Tirage au sort et démocratie radicale – Au-delà du libéralisme

Long ignored by political science, sortition has recently came back on the front of the stage, bringing a new light on the question of democracy. Since Aristotle and Montesquieu, it was traditionally admitted that sortition was inherently democratic and anti-oligarchic. However, do the renewed interest for sortition from political elites and some theorists of representative government, and its recent experimental use in Porto Alegre and in British Columbia constitute a factual denial to the Aristotelian thesis of a fundamental contradiction between sortition and liberalism ? While rejecting the essentialist assumption that there is a nature of sortition, this article takes the opposite of the liberal thought which, insisting too much on the neutralizing vitrue of sortition, came to overshadow its equalitarian virtue, its subversive logic and its link to the idea of radical democracy. The hypothesis of a liberal sortition is undermined by the historical, sociological and philosophical approaches of the subject.