Hugh Pope

This is a guide to The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power by the late classicist Maurice Pope. As you’ll see below, the book has been endorsed by many, including columnist Martin Wolf of the Financial Times (“strongly recommended“), leading Yale professor of politics Hélène Landemore (“visionary“) and the Belgian pioneer of democracy by lot David van Reybrouck (“extraordinary“).

You can order the hardback either directly from UK publisher Imprint Academic (note the launch discount with code CAT23), from bookshops like Barnes & Noble or globally from Amazon (e.g. US, UK, AU, DE, FR). It is also available as an ebook on Kindle and on B&N’s Nook.

Links to public presentations and discussions of the book are here. You can also read the preface online.

Reviews and endorsements are below, with the most recent entries are added at the bottom of this page.

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This is a visionary, luminous, wide-ranging and profoundly humanistic book … Maurice Pope saw the potential of democracy by lot to fight corruption, to improve the quality of deliberation, to build on ordinary citizens’ common sense and diversity, and to educate and spread in the body politic the fundamental ethos of social equality.

—Dr. Hélène Landemore 

Professor of political science at Yale University and author of Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century.

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The apogee of a career’s thinking as a radical-minded classicist … The Keys to Democracy remains unique in its philosophical breadth and scope. And in its vision, it is still bolder than many on offer. 

—Dr. Paul Cartledge 

Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University and author of Democracy: A Life

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Maurice Pope was obviously something of a visionary, predicting the modern reincarnation of sortition in the form of citizens’ assemblies years before the recent “deliberative wave” was even a tiny ripple on a few disparate ponds. He was also incredibly knowledgeable and insightful. His arguments and reasoning as he sets out the case for sortition are still highly relevant today.

—Dr. Brett Hennig

Director and Co-Founder, Sortition Foundation, Cambridge, UK, and author of The End of Politicians: Time for a Real Democracy

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Maurice Pope’s book provides a compelling basis for the next democratic paradigm. He makes it clear that what we refer to as ‘democracy’ today is rather an oligarchy of elected elites—and that it was intentionally designed as such. It’s why we need to reclaim the true meaning, values and processes of democracy. Pope shows us why the ideal of government by the people is not only desirable, it is also possible if we return to democracy by random selection of representatives (sortition). It gives us hope.

—Claudia Chwalisz

Chief Executive Officer of DemocracyNext and former lead of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s work on Innovative Citizen Participation

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Required reading for our times. Innovation in democracy has never been more needed now that climate change requires long-term collective action underpinned by democratic consent—over decades to come. This bold proposal combines Maurice Pope’s insights into ancient methods of democracy with a brave vision for the future that overcomes the limits of representation.

—Dr. Heather Grabbe

Open Society European Policy Institute and University College, London

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Maurice Pope’s call for random selection-based democracy is a powerful, pre-emptive herald to the current expansion of citizen participation. It has the distinctive merit of connecting the field of sortition design to wider historical trends and political philosophy. In doing so, his book adds invaluable intellectual ballast to the quest for better democratic practices. Pope’s masterful tract shows that today’s attempts to involve citizens in politics should not be dismissed as an ephemeral fad, but have deep roots in political concerns and debates extending back many years.

—Prof. Richard Youngs

Senior Fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, professor at Warwick University and author of Rebuilding European Democracy: Resistance and Renewal in an Illiberal Age 

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Informed by a learned and entertaining sweep of the pedigree of democracy, this erudite book makes a cogent case for the merits of sortition as a means of revitalising citizen engagement and improving the quality of political decision making, while not hiding the obstacles to its adoption in the years ahead. At a time of growing cynicism, it should be read by anyone seeking creative ways to boost trust in politics.

—Michael Keating

Executive Director of the European Institute of Peace and former Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General in Somalia

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Those of us who yearn for citizens’ assemblies to be better respected, understood and used as a transformative tool for democracy will find much solace and hope in Maurice Pope’s pioneering book. Having a work of such calibre and prescience at our side will surely help many hitherto covert sortition supporters come out of the closet once and for all.

—Annika Savill

Formerly the Executive Head of the UN Democracy Fund, the Senior Speechwriter to UN Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan and the Diplomatic Editor of the UK’s Independent newspaper

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Awe-inspiring … [Maurice Pope] was an intellectual dark horse.

—Dr Edith Hall

Professor of Classics, Durham University and author of Aristotle’s Way and Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

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Maurice wrote his book decades ago. Couldn’t get it published. Too crazy an idea. Until now! 

—Jefferson Smith

Democracy Nerd podcast host

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A masterpiece of thinking and writing, and a pleasure to read … I love the book.

