Reviving Randomness for Political Rationality: Elements of a Theory of Aleatory Democracy

For a long time, political theory frowned upon the notion of chance; political theorists and philosophers apparently have a difficult time taming their impulse to rein in the factor of chance. For them, calling something “a chance event” amounts to evidence of intellectual inadequacy and even condemnation. In Kant’s philosophy, the term “by chance” means “only empirical,” implying that something is completely arbitrary and not thought through.1 And according to Hegel, not only Homer’s sublime song but also the science of philosophy and the great works of bayonets and cannons owe nothing to chance and everything to the great “Compositeur Geist”:2 “An Iliad is not just thrown together by casting dice,” reads an aphorism from Hegel’s “Wastebook.”3 For a long time, spurning any positive recourse to chance belonged to the core of basic epistemological convictions, especially in the case of the political Left. In their sociopolitical thinking, the radical Left during the French Revolution, the utopian socialists, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and all the other leftist schools of thought in their time and following them have considered chance an irrational factor. The works of Marx and Engels are all permeated by a polemic against people in the capitalist system being at the mercy of the irrational forces of chance; only socialism and communism, yet to come, hold the promise of redemption from the arbitrariness of chance, and the unimpeded operation of reason and planning.4 August Bebel’s explanation of the depravity of capitalism being due to efficiency losses in an economic system guided by the unplanned chance decisions of the market follows the same logic.5 The critique of “chance” and the recourse to historical necessities or the revolutionary will, used to argue against it, also left their mark on the various schools of thought of revolutionary Marxism, from early Lukács to Trotsky, on the one hand, and the reform socialism of Wolfgang Abendroth and the Leftist wing of the Social Democratic Parties, on the other.6 In the meantime, it was above all conservatives following Arthur Schopenhauer, including ironic and incorrigibly optimistic skeptics such as Odo Marquard or postmodernist thinkers such as Lyotard who promoted the cause of chance.7 In academic philosophy, a new, difficult, delicate debate about the status of chance decisions in light of theories of justice was only able to unfold in the aftermath of controversies over the work of John Rawls.8 In addition, a handful of models and deliberations in the realm of economicsinspired decision theory, developed since the 1970s and 1980s, contributed to the renaissance of the topic. Jon Elster had merged them under the label “second-order rationality” in the first major study on the potentials for rationality in chance decisions.9 Once convinced that chance may on occasion deserve not criticism but even praise, the next step is to induce chance decisions by design. In everyday life, this is done by drawing straws or flipping a coin. In its sophisticated form, a chance decision brought about by design is called a lottery.10 In the long history of lotteries, we can find all kinds of technical