“Enjoyable”, “idiosyncratic” & “broadly right”

A lovely review of Maurice Pope's The Keys to Democracy in the journal Polis

I can't resist sharing parts of a glorious review of my late Dad's posthumous book The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model of Citizen Power. It's just been published in the January edition of Polis, the Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought (No. 42 (2025) 157-171).

James Kierstead of The New Zealand Initiative first gives a beautifully clear summary of the contents and arguments of the book, then really gets to the bottom of what Maurice Pope wanted to say. (After my father died in 2019, we found the long-lost typescript in his library; Imprint Academic published it in 2023). Along the way, Dr Kierstead explains what he liked about it:

This is an enjoyably idiosyncratic book. Since Pope wrote it long before the recent surge in interest in allotted ‘citizens’ assemblies’, ‘deliberative polls’ and the like, he was free to sketch out an argument on a then-novel topic unencumbered by more recent technical literature. That didn’t stop him drawing on a wide range of sources, from Georges Gallup and Grote through the Unitarian anarchist Lysander Spooner to James Wycliffe Headlam’s now forgotten Election by Lot at Athens (1891).

The argument against ‘noumenalism’ is one of the most gloriously eccentric in the book. Ultimately, though, it seems somewhat beside the point. Few sceptics of sortition are likely to be won round by Pope’s argument that what counts ‘in the metaphysics of democracy’ is that we view randomness as ‘noble’ rather than ‘base’ (p. 120). The material that Jonathan McVity says Pope cut from this chapter (p. 187), which aligned sortition with Karl Popper’s emphasis on democracy as a matter of conjectures and refutations, might have proven more persuasive.

A more serious problem for me is the radically and almost exclusively sortitive nature of Pope’s utopia. Pope’s ideal democracy is one from which all the other institutions that democrats (even participatory democrats) have been favourable to in the past (referenda, mass assemblies, elections) are excluded. Since we currently have elections, parliaments, and so on, this means that Pope’s Kallipolis is much more distant than his occasional advocacy of only ‘gradual’ and ‘piecemeal’ (p. 166) change might suggest...

Pope’s arguments against referenda, moreover, are somewhat unexpected, coming as they do from a such a great democrat. The idea that people would have to ‘master the issues’ for referenda to ‘command respect’, but probably won’t because it takes too much time and effort (p. 70), is one that could equally well be turned against his allotted bodies. And the argument that plebiscites don’t lead to ‘a harmonious decision’ (p. 73), while seemingly confirmed by the Brexit referendum, leads us out of the territory of majoritarian democracy altogether and into the world of consensus-based systems.

Maurice Pope in his library in Oxford in the early 1990s, shortly after the time he would have completed the second draft of The Keys to Democracy. Photo: Patrick Pope

Before I conclude, though, I should note that I think that many of Pope’s basic intuitions are broadly right. What we have now is not really the rule of the people. Experts should have a place in our democracies (even an honoured place), but ultimate control should be in the people’s hands, especially when it comes to decisions about ‘the ends of public policy’ and about what is ‘fair, just and moral’ (to quote, as Pope does on p. 128, the US political scientist Harwood Childs). Sortition offers a promising way out of (or, at least, a method of mitigating) the dysfunctions of our current party politics. Even if I don’t find all of Pope’s arguments for these conclusions similarly compelling, reading his book only strengthened me in these convictions.

I also want to emphasize again how much I enjoyed reading this book. Pope is an interesting mind, and even the reader that still scoffs at the idea that our political systems should be more random will find things to enjoy in the boldness and ingenuity of his arguments and the breadth of his interests. And anyone who has had their cautious suggestions about the potential of sortition dismissed as ludicrous will marvel at the confidence and independent-mindedness with which Pope sets out his arguments, even the ones that ultimately fail to persuade.

For those of us who have previously felt isolated in our klerophily, there is also a feeling of partial vindication, with many of Pope’s intuitions now taken seriously by a whole subculture of academics and activists. That’s something that would no doubt have delighted Pope, even if some of his proposals have now been superseded. (Minority representation now tends to be ensured in citizens’ assemblies not, as Pope suggested, by calculating a minimum number of members needed to make their presence nearly certain, but through the more direct method of stratified sampling.)

There is, finally, one last reason why I think the publication of this book so many years after it was first written should be welcomed. Pope’s politics seem marvellously heterodox, and this volume contains plenty of offhand remarks that should enrage dogmatists of both the left and the right. At the same time, he was clearly a certain kind of Englishman, with an unimpeachable classical education (at Sherborne and Oxford) as well as a fine library, from which he gazes out at the reader in the frontispiece.

At a time when groupthink and tribalism seem more and more common, one of the book’s final services may be to remind the sortition movement of how diverse the paths are that lead us towards randomness, and of how crucial it will be to treat people truly randomly if we are to reap the benefits of continued democratic liberation for all.

The full text of the James Kierstead's review is available on Polis's website here or as a PDF on iCloud here.