—James Harding

Editor and founder Tortoise media, former director of BBC News and ex-editor of The Times.

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It’s an astonishingly brilliant book. It thinks through many of the things that political theorists and political scientists have been gradually groping towards over the last 40 years. It is radical, but also realistic. It recognizes that the full utopian vision is not going to come about any time soon, that many of the changes in democracy have been gradual processes that have taken hundreds of years to develop.

—Dr Alan Renwick

Professor of Democratic Politics at University College London, Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit and author of The Politics of Electoral Reform: Changing the Rules of Democracy.

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Encountering the book … is like discovering a time capsule: we peer into the mind of a genius whose work reaches out from the past and yet, in its perspicacity and ambition, stretches way ahead of us. It’s also a delight to read. Pope’s voice speaks through the text in his breezy style and inimitable wit; the anecdote and humor that he peppers throughout make his points pop in your mind. And they’re big ones...

Pope was … a visionary, and his plan’s more revolutionary than The Communist Manifesto. What’s incredible about it is the context of its writing. In the late 1980s—and certainly with the fall of the Soviet Union—citizens of the West were being told repeatedly that we’d reached “the end of history.” There were no alternatives, Thatcher declaimed, to liberal capitalism and the elective oligarchy that’s got us by the throat. Yet deep in the bowels of his study, this brave, brilliant man was working out an audacious dream for democracy entirely on his own. Reading the result is like being invited in and given a cup of tea in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other—except the dynamite explodes your mind. The author’s out on a limb here; yet every place he leaps, he finds his feet. The epigraph from Chesterton above actually omits the full phrase: “All real democracy is an attempt, like a jolly hostess, to bring the shy people out.” Maurice Pope is that host, and his feast’s a joy.

—Nick Coccoma

Review in The Similitude, 5 April 2023.

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It’s surprisingly a lot more relevant today than when Maurice Pope originally wrote it. He was echoing his experience in understanding classical and Athenian democracy and the ways they used instead of elections, which he was very sceptical of. They used sortition, basically random selection, to put ordinary people in control of decision-making and government. Recently there’s been a lot of experiments in this, in Ireland, where they used it to reform their abortion law, and they are about to use it to discuss their neutrality, and in France where they’ve used it in … . carbon and environmental issues and euthanasia issues. So it’s a fascinating book on how random selection can be a more democratic tool than elections.

—Jeremy Shapiro

Director of Research at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Speaking on Mark Leonard’s World in 30 Minutes, 28 April 2023.

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Un livre né d’une belle histoire : d’abord refusé par les maisons d’édition il y a plus de 30 ans, le manuscrit a été retrouvé par son fils @hugh.pope, qui l’a édité et publié. Un livre précurseur sur les assemblées tirées au sort. Hugh Pope m’a raconté cette histoire incroyable lors d’une rencontre au Parlement.

A book born of a lovely story: first turned down by publishing houses more than 30 years ago, the manuscript was rediscovered by his son, who edited and published it. A pioneering book on randomly selected assemblies. Hugh Pope told me this unbelievable story during a meeting in parliament.

—Magali Plovie

President of the French-speaking Parliament of the Brussels Region in Belgium. Magali Plovie chose The Keys to Democracy as one of her three picks for “inspirational reading on democracy this spring.” May 2023.

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Of all the things I’ve read on sortition, it’s the most Socratic ... Recommended!

—Nicholas Gruen

CEO of Lateral Economics, Australia, during our May 2023 podcast discussion about the The Keys to Democracy.

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Not a bad stylist, your Dad. Not a bad writer at all.

—Michael Goldfarb

Broadcaster, ex-NPR correspondent and host of FRDH Podcast “Democracy in Crisis: One Idea for Fixing It“. 4 June 2023.

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A lot of people recognize that something is going pretty badly wrong. We have clearly lost confidence in core institutions … people feel they have been disregarded and ignored and given a pretty poor hand and they recognize that it might actually undermine the stability of what they expect. They are prepared to think … maybe we’ve got to change.

One of my most radical proposals … in a column two weeks ago, is that we should complement representative democracy with Athenian democracy, which is, we can’t have everybody in a room but we can use citizens assemblies. We want ordinary people engaged in political discussions.

There’s been much more work in this area around the world than even I had realized even when I wrote that … I have a very dear friend, very brilliant, Nicholas Gruen, an Australian economist who’s written a lot on this subject, with whom I have very long conversations.

This then led me into the modern literature on sortition: there’s a new book, JUST published, authored [by the late classics scholar Maurice Pope], long after his death, by [his son] Hugh Pope … on this subject, which I strongly recommend.

