Democracy was invented by the Greeks, right? And they had elections among the non-slave males… Wrong. In fact, the free men (not women) of Athens used a machine where their names were placed in slots and a few were drawn randomly to serve in a citizens’ assembly. It was not until the 19th century, more than two millennia later, that democracy became synonymous with elections. This is the forgotten historical revelation in Brett Hennig’s new book The End of Politicians, one that our modern mythology of democracy has conveniently buried.

Eighteenth-century radicals had no illusions about elections being democratic. James Madison, architect of the US constitution and fourth US president, knew this from Aristotle, Rousseau and Montesquieu, who all linked democratic government to random selection by lot, and aristocratic government with elections. “Selection by lot is in the nature of democracy, selection by choice is in the nature of aristocracy,” he wrote.

“Historically sortition — random selection or lottery — was how the ancient Athenian democracy allocated most political posts. It was widely accepted that elections will produce an elite (they come from the same word) and that professionalism in politics was dangerous,” the Australian activist and academic, now based in Edinburgh, tells the Star. “After the various revolutions that were the harbingers of modern republics the propertied men who emerged victorious used elections as a device for selecting leaders from among the propertied class.”

Elections in capitalist society produce the government of wealth. For example, mean US family wealth in 2010 was £62,000, while the not so mean wealth of a member of the US Congress was £930,000. This is not just a problem in the West. In China’s National People’s Congress, the seven richest members have a joint wealth of £72.4 billion, dwarfing the wealth of US Congress members.

Hennig, who has previously been a cab driver, a software engineer and has a PhD in astrophysics, asks: what kind of legislation would the US get from a representative assembly in which 15 per cent received foodstamps, 50 per cent were women and the majority were workers and carers?

The author says he was drawn to sortition after years of campaigning and involvement in progressive politics in Australia: “I came to sortition after many years of working on various social justice campaigns — refugees, anti-war, climate change — and subsequently joining a supposedly ethical political party.

“After moving up the internal power structures I became very disillusioned with the usual power-games and political careerism of individuals in the party. At the time I was reading Hardt and Negri’s trilogy on political philosophy and began researching network forms of democracy, eventually coming across sortition — which transformed my view of democracy and what an ideal democracy would look like.”

The End of Politicians provides a guide to the history of representative government and a hopeful look at what an alternative might look like. Its conclusions are familiar to anyone who’s been alert over recent decades. So-called representatives do not reflect their voters’ opinions. In fact they track

the interests of the wealthy. Hennig quotes a study by Martin Gilens from 2012 that reveals a “complete lack of government responsiveness to the poor.”

“Honest observers agree that what occurs in our democracies is a broadly constrained bargaining among the elites. The patterns of responsiveness are closer to plutocracy than democracy,” according to Gilens.

Traditionally, people on the left have seen socialism or social democracy as the answer to this problem. The difficulty today, though, is to find an institutional form that truly represents the people. Neither liberal democracy nor state socialism have passed the test of history. What should we be fighting for now? Sortition offers a way of ensuring that the majority in society are represented directly through a new model of deliberative democracy. It is of course a radical, revolutionary change and one that will require a huge leap in our thinking, and a lot of persuasion.

“Our political imaginations have been stunted by the dominance of the idea that elections are fundamental to democracy,” says Hennig. “Elections are elitist constructions. Look at the composition of our parliaments! We must promote sortition, push for experiments with sortition, and institute it at different levels to popularise it.”

This is already happening. Ireland is currently holding a citizens’ assembly composed of 99 randomly selected people talking about the constitutional ban on abortion, climate change and fixed term parliaments. “A few years ago they held a citizens’ assembly that led to the successful referendum on same-sex marriage,” Hennig points out.

The Sortition Foundation is bringing the G1000 to the UK in September — a forum that brings together up to 1,000 randomly selected people from a local area to talk about local issues. And in Scotland, there is a campaign to make the second chamber of the Scottish Parliament a citizens’ assembly based on sortition.

The idea inevitably comes up against the same objection that meets all forms of popular democracy — ordinary people can’t be trusted. “The most common objection is, sadly, that the ‘average’ person is simply too stupid,” says Hennig. “However, the evidence of sortition assemblies to date completely contradicts that assumption. Ordinary people can and do make balanced and informed decisions that other people trust.”

The benefits of sortition include dramatically reducing the cost of elections, since no campaigning is required, with no fundraising from businesses and lobby groups, reducing the danger of undue influence and corruption. “Instead of ticking a box every few years, we would be glued to a screen wondering if our name or someone we knew would be drawn to legislate for the next few years,” he writes.

This is very far from a traditional anarchist or communist vision. “Any group seeking to impose its own comprehensive moral philosophy on an entire society should be rejected as totalitarian,” Hennig writes. Though this critique is often applied to the left, modern right-wing governments are doing something similar. Just think of May, Thatcher and the Tories and their ongoing efforts to remake Britain as a version of Downton Abbey.

The growing gap between the theoretical political equality of democracy and ever growing economic inequality urgently requires radical redress. In Europe and North America, elections have done almost nothing to change this. Instead they have lent legitimacy to our elites who then bargain among themselves, argues Hennig.

Where it has been tried at the local or city level in countries such as Ireland, Australia and the Netherlands, the legitimacy of decision-making by sortition assemblies has been found to be high — people trust and respect the results, unlike many of those made by the unrepresentative parliaments currently ruling over us.

But should sortation ever be adopted at a national level, say in the second chamber to replace the House of Lords, surely the powers that be would control the legislative framework and advice to the lot members to prevent radical decisions? “Dominance by civil servants, experts and bureaucrats may be a problem,” admits Hennig. “However, without elections several forms of influence — in particular via the mainstream media, institutional donations and corporate backers — would be eliminated. I have faith that empowered ordinary people could resist domination by bureaucrats and the like.”

A parliament of workers and carers, paid a decent salary and with evidence-based deliberation, would most likely protect workers’ rights, pay carers and tax the wealthy, says Hennig. And who, in all honesty, would not want to see the end of politicians?

• The End of Politicians is available through the crowdsourcing Unbound website: unbound.com/books/the-end-of-politicians. For more information visit www.sortitionfoundation.com