Should we go back to Democracy by lot??

Visiting Jacques and Véronique in Tangier last week, we had loads of exciting discussions. One of them was brought up by Jacques about the failures of our democracies and his conviction, that we should try out Democracy by lot or draw, instead of our worn-out representative democratic systems...

Here is where nice coincidences do pop up. The day after, I opened the regular letter of "College de France", with an interview of Chloé Santoro*, a researcher, who in 2025, became the fourth recipient of the Collège de France Prize for Young Researchers. Check further down for more info on Chloé and Collège de France...

In this interview, that I have translated and reproduced below (10 min read... :)), it comes up, that Democracy by lot is in the heart of her studies on the functioning of the Athenian democracy. It was its essential system, which is little known today, but could inspire many, who wonder how to transform our present representative democracy, often accused of democracy's present crisis in the Western world.

Don't hesitate to react further down!!

“In a democracy, any form of delegation of power is a last resort.” 

Can citizens make important decisions without systematically resorting to political representatives? Drawing on the example of Athenian democracy, philosopher Chloé Santoro outlines a democratic system based on active and deliberative citizenship. She describes an institutional architecture capable of generating collective intelligence, not only through decision-making processes, but also through social practices and the development of critical thinking. 

You say that our democracies face a paradox. Why?

Chloé Santoro: In our representative systems, the people are sovereign, but paradoxically, they only exercise their sovereignty by electing a representative who will decide on their behalf. In my opinion, it is this paradoxical conception of democracy that partly explains the profound crisis of legitimacy we are witnessing today. The aspirations for more integrated and authentic forms of democracy are strong; nevertheless, with the exception of Switzerland, voters are consulted very little in our current systems. They only intervene on minor decisions. Two arguments, rarely questioned, justify this: firstly, ordinary citizens are deemed incompetent to govern, and secondly, large numbers are considered a handicap. However, there is a precedent where these two assumptions were disproven: ancient Athenian democracy.

I became interested in Athens because I wanted to understand whether it was possible for ordinary citizens to make important decisions without relying on political representatives. My main questions concerned collective intelligence: what is it? Does it truly exist? How is it built, through what social practices and institutions? What I was interested in understanding was the "epistemic model" of Athenian democracy, that is, how, in Athens, the knowledge, skills, and abilities of citizens were organized and used to participate in political life.

What conclusions do you draw from your research? 

One of the first observations of this work is the strangeness of the Athenian system compared to our frameworks of political thought and practice. For example, in Athens, decisions were made according to a logic that proves counterintuitive within our representative systems: the more important a decision was, the more people the Athenians believed it required to make it. This correlation between the gravity of the decision and the number of decision-makers is, in my opinion, what constitutes the essence of a "radical" vision of democracy.

In my work, I try to lay the groundwork for a democracy I call radical, which I see as the opposite of representative democracy. While radical democracy already exists as a concept, I disagree with the way it has been conceived as a natural form of organization. On the contrary, Athens shows us that popular sovereignty doesn't simply need to be expressed. It must be built, over time, through rather complex institutions. I am therefore developing an original concept of radical democracy, centered on the question of learning.

This choice was also motivated, according to you, because the philosophical sources currently available to us are biased…

Even though I am a philosopher by training, I relied very little on philosophical theories of democracy, for several reasons. First, historiography has progressed considerably in recent years. Certain theories of democracy, which I would call "elitist," have lost ground thanks to advances in this discipline. For example, the declinist interpretation of Athenian participation from the second democratic period onward, which prevailed as recently as thirty years ago, is no longer accepted by historians today. Political theory has not yet fully integrated these developments. This was one of the objectives of my dissertation: to ensure that the blend of radicalism and pragmatism that characterizes this regime is both better understood and taken more seriously.

Furthermore, some philosophical texts have been relatively better preserved than other sources. I am thinking in particular of texts like those of Plato or Aristotle, which permeate our philosophical theories. However, from a historical perspective, the vision conveyed by these classical texts is outdated. Plato, for example, defends an elitist model according to which the person making political decisions must be carefully chosen for their personal characteristics and possess strong skills for governing. Paradoxically, this model is far more compatible with the technocratic ideology that underpins our contemporary representative institutions than with the dominant ideology and institutions of his time.

In practical terms, how did the Athenians govern?

On the one hand, they relied on the votes of thousands of citizens present at the Assembly, rather than on a single representative, to make important political decisions. On the other hand, the Athenian government relied heavily on the selection of ordinary citizens by lot. Thousands of these citizens dedicated themselves to their city each year, preparing Assembly sessions or presiding over trials, for only about a hundred elected representatives. Sortition is a method of selection that we are beginning to experiment with again today, but it remains marginalized in terms of decision-making bodies, even though it is a way to promote not only social diversity, but also cognitive diversity.