I thought this is an idea which I thought at least should be resurrected. If we want democracy to work in the long run and we’re not very happy with where we are we should start opening up the debate into whether we have got the best settlement.

Remember, the representative democracy we have is established within the framework created, broadly speaking, by Simon de Montfort rather a long time ago in the 13^th century. We have made it more democratic but there’s no particular reason why it’s God-given, it is possible to ask ourselves whether we could do this better in one way or another. I think that’s a question we should be considering.

—Martin Wolf

Financial Times’ chief economics commentator and its best-read columnist, in conversation with Tortoise media’s James Harding at the KITE ideas and music festival, 11 June 2023.

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Over the years we have come to learn that in this country [Belgium] voting is compulsory, but citizens’ panels are not going to be compulsory. This argument has been slowly creeping into the field of deliberative democracy, “Ala, let’s not make it compulsory”.

And yet if you read about what people were thinking about it in the 1980s, and I’m in the middle of the process of reading The Keys to Democracy, the book recently published just a few weeks ago. It was written by Maurice Pope who was a professor of classics at Oxford – and his son Hugh Pope, who is sitting on the front right there, you took care of your Dad’s manuscript.

He wrote an incredible book in the 1980s which unlike all his other publications did not find a publisher, because it was seen as completely maverick, this book – all of a sudden, I mean – it’s extraordinary, first of all because the entire gist of deliberative democracy is in there. With one difference: he thinks it should be mandatory.

—David van Reybrouck

Belgian poet, playwright, novelist, co-founder of the G1000 democratic reform NGO and pioneering author of Against Elections. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy–Europe (FIDE) on 22 June 2023.

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I didn’t want to read [Maurice Pope’s manuscript] until I had written my own book on democracy, and now that I have read it, I wish I was as perceptive as Pope.

—Lewis H. Lapham

Founder of Lapham’s Quarterly, former editor of Harper’s Magazine, and author of The Wish for Kings: Democracy at Bay (1993). From a letter to Jonathan McVity, the literary agent for The Keys to Democracy, 7 December, 1992.

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In the year 2023, a book came out, and I have it in my bag, that had been written in the late 1980s by the Oxford classicist Maurice Pope. [He] couldn’t find a publisher in his lifetime. When it was published posthumously, readers discovered a visionary chapter on the future of global governance. I quote: “Unfortunately, the United Nations is the creature rather than the master of the sovereign states that compose it. It is not a house of representatives but a diplomatic rendez-vous.” As an alternative, Maurice Pope pleaded for a global assembly drafted by lot that would represent the world population. He realised the prospect was distant and the practical challenge immense, but he none the less concluded with the following words: “A forum of this kind would make for peace far more than one where government representatives make propaganda speeches. There is no other institution in sight that can offer any kind of promise to cure group rivalries, national, racial, religious and ideological that so dangerously divide humanity.”

—David van Reybrouck

Belgian poet, playwright, novelist, co-founder of the G1000 democratic reform NGO and pioneering author of Against Elections. Speaking at the Einstein Forum on 1 July 2023.

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“I’d love to debate the pros and cons of this system [of sortition] for longer because it seems like it has a lot to recommend it …. The interest [of co-editor Hugh Pope] is clear and the enthusiasm is inspiring, and I’m not at all surprised that people you talk to about this are infected with the same enthusiasm …. This has been a very interesting topic for me personally, and I hope for our listeners, partly because it is quite different from what we normally talk about. But I think it still fits squarely into the science of policy mould … the book you’re looking for is written by Maurice Pope, edited by Hugh Pope, and it’s called The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power.”

—Toby Wardman, host of the podcast of the Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA), during an interview about sortition with Hugh Pope.

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“The Keys to Democracy. Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power was written twenty years before this interest in sortition took off [in the past decade]. Maurice Pope (1926–2019) was a classicist, an expert in the ancient Cretan script called Linear A and author of a captivating study of ancient scripts “The Story of Decipherment” (1975) …

“The quality of the argument is in my view quite uneven. Some of the political analyses and in particular the historical sections suffer from oversimplification, generalisation, and special pleading. For instance: “The political ideals and most of the political practices of Western civilisation go back through Venice and ancient Rome to classical Greece.” (p. 115). No, they don’t, this is simply not true, nor is Pope’s account of how sortition got “lost” in the course of history. On p. 123, Pope contends: “It would be possible […] to define history itself as the story of how experts have been proved wrong. For otherwise […] it would not be history at all, but current practice. […examples in] the history of science. Being history, it is possible to tell which side was wrong.” This view of history is simply bizarre. If Pope resorted to such sweeping statements to help easy reading, I don’t think they are the proper means to that end.

