Pericles’ funeral oration has played a significant public role, especially in Anglophone countries, over the last century. Renaissance humanists had valued it simply as a masterful piece of oratory, to be studied for its literary qualities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was seen primarily as a source of historical information about Athenian culture, with no present significance. The great change came in the early nineteenth century, when radical and liberal thinkers in Britain, for whom democracy was no longer a threat but a promise, focussed increasingly on the contents of the speech. Cultural achievement was, they argued, intimately bound up with the participation of the people in public life. For them, the proof was in Pericles’ praise of Athens and its institutions. Ancient and modern democracy were now elided, and the words of this funeral speech were thus made available for politicians seeking to celebrate their own societies, from the United States of America to the European Union. These readers of the funeral oration as a celebration of democracy almost entirely ignored the original context of the speech. Developments in modern warfare as well as the rise of the mass citizen army changed this.

Chapter Five engages a normative discussion. It presents a case for return of sortition to the political systems of the Global North. It discusses the main challenges that random selection faces: How is it possible to justify a new kind of representation and to develop a functional epistemic democracy without being kept in the trap of consensus? Four potential roles of sortition bodies are then analyzed: opining, monitoring, judging, and legislating. A systemic democratization of democracy is proposed. Minipublics may be a source for democratizing democracy, a platform for a more enlightened public opinion and a more responsible public action: In short, for a dynamic that runs counter to both postdemocracy and authoritarianism. However, the chapter defends the shift from the minipublics to the legislature by lot, and the necessity to go beyond deliberative democracy. It summarizes the main ideas contained in the volume, opening a broader perspective on how random selection may help to reinvent politics and democracy in the twenty-first century. It defends that democracy 3.0, which differs both from the democracies of the Ancients and the Moderns, could be a “real utopia.”