A Constitution for the Future South

Presented at the 2025 Abbeville Institute Conference “The New South and Future South”

A green hill… covered with wavering grass… sweeps up to a mighty castle, bright in the summer morning. At the highest parapet of this castle, you stand. A light breeze ruffles your hair. You look out on…ring after concentric ring of ramparts encircling your castle, stretching to the near hori­zon. Active in the space between each ring, you see everyone you have ever known and loved.

This castle is your soul at the beginning of the Jeffersonian era in 1787; those concentric ramparts encircling your castle are the hierarchy of intermediat­ing institutions that form Jeffersonian society. They provide not only a defense, but equally important, provide the definition of your very identity.

Visualize each ring from farthest to nearest.

In the distance is [1] the ring wall of the local State. This is not the Federal state with its 50 administrative units. It is the local, near and familiar State. General Lee wrote[a] to Winfield Scott on his resignation from the Union army: “Save in defence of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.” This was the meaning of patriotism for every person of this era, North and South. Remember that at this time over 90% of the population was involved in agriculture, which held a profound local attachment. This attachment lasted longer in the South, and possessed there an almost mystical quality, as the neglected Southern novelist Ferrol Sams describes on the first page of his Run With the Horsemen:

In the beginning was the land. Shortly thereafter was the father. The boy [the main character] knew this with certainty. It was knowledge that was in his marrow. It predated memory and conscious thought as surely as hunger and thirst. He could not have explained it, but he knew it. […] He also knew that in turn the land owned his father. Everything the father did eventually revolved around nurture of the land. Without the land there would be no family.

The next proximate wall is [2] the institution of property, closely associated with the first wall through real property. Prop­erty is the indis­pensable foundation of all other rights. It is the instrument for exercising any right. “Well,” you may ask, “does this mean that George Soros has more rights than I do?” Certainly, his right of free speech is magnified by his millions spent to elect pro­gressive district attorneys. But does he have nine lives or more, like a cat? He has one life, as each of us does. It is impossible to attack that greater property enjoyed by the rich without also undermining that fundamental property of each person in his own life. This unique property of each person provides the only meaning of the term “equality”: Equal protection of that single original property before the law. The next concentric wall closer to your castle is [3] associations of countless types, which were famously described by Alexis de Tocqueville. I read from Chapter 5 of his Democracy in America. He is writing in 1831, at the very flourishing of the Jeffer­sonian era:

The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. […] Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

The next ring is [4] the specifically vocational association. – Not just trade associations and business clubs, but especially appren­tice­ships, which was the main way that young men acquired their life’s work then. Although legal and medical schools existed in this era, typically a young lawyer learned by “reading law” – mean­ing apprenticeship in an existing law office, usually with a copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries as the primary reference text. The next concentric ring is [5] the church, the heart of the community’s mutual assistance and social life. The first permanent structure erected by American settlers moving west typically was a church. The next ring is [6] the institution of traditional marriage, which was a special defense for the economically disadvantaged wife and for dependent children. Next is [7] the family. Men die; but through children their spiritual worth is projected into the future. In the West the status of the wife rose from chattel to reverence, as witness the adoration of Mary, holy mother of god, beginning in the 11th century. And finally, at the last and closest ring of defense and identity, is [8] one’s own sexual identity, which was learned primarily from close and persistent contact with family members, especially those of the same gender.

The state is at war with every one of these intermediating institutions.

Let us examine its assault on each ring of walls in turn, starting at the outermost one.

[1] Patriotism is no longer rooted in the red clay and pine straw of Georgia, in the smell of the sea in the Low Country, in the black clay of central Texas. Patriotism now means the ideology of the Federal state, indoctrinated as a universal truth in its public schools.

[2] Property is no longer the basis of all rights and of the principle of equality before the law, thanks to the state intellectuals’ false distinction between unlimited personal rights and a limited right to possessions. The Federal state now has the power to take any amount of property for public use. This power was first established by the Supreme Court ruling Munn v. Illinois (1877) through the novel “public interest” argument. And the ruling NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) formalized the state’s unlimited power to tax.[b] WEF President Klaus Schwab has said: “By 2030, you will own nothing and be happy” – and he might have added: ‘And all your rights will be protected.’

[3] Associations are now regulated by the Federal state: Private clubs and associations may discrim­i­nate only if they can demonstrate being a “bona fide membership club,” with no principled protections against a determined and well-funded litigant.

[4] Vocational associations are now regulat­ed by the Federal state: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 destroyed the meaning of property-based individual rights by granting rights to groups. Its Title VII amendment prohibits employers from discriminating based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. The courts further extended it to discrimination based on “stereotypes” or “disparate treatment” – terms defined by the social justice whims of a Federal judge.

[5] Churches are now regulat­ed by the Federal state: They and other charities can lose their “privilege” of tax exemption under section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code if sermons or other activities are deemed by the state as being too political. Churches can at a whim be judged a threat to the state, as when the FBI recently placed traditional Catholics under surveil­lance as “potential terrorists” in Richmond, Virginia.

