Drawing Lots for Governance: A Political Innovation

Abstract

Abstract Introducing the lot from other domains into the political sphere was an innovation, and this chapter evaluates how this innovation was anchored in some poleis and rejected in others. The first section examines how the ancient Greeks viewed the application of the lot to the polis offices. Ancient comments on the practice are relatively few, and in the available sources, the critics are more vocal than the advocates; Plato and Aristotle are among the most outspoken critics. Their objections are not concerned with the lot itself but with the group who would stand for the allotment: indiscriminate allotment from all, as practiced in Athens, assigns too many unqualified citizens to office. The second section reviews two modern commentators on the allotment for office in Athens: G. E. M. de Ste. Croix (1960s, published in 2004) and Bernard Manin (1997), who arrive at totally different evaluations. The last section sketches how drawing lots for polis office could have been introduced and, in a fair number of Greek poleis, be accepted as a means for citizens’ political engagement. The Endnote offers a brief comment on the work of James Headlam (1891).