In Athens, lotteries were conducted according to the Cleisthenian system, that is, according to a rather complex distribution of the population into "tribes," within which citizens from different types of territories were mixed. This is a feature that remains largely unknown to the general public today, even though it played a fundamental role in ensuring a constant mixing of the civic population and establishing bonds of trust that transcended social affiliations.

You undertook an immersion within the French Citizens' Convention for the End of Life. Why?

Ancient Athenian society remains very different from our own, and our sources are fragmentary. Even though historiography has made significant progress in understanding political institutions, gaps remain in our knowledge of how Athenian democracy functioned on a daily basis, due to a lack of comprehensive descriptions in ancient texts. For example, we have limited insight into how deliberations were conducted, or into the purpose of certain reforms.

I therefore needed to be able to test some of my hypotheses with an assembly in action, to think by analogy. The Citizens' Convention on End of Life (CCFV), which brought together 184 ordinary French citizens over nine weekends between 2022 and 2023 to deliberate on the legal framework surrounding end-of-life care, lent itself to this observation. As in Athens, the citizens had been randomly selected to participate in this experiment. I wanted to understand how this differed from other selection methods. I was also interested in how the mechanisms of sociability influence individuals during deliberations and at the time of voting. My immersion within the CCFV thus allowed me to observe how relationships were built between voters, how they granted or withdrew their trust from one another. This affective dimension of how we do democracy, or, to put it more simply, how collective intelligence is built with the heart, is what I missed about Athens… I needed to be able to observe it much more closely.

How does one ultimately become an informed and autonomous citizen?

I would say that the real democratic question is that of collective autonomy, and that this cannot be improvised. Sociability is essential, and it takes time to build it. A group is built by sharing common moments, whether through meals, laughter, and so on. These moments contribute to the quality of democratic debate. This means that we must not only consider deliberation, but also informal times to allow collective reflection to develop. Individually, this also requires practice. Certainly, Athenian citizens could be chosen by lot; however, they had many other opportunities to coordinate and exercise their critical judgment through collective events. They were much more experienced than we are in this regard.

What I mean by training is the opportunity, within the context of various daily activities, to exercise one's critical judgment as a citizen. For example, Athenian citizens were paid to go to the theater. This activity was considered part of citizenship—and I think it's important to understand what that entails. Of course, one could point out that Athenians had more time than we do for this kind of activity since, even though most of them worked, they also generally had slaves who could handle daily tasks. However, I believe that civic participation in a democracy is not a luxury, and the fact that it was compensated in Athens, including in its "festive" forms, clearly demonstrates this.

How, in your opinion, can we avoid the pitfalls we have created so far?

Participating in public decision-making requires time and commitment. In the case of the Citizens' Convention on End-of-Life Care, for example, participants were asked to form an opinion on the current practice of deep and continuous sedation until death. Some then took it upon themselves to organize visits to hospitals and intensive care units to see firsthand what this meant in practice. I would say that it is sometimes difficult to think abstractly about certain issues. To understand a question like end-of-life care, one must be able to imagine the impact it will have on families, something deeply personal. Practice, however, can help gain experience and share it with others, so that the group gradually develops its understanding.

Of course, collective decision-making isn't always possible, especially in emergencies. The citizens of classical Athens were well aware of this, and it was possible that some military strategists or diplomats might have to make decisions without consultation. However, their actions were closely scrutinized, and they were held accountable for decisions made independently. And that, in my opinion, is the correct approach: recognizing that any form of delegation in a democracy is a last resort.

Interview by Emmanuelle Picaud

* Chloé Santoro is a researcher at the deliberation chair of the Hannah Arendt Interdisciplinary Laboratory for the Study of Politics (LIPHA), at the University of Paris-Est-Créteil, and an associate researcher at the Logiques de l’agir laboratory in Besançon.

Lecture  

Chloé Santoro will give a lecture entitled “Athens: Democracy as an Institution of Collective Intelligence” at the Collège de France on December 10, 2025, at 6:00 p.m.

The Collège de France, formerly known as the Collège Royal or as the Collège impérial), founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment in France. It is located in Paris near La Sorbonne. The Collège de France has been considered to be France's most prestigious research establishment. It is an associate member of PSL University (La Sorbonne).

Research and teaching are closely linked at the Collège de France, whose ambition is to teach "the knowledge that is being built up in all fields of literature, science and the arts".

As of 2021, 21 Nobel Prize winners and 9 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with the Collège. It does not grant degrees. Each professor is required to give lectures where attendance is free and open to anyone. Professors, about 50 in number, are chosen by the professors themselves, from a variety of disciplines, in both science and the humanities. The motto of the Collège is Docet Omnia, Latin for "It teaches everything"; its goal is to "teach science in the making" and can be best summed up by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phrase: « Not acquired truths, but the idea of freely-executed research », which is inscribed in golden letters above the main hall.