The Political Potential of Sortition: A study of the random selection of citizens for public office Oliver Dowlen 300 pp., £30 / $58, 978-1845401375 (cloth), August 2008 Series: Sortition and Public Policy Search Inside the Book at Amazon.com Search Inside the Book at Amazon.co.uk order your copy

The central feature of every true lottery is that all rational evaluation is deliberately excluded. Once this principle is grasped, the author argues, we can begin to understand exactly what benefits sortition can bring to the political community.

The book includes a study of the use of sortition in ancient Athens and in late medieval and renaissance Italy. It also includes commentary on the contributions to sortition made by Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Harrington and Paine; an account of the history of the randomly-selected jury; and new research into lesser-known examples from England, America and revolutionary France.

The DPhil thesis on which this book was based was nominated by Oxford University for the Sir Ernest Barker Prize in Political Theory for 2007.