Category Archives: Sortition and citizens’ juries

William Hague gets on board

William Hague has caught the bug for democratic lottery. And he writes about it well. This simple sentence is a nice little microcosm. “Social media companies are poisoning the democratic world with the addictive spread of narrow and intemperate opinions.” … Continue reading

Posted in Democracy, Sortition and citizens’ juries | 4 Comments

Democracy: doing it for ourselves

Above is the video of a presentation I made at NESTA in London on 15th November with discussants Claire Mellior and Martin Wolf. I reproduce (AI generated) timestamps in the shownotes of the video below. 00:00 – Introduction and Overview … Continue reading

Posted in Democracy, History, Innovation, Politics - international, Politics - national, Sortition and citizens’ juries | Leave a comment

Elite Capture: how Christianity wrote the playbook

This is one of the best podcast interviews we’ve done. We discuss Peter Heather’s marvellous book “Christendom: the triumph of a Religion”. It covers the thousand years from the time Christianity becomes embedded in the Roman Empire, via Emperor Constantine’s … Continue reading

Posted in Democracy, History, Religion, Sortition and citizens’ juries | Leave a comment

Why ESG is a puppet show and what to do about it

The more I’ve thought about sortition or as I call it “representation by sampling” the more profound I find the ways it differs from representation by election. The latter is inherently competitive and performative and both these things tend to … Continue reading

Posted in Democracy, History, Sortition and citizens’ juries | Leave a comment

Four ways to fix the world

A while back I condensed a bunch of things I have been thinking about into four ideas which I explored with Peyton Bowman in these two discussions. In discussions with philosopher and school teacher Martin Turkis, it occurred to me … Continue reading

Posted in Cultural Critique, Democracy, Isegoria, Sortition and citizens’ juries | Leave a comment

Engines of oligarchy: with Hugh Pope

One of my favourite podcasts with journalist, scholar and gentleman Hugh Pope. Hugh has just brought to publication a book written by his father in 1990. But being well ahead of its time, the book was unpublishable. It pursued Aristotle’s … Continue reading

Posted in Democracy, Sortition and citizens’ juries | Leave a comment

Understanding the present by listening to the past: Walter Lippmann’s “The Public Philosophy”

One way to get beneath the surface of what’s going on is to read people who were writing about issues, as they emerged rather than in more modern times when they’d become the norm and become infused in our commonsense.  … Continue reading

Posted in Democracy, History, Political theory, Politics - international, Sortition and citizens’ juries, War and military | 1 Comment