Democracy is in bad health. The symptoms are familiar: the rise of fear-mongering populists, widespread distrust in the establishment, personality contests, and point-scoring in place of reasoned debate, slogans instead of expertise. Against Elections offers a new diagnosis —and an ancient remedy. David Van Reybrouck reminds us that the original purpose of elections was to exclude the people from power by appointing an elite to govern over them. He demonstrates how over time their effect has been to reduce the people's participation in government to an absolute minimum, ensure power remains in the hands of those who already wield it, and force politicians to judge policies not on their merits but on their likelihood to win or lose votes. And that's when elections go well. Yet for most of democracy's 3000-year history governments were not chosen by election at all: they were appointed, much like the jury system, through a combination of volunteering and lottery. Drawing on vast learning, an international array of evidence, and a growing number of successful trials, Against Elections demonstrates how a sophisticated and practical version of this ancient system would work today and thus eliminate the underlying cause of democracy's sickness. Urgent, heretical, and completely convincing, this book leaves only one question to be answered: what are we waiting for? "Very persuasive . . . There are few new big ideas in politics and few answers to the serious challenge faced by democratic politics . . . invigorating and advance[s] a promising practical idea . . . fresh, challenging and uncomplicated." — Times "This fine iconoclastic work could not be more timely ... demonstrate[s] that far from safeguarding our right to self-determination, elections are actually impeding our democracy." —Karen Armstrong, author, A History of God "Mounts a convincing case that we have wrongly conflated democracy with elections." — Observer "Van Reybrouck wants to revive a system in which government is not just for the people, but really by the people . . . a persuasive description of a system designed to be soundly based in popular assent . . . A President Trump might focus attention on his views." — Financial Times "Choosing our rulers by popular vote has failed to deliver true democratic government: that seems to be the verdict of history unfolding before our eyes. Cogently and persuasively, David Van Reybrouck pleads for a return to selection by lot, and outlines a range of well thought out plans for how sortitive democracy might be implemented. With the popular media and political parties fiercely opposed to it, sortitive democracy will not find it easy to win acceptance. Nonetheless, it may well be an idea whose time has come." —J. M. Coetzee "A sovereign remedy for the raging crypto-oligarchy of our turbulent times." —Paul Cartledge, author, Democracy: A Life David Van Reybrouck is a pioneering advocate of participatory democracy. He founded the G1000 Citizens' Summit, and his work has led to trials in participatory democracy throughout the Netherlands. He is also one of the most highly regarded literary and political writers of his generation and the author of Congo: The Epic History of a People , which won 19 prizes and has been translated into a dozen languages.