Against Elections

"Against Elections was the first big successful book on sortition. It’s been translated into 25 languages and it’s a fantastic read. When I first read it, days later I still remembered whole pages of it by heart, it’s so well done. In the world of democratic innovation, that book was the one that really lit the fuse for many people. Randomly selected assemblies had previously been held in British Columbia, Ontario and Iceland. But Van Reybrouck’s book followed the fact that he organized the first big one in Belgium in 2010. This was the G1000 . At that point, Belgium had been without a government for more than a year because the parties couldn’t agree on one. So Van Reybrouck’s group invited 1000 randomly selected Belgians to tell the next government what they wanted it to do. Van Reybrouck’s book is inspired by the frustration the Belgians felt with the way their already complicated country had got even more tied up in knots by its election system, but his genius is to make the story universal. He was helped in this by the publishers Imprint Academic , which later also took on my father’s book. The publisher there, Keith Sutherland, began publishing a series of books on sortition and public policy in the early 2000s. Van Reybrouck told me he ordered their books and read them all. So he based his book both on research and the thrilling experience of organizing the G1000. Against Elections is full of that early idealism."