Special Webinar: Revitalizing Democracy—Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom
Friday, October 16, 2020
10:00 am – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Online
Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Global Humanities Network at OSUN and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.
The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: how can we revitalize our democracy?
The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: how can we revitalize our democracy?
Hannah Arendt knew that democracy is tenuous. In 1970 she famously wrote: “Representative government is in crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.”
Democracy is weakened when citizens are encouraged to hand over the time-consuming work of self-government to professional politicians. Arendt was continuously critical of representative models of democracy that rely upon experts in place of participation, which is why she rooted the crisis of democracy in the dissipation of public power.
Arendt’s response to the disempowerment of the people in our modern world of bureaucratized politics was decentralization and the council system. At all times, when the people are mobilized to engage politically to found freedom they form citizens councils, as happened in New England town meetings, the revolutionary clubs in France, the soviets in Russia, and the municipal councils in Hungary. In every case, these public forums provided spaces for the experience of public and political freedom. The life of the free man needs “a place where people could come together—the agora, the market-place, or the polis, the political space proper.”
The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: how can we revitalize our democracy?
“Sortition” is one answer increasingly forwarded by citizen activists. Sortition means a government of representatives chosen by lottery instead of by election. By bringing nonexpert citizens into political institutions, sortition both breathes energy into representative democracy and nurtures virtue amongst citizens. It is one way to address the deficit of democratic participation that plagues modern democracy.
At the Arendt Center we recently launched the Bard Institute for the Revival of Democracy through Sortition (BIRDS), a critical platform for diverse research and resources that are emerging around deliberative democracy and sortition. Sortition is not simply an abstract idea. Around the world, citizen assemblies of randomly selected participants are meeting to discuss and decide upon important political controversies. Our 2020 conference will bring leading experts on democracy and on the use of citizen assemblies to Bard to ask how elements of lottery and citizen governance can help reenergize our democracy. Questions to be asked at our conference include:
• Can elements of lottery revitalize democracy today?
• How can we make our representative democracies more participatory?
• Should we be afraid of democratic populism?
• How can we reinvigorate institutions of deliberative democracy?
• What new institutions and practices can energize our politics?
Above all, we ask, how can we revitalize democracy in the 21st century?
Speakers
David van Reybrouck
David Van Reybrouck is considered ‘one of the leading intellectuals in Europe’ (Der Tagesspiegel) and is a pioneering advocate of participatory democracy. He founded the G1000 Citizens' Summit, and his work has led to trials in participatory democracy throughout Belgium and The Netherlands. He is also one of the most highly regarded literary and political writers of his generation, whose most recent book, Congo: The Epic History of a People, won 19 prizes, sold 500,000 copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. It was described as a ‘masterpiece’ by the Independent and ‘magnificent’ by The New York Times.Helen Landemore
Hélène Landemore is Associate Professor of Political Science, with Tenure. Her research and teaching interests include democratic theory, political epistemology, theories of justice, the philosophy of social sciences (particularly economics), constitutional processes and theories, and workplace democracy.
Roger Berkowitz
Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights, Berkowitz writes and speaks about how justice is made present in the world. He is author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, co-editor of Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2010), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012), and editor of the annual journal HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center. His essay "Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Hannah Arendt's Politics," has helped bring attention to the centrality of reconciliation in Hannah Arendt's work. The Arendt Center organizes an annual conference every October. Professor Berkowitz edits the Hannah Arendt Center's weekly newsletter, Amor Mundi. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, The American Interest, and many other publications. Berkowitz is the 2019 recipient of the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Bremen, Germany. (Photo Credit: Doug Menuez)Download File: HACCONFERENCEREADERUPDATED_compressed.pdf