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.

Chapter Three tackles the historical enigma of the disappearance of sortition from politics following the French and American revolutions. First, it highlights the “great divergence” between China and the West on this issue, the former using sortition (jointly with imperial examinations) until the beginning of the twentieth century. Next, it unearths the causes of the two-century partial eclipse of random selection in Western politics, at the same time as the technique was employed for the appointment of trial juries. In fact, the random selection of juries was linked to the idea that jurors were interchangeable sources of common sense. On the contrary, the Swiss debate that was waged during the revolutionary period at the turn of the eighteenth century shows that the new rationalist ideas that emerged with the advent of modernity and the Enlightenment viewed the use of chance as a blind and irrational vestige of the past. At that time, the notion of the representative sample, which is familiar to contemporary readers, had not yet been developed. Consequently, even those who defended a descriptive form of representation, where representatives sociologically resemble the people they represent, could not lay claim to sortition when defending their ideal.

Chapter Four analyzes the exponential development of contemporary experiments in sortition. Their advocates base their arguments on the concept of the representative sample, which links the use of chance with descriptive representation. They combine selection by lot and deliberation, stressing justifications such as impartiality, democratic equality, and epistemic democracy. Two waves of experiments are described in turn. The first has focused on deliberative minipublics such as citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, and deliberative polls. They were consultative, top-down, highly controlled by their inventors, and mere complements to representative democracy. The second wave has seen a flourishing of democratic innovation. Empowered minipublics have been combined with participatory or direct democracy, most visibly with citizens’ assemblies. They have begun to be institutionalized. Sortition has also been used in party politics. The politicization of some experiments and the interaction with social movements offers an alternative to the mainstream model, which praises the impartiality and neutrality of minipublics. Three rationales have supported random selection in politics throughout history: Gaining knowledge of a religious or supernatural sign, ensuring impartiality and promoting equality. The chapter concludes with three contrasted contemporary political imaginaries that advocate sortition in the present: Deliberative, antipolitical, and radical democracy.

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.”

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.

Chapter Two analyzes the rebirth of sortition in the West during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. It explores the mutations of the medieval and Renaissance Italian republics, as well as the practices of sortition in Early Modern Spain, Switzerland, and other European countries. During these periods, sortition was widespread and took many different guises, though it was always combined with elections and cooption. It was above all a means to channel the competition for power and resources among groups, and especially among the elite. It was a key element of “distributive aristocracies” in different republican contexts, in which a relatively small subsections of elite citizens could develop self-government in the name of the common good and enjoy the privileges of administrating the polity. In the Italian Communes of the thirteenth century and for limited periods of time in Florence, republican self-government was extended to a larger circle of citizens. Practices of sortition in India are also described. Prior to modernity, although the scientific notion of representative sampling was still unknown, political sortition was linked to an empirical “taming of chance” and used as a rational instrument of government.

In the French edition of The Weight of the World, Bourdieu contends that the goal of his critical sociology is to ‘open up possibilities for rational action to unmake or remake what history has made’ (1999 [1993]: 187). But what is ‘rational action’ in politics? And what potential contribution can intellectuals make to it? This last question is the one that I would like to address here, taking Bourdieu's own answers to it as my starting point. The aim will not be to analyse the concrete orientation of his public interventions, but instead to understand the type of articulation between political life and the intellectual world that he conceptualised. I have no philological ambitions of retracing Bourdieu's trajectory from the 1960s onwards. My intention is to focus on his theorisation of these issues during the last period of his life, from the moment he committed himself increasingly to the public realm (the turning point here is symbolised by the publication in 1993 of The Weight of the World, whose echo outside the academic world was considerable).