisted of hundreds of citizens. This too is at odds with our system, in which there is a certain oligarchisation of democracy? 'Oligarchisation': typical Verdin, but the most remarkable fact of all was yet to come. "Third, most functions were assigned by drawing lots, including to a large extent that of magistrate. "This drawing of lots, or sortition, had its advantages, Verdin continued calmly, 'as the aim was to neutralise personal influence. In Rome there was no such system and countless corruption scandals were the result. Moreover, in Athens posts were for just one year and generally speaking people were not eligible for re-election. At all levels, citizens were made to switch places as often as possible, the aim being to achieve maximum participation and therefore equality. Sortition and rotation were right at the heart of the Athenian democratic system? "The Athenian system was pragmatic rather than dogmatic, Verdin told us, 'and it arose not from a theory but from experience. Sortition was not used for top military and financial functions; instead elections took place, and as rotation was not compulsory competent figures could be re-elected. Pericles, to take one example, was chosen as a strategos fourteen years in a row. The principle of equality was thereby subordinated to the principle of security. But this applied to only a minority of governmental mandates? ([[Ideology]]) I'm not the only one to be curious. Over recent years, interest in the history of our current system has grown in academic circles. Truly groundbreaking was a 1995 book by French political scientist Bernard Manin, called The Principles of Representative Government.[^2] The opening sentence was a bombshell. 'Contemporary democratic governments have evolved from a political system that was conceived by its founders as opposed to democracy.’ Manin was the first to investigate the reason why elections are so important. His research revealed how, immediately after the American and French revolutions, the electoral-representative system was chosen with the intention of keeping at bay the tumult of democracy. 'Representative government was instituted in full awareness that elected representatives would and should be distinguished citizens, socially different from those who elected them.’ An aristocratic reflex lay at the basis of today's democracy and the extraordinarily far-reaching conclusion was that the representative system we know everywhere today "includes both democratic and undemocratic features'. [^3] What these more recent studies demonstrate is that our current democracy is the result of a chance conjunction of circumstances over the past two hundred years, So what was there before the American and French revolutions? In various places in antiquity and the Renaissance, the drawing of lots was relied upon. In classical Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, to return to those times for a moment, the most important organs of government were indeed manned by means of sortition, the Council of 500 (Boule), the People's Court (Heliaia) and practically all the magistracies (arkhai). The Council of 500 was the central governmental body of Athenian democracy: it prepared the agenda of the People's Assembly (Ekklesia), it oversaw finances, public works and the magistracies and it was even responsible for diplomatic relations with neighbouring powers. Citizens chosen by lot were at the nerve centre of power, and of the seven hundred magistrates, six hundred were appointed by sortition while the rest were elected. Nowadays we might perhaps be surprised that Athenian democracy, in its heyday, relied on something as unfamiliar to us as the drawing of lots, but for contemporaries it was simply self evident that it should. Aristole put it frankly: For example, the appointment of magistrates by lot is democratical, and the election of them oligarchical? Although Aristotle was himself an advocate of a mixed form, he brought the difference between sortition and election into focus by calling the former democratic and the second not. This is made clear elsewhere in his writing too: he noted of Sparta that the constitution contained countless oligarchic elements and 'that all offices are filled by election and none by lot is one of these oligarchical characteristics'. Aristotle regarded the drawing of lots as truly democratic. Typical of Athenian democracy was the fact that virtually no distinction existed between politicians and citizens, between the governing and the governed or between holders of power and subjects. The function of 'career politician' that we all find so natural today would have seemed totally bizarre and absurd to the average Athenian, and Aristotle linked this to an extremely interesting idea about freedom. The basis of a democratic state is liberty... One principle of liberty is for all to rule and be ruled in turn.[^4] Twenty-five centuries old, Aristotle's work still presents some astonishing insights. Freedom does not mean always having power yourself. Nor does it mean being free of the need to pay attention to power or slavishly reconciling yourself to power. Freedom means finding a balance between autonomy and loyalty, between ruling and being ruled. This is an insight that today, with the 'oligarchising of democracy' now far more rife than twenty-five years ago when Professor Verdin warned of it, seems to have been entirely forgotten. The people of Athens did not all participate directly in the decisions taken by these bodies. I would therefore agree completely with a recent study that describes Athenian democracy not as a direct democracy but as a uniquely representative democracy, a non-electoral representative democracy [^5] Because representation of the people was brought about by the drawing of lots, we might speak of an aleatoric-representative democracy (from the Latin for dice). Aleatoric-representative democracies are indirect forms of government in which the distinction between ruler and ruled is brought about by sortition rather than election, and the political history of Western Europe features more such systems than is generally realised. When in 1492 Ferdinand II added the Kingdom of Castile to his Kingdom of Aragon, thus laying the foundation for present-day Spain, he said, 'Experience shows that cities and municipalities that work with sortition are more likely to promote the good life, a healthy administration and a sound government than regimes based on elections. They are more harmonious and egalitarian, more peaceful and disengaged with regard to the passions.’ [^6] In retrospect, this fleeting overview of history teaches us six things. 1) Since antiquity, sortition has been used as a valuable political instrument in several states. 2) In all cases these were geographically small, urbanised states (the city state, the civic republic) where only a limited segment of the population could participate in government. 3) The use of lots often coincided with the peak period of prosperity and culture (Athens in the fourth and fifth centuries, Venice and Florence during the Renaissance). 4) There were various applications and procedures, but drawing lots generally resulted in less conflict and more participation by citizens. 5) Sortition was never deployed exclusively but always in combination with elections, in order to guarantee competence. 6) States that used sortition often experienced centuries of political stability, despite great internal differences between rival groups. The tiny state of San Marino drew lots as recently as the mid-twentieth century in order to choose two governors from its sixty-member governing council. # Page Pg. 75 Line: In the eighteenth century ### III PATHOGENESIS ##### A democratic procedure: Drawing lots (antiquity and Renaissance) `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:` [^1]: Eric Hobsbawm, 1995: Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. London, 112. [^2]: The renewed interest in Athenian democracy can be attributed to the English translation of the life's work of Danish classicist M.H. Hansen: The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford, 1991). The original, a minute analysis of the fourth-century sources, is in six volumes. [^3]: Bernard Manin, 1995(1997): The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge, 1, 94, 236. [^4]: Aristotle, 350 bc (1885), Politics, Oxford, vol. 1, book four, part IX & book six, part II (translated by Benjamin Jowett), 124, 125, 18g. [^5]: Terrill Bouricius, 2013: 'Democracy through multi-body sortition: Athenian lessons for the modern day'. Fournal of Public Deliberation 9, 1, article 11. [^6]: Yves Sintomer, 2011: Petite histore de l'expérimentaion démocratique: Tirage au sort et politique d'Athènes à nos jours. Paris, 86.