Every Cook Can Govern

C. L. R. James 1956
Every Cook Can Govern
A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece
Its Meaning for Today

I've come across a gem of an article by C.L.R. James, whom I suspect to be one of the 20th century's most inspiring historians. Apparently, he wrote a large number of important scholarly works in the 50s and 60s that explored entirely new terrain; and he had a knack for reading history for what it can tell us today.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Greek Democracy was that the administration (and there were immense administrative problems) was organized upon the basis of what is known as sortition, or, more easily, selection by lot. The vast majority of Greek officials were chosen by a method which amounted to putting names into a hat and appointing the ones whose names came out.

Now the average CIO bureaucrat or Labor Member of Parliament in Britain would fall in a fit if it was suggested to him that any worker selected at random could do the work that he is doing, but that was precisely the guiding principle of Greek Democracy. And this form of government is the government under which flourished the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

(...)

For the Greek, the word isonomia, which meant equality, was used interchangeably for democracy. For the Greek, the two meant the same thing. For the Greek, a man who did not take part in politics was an idiotes, an idiot, from which we get our modern word idiot, whose meaning, however, we have limited. Not only did the Greeks choose all officials by lot, they limited their time of service. When a man had served once, as a general rule, he was excluded from serving again because the Greeks believed in rotation, everybody taking his turn to administer the state.

Books by C.L.R. James