Hugh Pope

A bestseller, the dictionary informs me, is not a book that reaches an abstract number of sales. It simply means it is among the top of its class. Even so, this was the last word I expected to be applied to my late father Maurice Pope’s posthumous work, The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power.

The Keys to Democracy may not have made it to any New York Times lists (yet). But for Imprint Academic, the UK publishing house that put it out two years ago today, the book has pride of place on its home page among the four listed as “best sellers.”

Better still, publisher Keith Sutherland told me this week, Imprint Academic will put out a paperback version in September 2025.

I still find it hard to believe the book’s good fortune. It was written more than three decades ago. We in the family long thought the manuscript was lost. Then, after my father’s death in 2019, my mother found the typescript in his library.

My brother Quentin and I edited the text, and we are thrilled at the continuing endorsements, reviews and interest in hearing more.

Just the other day, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, French author of insightful books like the The Death of Democracy – as well as being a University of Columbia professor, former head of UN Peacekeeping Forces and my old boss at International Crisis Group – wrote in spontaneously after ordering my late father’s book. He said that while he didn’t agree with everything, The Keys to Democracy “truly convinced me that sortition is a way to restore the dignity of each and every human being, and is part of the answer to the ills of our societies.”

I hope such reactions mean that more and more people in the world – perhaps triggered by recent advances of authoritarian government in many countries – agree that we need to evolve a better new way forward than electing yet more politicians. This just perpetuates the system that got us into this mess.

In his book, my father proposes to replace elections with a new system of randomly selected “panels” of ordinary citizens. These panels are much the same as what has become the fast-expanding idea of citizens’ assemblies, in which a randomly selected group of ordinary people from a community or country are mandated to solve a tough policy problem. They hear from experts, deliberate among themselves and, after ranking all ideas by votes among themselves, propose whatever commands a supermajority. Choosing by lot is also known as sortition. Some call the vision of this eventually becoming the basis of all government “lottocracy.”

The Keys to Democracy is not a typical political science book, however. My father may have been an academic classicist by training, but he was a successful writer too and wanted the book to be a good read and to draw on all his learning. He mixes in lessons from ancient Greece and the subsequent history of government, the limitations of the renaissance, the efficacy of the Anglo-Saxon jury system, the mathematical breakthroughs of sampling and opinion polling, and a defence of the philosophical and scientific beauties of randomness.

Over the book’s second year, my favourite shoutouts include:

The best book I’ve read all year! – Mette Spencer, sociologist and peace activist

I am loving this posthumously published gem of a book . . . strongly recommended. – Erica Benner, political philosopher

Pope is both a utopian and a realist. This masterful balancing act between the idea and its practical incarnations is a very strong point of his concept and sets it apart from other similar books. – Joanna Podgórska-Rykała, political scientist

I want to emphasize again how much I enjoyed reading this book. Pope is an interesting mind, and even the reader that still scoffs at the idea that our political systems should be more random will find things to enjoy in the boldness and ingenuity of his arguments and the breadth of his interests. – James Kierstead, classicist and think-tanker

You can find links to all the news and reviews about The Keys to Democracy here. Keep scrolling down to find the most recent ones! And a big thank you to everyone who has helped this book on its way up from a long-lost typescript on a bottom library shelf.