“But, making up for such drawbacks, Pope offers excellent observations on deliberation as a crucial ingredient of democracy and on the potential of sortition to prevent oligarchisation (the “law of Michels”), meritocracy and other problematic forms of hierarchy. Sortition enables implementing the equality of citizens and bringing their engagement in policy making about. Importantly, Pope points out that sortition, whenever it is employed, must be rigorous and compulsory to be effective, and allotted bodies must be selected from the whole population (p. 167; complemented by the outstanding comment by Potter in the appendix). He underlines that allotted panels of citizens must have moral authority and real responsibility (to which should be added a transparent system of accountability). Written with an open, engaging style, The Keys to Democracy is set to win a wider audience for its important and pressing message.”

—Prof. Dr. Josine Blok

Professor of History and Art History at the University of Utrecht and Chair of the European Network for the Study of Ancient Greek History. Excerpt from full review in H-Soz-Kult, 18.09.2023.

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“The great strengths of Pope’s writing are his independence of thought and his evident sincerity. Coming early into the field, and being a classicist rather than a political scientist, Pope was clearly breaking new ground, following his own logical train of thought. He was thus free from the burden of formulaically making connections to prior writings and from the petty-political considerations of self-promotion. This unique situation made a thoroughgoing impact on the book as a whole.

At the conservative end [of authors about sortition] sortition-based institutions are … seen as a way to infuse the system with new blood or new vigor … At the other end …. the current, elections-based system is [seen as] inherently (and by design) anti-democratic.

“The Keys to Democracy does not fit comfortably into either of those positions or in any one position on the spectrum between them. Befitting his background as a classicist, Pope’s attitude toward the elections-based system is radical… a complete replacement of the electoralist system by one based on sortition.

“… Other aspects of Pope’s narrative are less trenchant. In terms of policy outcomes of oligarchical rule, Pope is rather vague. It is only by implication, when in his sketch of utopia he discusses decreased economic inequality, that it turns out that this is a problem that he is hoping sortition will address. Other than that Pope asserts that elites tend to hinder progress being too committed to the status quo, but it is not made clear what progress is to be expected by democratization. Democracy is desirable as an ultimate goal, an inherently liberating power, rather than as a tool for certain public policy objectives…

“Despite the familiarity of much of the argumentation, and beyond the unorthodox explicit rejection of participatory ideas on the grounds that they are not democratic … Pope is offering an epistemological theory of sorts making a connection between truth and form of government...

“Pope’s book is certainly an important document. It presents an independent assessment of the politics of our society and the role that sortition could play in its democratization. It could be thought of as an alternative intellectual history of sortition, challenging the conventional thinking on this topic. It is neither a “rabble-rousing” manifesto nor a systematic cohesive analysis but a loosely-knit collection of ideas. Many of those ideas are not new to the field but others are novel and provocative even today, almost 40 years after the book was originally written.“

—Yoram Gat

Editor, Equality by Lot, an informal group interested in the deliberate use of randomness (lottery) in human affairs. 7 October 2023

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“When reading the book, it’s hard not to forget yourself. It’s hard not to forget that the book – although published nowadays – comes from decades ago! For it is deeply contemporary! And today more than ever it fits the political reality. It fits perfectly. It complements the ongoing debate around the world about possible ways to renew democracy, which is without a doubt in crisis.

“Pope is both a utopian and a realist. This perfect balancing act between an idea and its practical incarnations is a very strong point of the book. Pope is well aware of both the possibilities and limitations associated with the proposed model. He tries to discuss his concept in a clear manner, referring to numerous evidences and evokes images that work on the imagination. His narrative is engaging. The idea to describe a fictional situation after a disaster is great. We move with the author to another reality and begin to feel like members of this surviving community. We follow their fate and wonder, what would I do in such a situation, what would I decide, a supporter of what solution would I turn out to be? It’s an incredibly interesting experience …

“… At the time Pope proposed random selection … could the idea of a random selection of politicians be taken seriously? … I fear not. However, when the shortcomings of representative democracy become all too apparent and begin to trouble both established and post-communist countries, it becomes clear that the changes Pope wrote about must come.

“Was it necessary in the period when Maurice Pope came to his brilliant conclusions? Perhaps not, and perhaps that period in history and its circumstances would have meant that the topic would have been pushed to the periphery. Today it will no longer be pushed aside because the anti-democratic tendencies are too strong to be ignored.”

—Dr Joanna Podgórska-Rykała

Author of Deliberative Democracy, Public Policy, and Local Government (Routledge 2024) and professor of political science at Krakow University. This extract from her paper delivered to the annual conference of the Political Studies Association of Ireland, 21 October 2023.

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