[6] Marriage is now regulated by the Federal state: In the span of a single admin­istration – that of Barack Obama – the Defense of Marriage Act was memory-holed in favor of same-sex unions for sodomites. This abomination was codified in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), by reference to the Four­teenth Amendment.

[7] The Federal state’s power supersedes that of the family: The state now exercises its power to destroy, for example, black families by misguided welfare assistance; and to forcibly take children from parents who deny them “gender affirm­ing care.” The state has destroyed the reveren­tial aspect of marriage and family by stripping away the reverence for procreation by creating a fictitious right to unrestricted abortion. Marriage and family are now purely contractual relations.

[8] The Federal state now assumes the power to define sexual identity: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, in further destruction of the meaning of individual rights based in property, was extended by the 1972 Title IX amendment to prohibit sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding. This has now been re-interpreted to prevent discrimination based on “gender identity” and “gender expression,” regardless of age. The anxiety of puberty is made more traumatic by the enforced association with other children in public school. Children now spend more time with other bewildered, impres­sionable children than with character-shaping adults, and must now be exposed to a Transgender Day of Visibility, as promoted by the Biden administration. Professor Allyn Walker of Old Dominion University – a branch of the College of William & Mary, which educated Jefferson and Munroe – redefined pederasts as blameless “Minor-Attracted Persons.” When his contract ended in 2022, over 50 professors signed a letter in his support. Other state-sponsored professors teach that men can become pregnant.[c]

Now you know exactly why the Federal state hates the South: The South proclaims this hierarchy of intermediating institutions as its historical, Jeffersonian essence.

Remember this image that I have painted for you. It is the “A” from which B, C, and D will be derived in my following remarks. I have rather dramatically placed it ahead of the thanks that I now deliver to our Southern brain trust, the Abbeville Institute.

Here a listener may ask: “Now, wait. A government at war with every interme­di­ating institu­tion can only be socialist or tending to absolutism. Have you correctly defined government, Mr. Hulsey?” No; I have defined the state.[d] The state is not government; it is a form of govern­ment, only 377 years old. The state form of government must be socialist because of its hostility to property; it must tend to absolutism in order to possess the power of dissolving these intermediating institutions. Considering the destructive nature of the state form of government, the question really is: Why did it come into existence at all? – especially when there were available at the time far more successful, far longer-lived models?

For example: The Hanseatic League. It lasted over half a millennium – starting about 1159.[e]

For example: The Swiss Federation. It has lasted 734 years: From 1291 to the present.

For example: The Venetian Republic. It lasted exactly 1100 years: From 697 to 1797.

The state form of government was created on October 24, 1648, with the Treaty of Westphalia as the result of a historical crisis.

In the 16th century a plague swept across all of Europe – not a physical disease, but a plague that posed an existential threat to the entire Western world. It was a mass psychogenic illness that I will describe in a moment. Once it was inoculated, it became Protestant­ism.[1] The last four years should give evidence that this threat is always with us.

When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg on Halloween day, 1517, he ripped the scab off a number of religious enthusiasms from which the Church had previously healed itself. Millennialist or millenarian or chili­astic sects had appeared in Europe long before, but the Church had suppressed most by the early 15th century. The Albigensians (or Cathars) were suppressed by a Crusade in 1229, as also were the radical Taborites in 1434. The Brethren of the Free Spirit – whose motto was: “Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it.” – were also suppressed before Luther’s time.

However, in 1520, just three years after Luther’s famous posting, a German priest named Thomas Müntzer took to heart Luther’s sug­gestion that anyone could read the Bible unambiguously. Müntzer’s reading led him to a theocratic Anabaptism – Anabaptism being the belief that the sign of Election to eternal life was an emotional, mystical conversion experience, a process of being “born again,” or baptized in the Holy Spirit. In the city of Muhlhausen, Müntzer proclaimed himself the “living Christ,” abolished marriage, pro­claimed “omnia sunt communia” (all things are to be held in common), and murdered the non-Elect – as he judged them. When attacked by an army of princes on May 15, 1524, he told his peasant followers not to worry, that he would catch all the enemy cannon­balls in the sleeves of his cloak. In the ensuing battle, all of his 5,000 followers were put to death, as he was, after being tortured.

There are numerous examples of this religious hysteria, but here is one more. In 1532, Anabaptists flooded into the city of Münster, declaring a New Jerusalem where no work was required, thanks to property stolen from the original townfolk. Several Dutchmen took control of the town. One of them, Jan Bockelson, became a communist dictator, abolishing all private property and private ownership of money. After running naked through the town like an Adamite and falling into a three-day trance, Bockelson had himself declared King of the Whole World, with antinomian purity. Antinomi­anism proclaims that one’s soul is so purely liberated from the flesh that one can gluttonize, fornicate, and murder without sin. However, the usual stern consequences prevail for the filthy sinners who are not the Elect. Although the Anabap­tists may have enjoyed Bockelson’s edict of enforced promiscuity, they began to starve after the city was blockaded. Bockelson said that he would change the cobblestones into loaves of bread. That failing – doubtless due to weakness of faith – in 1536, he was captured and tortured to death.

