Sortition and Democracy: History, Tools, Theories

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After two centuries during which it had nearly disappeared in Western countries, sortition is used again as a method of selecting people who could speak for, and in certain cases decide for, all the citizenry. What is the meaning of this comeback? To answer this question, this book offers a historical analysis. It brings together a number of the best specialists on political sortition from antiquity to contemporary experiments, in Europe but also in the Ancient Middle East and in imperial China. With a transdisciplinary perspective, this volume demonstrates that sortition has been a crucial device in political history; that the instruments and places where sortition was practised matter for the understanding of the social and political logics at stake; and that these logics have been quite different, random selection being sometimes an instrument of radical democracy and in other contexts a tool for solving conflicts among elites. Will sortition in politics helps to democratize democracy in the twenty-first century?