Description
Sortition — also known as random selection — puts ordinary people in control of decision-making in government. This may seem novel, but it is how the original Athenian democracy worked. In fact, what is new is our belief that electoral systems are democratic. It was self-evident to thinkers from Aristotle to the Renaissance that elections always resulted in oligarchies, or rule by elites.
In this distillation of a lifetime’s thinking about the history and principles of democracy, Maurice Pope presents a new model of governance that replaces elected politicians with boards, councils and assemblies that are all selected by lot. The re-introduction of sortition, he believes, offers a way out of gridlock, apathy, alienation and polarisation by giving citizens back their voice.
Pope’s work — published posthumously — grew from his unique perspective as a widely travelled English classicist who also experienced the injustice of apartheid rule in South Africa. His great mind was as much at home with the history of philosophy as the mathematics of probability.
Pope lays out a vision for a government entirely based on random selection and citizen deliberation. Sortition-based democracy, he believed, is the only plausible way to achieve each element of Abraham Lincoln’s call for a democratic government “of the people, by the people, for the people”.
