On Democracy, lack of privilege, and sortition

Democracy is not the whim of children, slaves, or animals. It is the whim of a god, that of chance, which is of such a nature that it is ruined as a principle of legitimacy. Democratic excess does not have anything to do with a supposed consumptive madness. It is simply the dissolving of any standard by which nature could give its law to communitarian artifice via the relations of authority that structure the social body. The scandal lies in the disjoining of entitlements to govern from any analogy to those that order social relations, from any analogy between human convention and the order of nature.  It is the scandal of a superiority based on no other title than the very absence of superiority.--Jacques Rancière (2005) Hatred of Democracy, translated by Steve Corcoran, p. 41. [HT Adriel Trott]

To those of us raised in representative or parliamentary democracies, the tight connection between chance and democracy that Rancière draws is not intuitive anymore. But he is echoing here the ancient conventional wisdom. For example, Aristotle (not exactly a friend of democracy) reports that "it is thought to be democratic for the offices to be assigned by lot" (Politics 4, 1294b).

Under the influence of Aristotle, I kind of assumed that the justification for lot was really grounded in considerations of fairness: under sortition, each of us have an equal chance and so equal share at being governor and being governed. So, for example, he (Aristotle) writes:

Thus democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect they are equal absolutely for they suppose that because they are all alike free they are equal absolutely...and then the democrats claim as being equal to participate in all things in equal shares, Politics 5, 1301a

Now, Aristotle is unfair here; one can think one is equal in some respects and not think one is equal absolutely. And one can maintain that those respects in which we are taken to be equal are sufficient grounds to opt for rule decided by lots. Of course there are risks involved, but doing (ahh) justice to such expressions of fairness and equality may well be worth the risk. It is not obvious one has such fewer risks under hereditary monarchy, and processes that select for some characteristic X, may also end up selecting for the desire to rule which may well undermine some good-making feature of X. (Plato was clearly tempted by the thought in the last bit of the previous sentence.) Either way, Aristotle conveys what we may call a fairness conception of the justification of sortition.

And, in fact, if you think about sortition in this way, one may well be tempted -- as I am in my undergraduate lectures and have argued in public media -- to argue that once states are scaled up in size, obstacles to sortition begin to mount. For example, as Tom van der Meer and I have argued, due to the intellectual division of labor, (i) legislatures chosen by lottery might be even more influenced by assistants and lobbyists with access to the representatives, and (ii) randomly selected body of representatives would likely require thousands of participants to be more or less representative of the U.S. population. Both (i) and (ii) end up undermining fairness considerations.

Influenced by a creative reading of Plato's Laws, Rancière understands the grounds of sortition differently. To be sure Rancière also argues that the "drawing of lots" expresses being a "people of equals" (40) But this is not really fundamentally about fairness. Rather, the rule of chance, the "throw of the dice" is a symbolic and actual means to disconnect entitlement in other areas of life as proper or natural analogies to political privilege or superiority.

That is, the rule by lot violates a kind of political principle of sufficient reason, by embracing, we may say, the lack of reason as a grounds for rule.* If I understand Rancière correctly, the true democrat accepts that another's superiority or one's own subordination can never be justified and so requires a mechanism that does not tempt us to look for such justification (or create alternative institutions that supply those in bad faith). Rancière puts the point as follows, in a democracy the power of the people "is simply the power peculiar to those who have no more entitlements to govern than to submit." (47)

Rancière has more fondness for thinking in terms of "the people" than I do. But that true democracy reminds us of the fundamental un-groundedness, even arbitrariness, of political life from the perspective of reason strikes me as an important truth worth recovering. One may even say that in so far as democracy teaches this, it is the beginning of wisdom.

 

*Rancière claims that Plato recognizes this lack of grounds in the rule of the philosopher king: "some divine chance must make him king without having desired it." (43; I think Al-Farabi grounds this in prophecy.)

Comments

[Samuel Bagg]

And of course I think it is most promising as a means of preventing capture and corruption :-)

If you are interested in this, though, Oliver Dowlen's book (Political Potential of Sortition) is fantastic.

[Eric Schliesser]

I am not persuaded by the arguments sortition prevents such political vices.