Chapter One discusses the contrasts between ancient and modern democracies. First, it describes the current crisis of political representation, the causes of which are structural in nature. After briefly outlining the potential scenarios of postdemocracy and authoritarianism in the Global North, it examines in greater detail a counter-hegemonic project that especially relies upon democratic innovations and aims at democratizing democracy. It then proceeds with an overview of how selection by lot operated in Antiquity, a crucial reference point for advocates of sortition. Describing its political use in ancient western Asia, it elucidates how after Aquinas, two types of sortition came to be differentiated, divinatory and distributive, in addition to the procedure’s use in games of chance or science. Although it partly emerged from divinatory practices, sortition became a secular practice during its Golden Age in Athens, a distributive democracy in which the legitimacy of sortition derived from its impartiality and its radical democratic logic. Political sortition was widespread in Rome but quite different, with a ritual and symbolic dimension that enabled peaceful competition among elites in the name of the Republic and the common good. These contrasting examples establish the fact that sortition can be used according to diverse rationales.

The introduction starts with a factual element showing the exponential development of randomly selected minipublics, which seem to remember the Athenian democracy. It describes the growing interest about sortition in the literature, both in history and in political science. It defends the strategy of the book, which couples historical sociology and political theory. It defends four claims. The first criticizes the idea that sortition in politics has preserved a transhistorical democratic logic, as political sortition has played a number of varied functions throughout history. The second claim explains the disappearance of sortition in the nineteeth century by a combination of factors: Without the notion of the representative sample, the use of chance appeared blind, irrational, incompatible with popular sovereignty, difficult to couple with an elective aristocracy or with an increasing division of labor in big nation states. The third claim is that sortition’s recent return to politics is explained by the coupling of representative sampling, which make possible the constitution of a “minipublic” or microcosm of the people, with deliberation. The fourth claim proposes a normatively convincing and politically realistic case for empowered minipublics and the democratization of democracy. The introduction concludes by presenting the outline of the book.