Sortition: The God That Will Fail

Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen RuleHélène LandemoreThesis, 2026; 309 pp.

One way to grasp the essence of Politics Without Politicians is to view it as the polar opposite to Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed. Hoppe thinks that democracy is a mistake: Hélène Landemore, a professor of political science at Yale University, thinks we do not have enough of it. What we call democracy today in her view rests on an elitist premise.

In what way is this so? People think of democracy as a competition between political parties to gain office. She terms this the Schumpeterian view: “Democracy . . . is simply a method, specifically ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote. This definition was formulated by an Austrian economist named Joseph Schumpeter, who was no friend of democracy.” This definition, by the way, was exactly the one favored by Ludwig von Mises.

But why is this elitist? Landemore’s answer is in part insightful, in part naïve. Politicians, she recognizes, are avid for power over others and often corrupt: “As political scientist Brian Klaas acknowledges, the problem is more general: ‘There is always self-selection bias with power. Whether it’s trigger-happy police officers or power-hungry tyrants in homeowner’s associations, power tends to draw in people who want to control others for the sake of it.’ Attracting the power-hungry may be problematic. But what is even more problematic for Klaas is that power may attract the corruptible. Indeed, the more corruptible people are, the more they tend to be drawn to jobs where corruption is likely to exist. To be sure, not all electoral democracies suffer from high degrees of corruption, but the stakes of power are such that the possibility of corruption is much more likely in the job of politician than it is, say, in the job of kindergarten teacher or nurse. More worryingly still, Klaas documents an overrepresentation of psychopaths among a number of professions—including salesmen, CEOs, lawyers, surgeons, and police—that share very similar traits with the job of the politician.” Chapter 10 of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” will occur to many readers.

Landemore seems to have painted herself into a corner. She wants more democracy, not less, but the democracy cannot be elitist. But how can you have democracy without elections? Her answer is sortition, rule by a random selection of people: “The gist of it can be summarized by a famous quip by the American conservative author and journalist William F. Buckley Jr. In a 1961 Esquire magazine interview, Buckey said: ‘I would rather be governed by the first 2.000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.’ . . . A large, random sample of the population might not be such a bad mix of people. In fact, it could be both more democratic and more effective to be governed by them than by a group of Harvard academics.”

Further, if we wish to avoid power seekers, then shouldn’t we try to encourage the powerless to speak out? Landemore certainly thinks so, emphasizing “the importance of designing institutions from the perspective of and for the people least likely to seek or want power—those I will call, for lack of a better term, ‘the shy.’”

Landemore’s disdain for the power hungry is all to the good, but what she says makes me uneasy and, in any case, rests on a false premise. What makes me uneasy is that she distrusts all efforts to stand out from the crowd: How dare you think, she seems to say, that you are better than others just because you possess some specialized knowledge? Isn’t this exactly what José Ortega y Gasset wrote about in The Revolt of the Masses? (1931): “It is false to interpret the new situations as if the mass had grown tired of politics and entrusted its exercise to special persons. Quite the contrary. That was what happened before; that was liberal democracy. The mass assumed that, in the end, with all their defects and blemishes, the political minorities understood public problems a little better than it did. Now, on the other hand, the mass believes it has the right to impose and give the force of law to its café commonplaces. I doubt that there have been other periods in history in which the crowd came to govern as directly as in our time. That is why I speak of hyper-democracy. The same thing occurs in the other orders, very especially in the intellectual. Perhaps I am mistaken; but the writer, when taking up the pen to write on a subject he has studied at length, must think that the average reader, who has never occupied himself with the matter, if he reads him, does so not in order to learn something from him, but, on the contrary, to pass judgment on him when he does not coincide with the vulgarities that this reader has in his head. If the individuals who make up the mass believed themselves especially gifted, we would have nothing more than a case of personal error, but not a sociological subversion. What is characteristic of the moment is that the vulgar soul, knowing itself to be vulgar, has the audacity to affirm the right of vulgarity and imposes it everywhere. As they say in North America: to be different is indecent. The mass steamrolls everything that is different, eminent, individual, qualified, and select. Whoever is not like everyone else, whoever does not think like everyone else, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear that this ‘everyone else’ is not ‘everyone’. ‘Everyone’ was normally the complex unity of mass and divergent, special minorities. Now ‘everyone’ is only the mass.”

How would Landemore answer Ortega? She would appeal to history, in particular to the history of ancient Athens. The democracy of the Athenians, she points out, operated by sortition, not election, and though experts were consulted, they were kept in their proper place: “Ancient Athenians delegated agenda-setting power to a group of five hundred randomly selected citizens chaired each day by a different, also randomly selected, citizen. The Council of 500, as the assembly was called, was appointed by lot annually and deliberated over policy recommendations and law proposals. . . . Not only did classical Athens make ordinary citizens the source of all laws, it also subordinated experts to their will. To the extent that magistrates and generals were experts, their decisions were in the service of citizens’ ends. Even more fascinating, according to the historian Paulin Ismard, the only experts of any kind allowed to directly support the work of citizens as lawmakers were slaves.” And wasn’t this system of government compatible with a high level of culture?

The reply I have suggested for Landemore does not adequately respond to Ortega’s complaint. Woe to the Athenian intellectual who aroused the suspicion of the masses! It is enough to mention Socrates. Would Landemore deem his death sentence a fit reward for someone who questioned the wisdom of the masses?

Landemore’s answer to this, I suspect, would be to appeal to the wisdom of people deliberating together, a wisdom she claims can be mathematically demonstrated. And this is where she is naïve. She says: “Scott E. Page formalized this argument as the so-called Diversity Trumps Ability theorem, a now famous and much debated result meant to apply to the context of engineering and business. For me, it unlocked the following thought: Maybe one of the reasons we should want to include even the most ignorant citizens in a political deliberation—not just the smartest ones—is precisely because we are, paradoxically, more likely to smartly solve our problems that way.”

Plato long ago upended Landemore’s political mathematics in book 6 of The Republic: “Imagine then a fleet or a ship in which there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better. The sailors are quarreling with one another about the steering—every one is of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who taught him or when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut in pieces anyone who says the contrary. They throng about the captain, begging and praying him to commit the helm to them; and if at any time they do not prevail, but others are preferred to them, they kill the others or throw them overboard, and having first chained up the noble captain’s senses with drink or some narcotic drug, they mutiny and take possession of the ship and make free with the stores; thus eating and drinking, they proceed on their voyage in such manner as might be expected of them. Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in their plot for getting the ship out of the captain’s hands into their own whether by force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of sailor, pilot, able seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they call a good-for-nothing; but that the true pilot must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art, if he means to be really qualified for the command of a ship, and that he must and will be the steerer, whether other people like it or not— the possibility of this union of authority with the steerer’s art has never seriously entered into their thoughts or been made part of their calling. Now in vessels which are in a state of mutiny and by sailors who are mutineers, how will the true pilot be regarded? Will he not be called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing?”

Landemore wishes to be a radical democrat, but she is not radical enough. Why do people need to be ruled at all? In a free-market social order along Rothbardian lines, people are at liberty to deal with others as they wish, so long as they do not violate rights. And the rights people have are determined by natural law, not by decision. “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.”