Then came the Calvinists at the end of the 1500s. Beginning in 1618, the Thirty Years War broke out, a religious war among Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Protestants of various sects that was estimated to have killed between a third to half of those living along the Rhine River. There were atrocities on all sides, and famine, with some reduced to eating grass and corpses.

Everyone realized that the mass psychosis had to be healed again, with a wall of separation between religious claims and those of govern­ment. So on October 24, 1648, with the Treaty of Westphalia, the Thirty Years War was brought to an end, by a truly astonishing gathering. It was a gathering of hundreds of Europe’s proto­intellectuals,[f] who convened alone: Without kings, without church­men. They bridled the chiliastic and wildly fissiparous Protestant impulse by the only means available to them: It could not be by the church – that would have been throwing oil on the fire; it had to be by a hypertrophy of the state, by an exaggeration of its sovereign power.

Listen to the key architects of state power of that time:

Jean Bodin (1530-1596) described sovereignty as the absolute and perpetual power of a republic which is subject to no earthly tribunal, a power which creates law but is not subjected to the law it creates. As well, this power is indivisible, and so cannot be divided between supreme and lesser magistrates. Sovereignty is centralized supreme power.[g]

Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) proclaimed the king’s sovereignty to be absolute, with no basis in sovereignty of the people:

In the case of civil government, one must stop at the supreme person or assembly because higher authority cannot keep ascending into infinity. Only god is devoted to passing judgement on the crimes of this body. [Whether a sovereign act is] morally acceptable or unacceptable is not a suitable distinguishing criterion [for legitimacy].[h]

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): who proclaimed a Leviathan of either king or Parliament to be a “Mortall God”.

With the creation of the state form of government, its absolute sovereignty was won. The medieval battles between church and king were over. The Church that had sent king Henry IV (1050-1106) bare­foot in the snow to Canossa now entered into a partner­ship as a state church, as did the Protestant churches. Religion and heredity would jointly provide the state that element without which sovereignty was powerless: Legitimacy.

Then, with the desacralization of religion and heredity, especially after the French Revolution, the state was left hanging in mid-air, without a legitimate foundation. So its defenders made a dramatic switch: It would become legitimized solely by its democratic claims. Notice: Democracy is the double-edged sword of legitimacy. This foundation creates a neurotic fear that some demo­cratic institution will give birth to a movement that threatens state overthrow. The state must perversely proclaim the very principle that contains the seed of its own destruction. The only sure way to remove this threat from some democratic element is to use the democratic idiom to bind the individual directly to its power, without inter­mediaries. For a state founded solely on democratic claims, even one inter­mediating institution – even one so small as one Catholic church in Richmond, Virginia, or even one grand­mother from Colorado Springs[i] who entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021 – is a threat to its sovereignty. The terrified state mobilized 15,000 FBI agents – 39% of its entire workforce[j] – to track down anyone associated with the January 6 event – a so-called “insurrection” where not a single gun was brandished or discharged by any of the rioters.
Ask in the Q & A why the Second Coming of The Donald will not fix matters.

So, for the philosophers of Classical Liberalism, the paramount question became: HOW TO LIMIT the totalitarian impulse of sovereignty in this newly created form of government?

Madison’s ingenious attempt was federalism:

First, we must have a rectification of terms. Professor McClanahan has created an excellent video, The 1607 Project – highly recom­mended. In that video, contributor Barry Shain of Colgate Uni­versity points out that in 1787, the true Federalists were actually the Anti-Federalists; and those calling themselves Federalists, such as the authors of the Federalist Papers, were actually nationalists. (An observation originally from M.E. Bradford?) Since Professor Shain is right, the question arises: Were the Federalist Papers a Machiavellian document? It seems so for Alexander Hamilton. In Federalist 15 Hamilton described federalism as “the political monster of an imperium in imperio” – meaning that divided sovereignty is impos­sible. Madison we may assume to be more sincere. His brilliant discovery of federalism to limit state power is compressed in Federalist 51, and within that essay, the idea is compressed in this single sentence:

In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good.

Madison is saying that numerous and dispersed factions never combine except for “good” purposes, which is absurd. This notion was refuted by history even before 1860, for example, in the Northern-imposed Tariff of Abominations of 1828, and in the formation of the Republican Party in 1854, the nation’s first sectional political party.

John C. Calhoun’s attempt to limit the totalitarian impulse of sovereignty was his idea of a “concurrent majority.” It can be under­stood as having three working parts. The first step is interposi­tion, or noncom­pliance with a national law, whether by the local State or by some smaller unit within it (this step inspired by Madison’s 1798 Virginia Resolutions). If that step were challenged Federally or by other States, this State next would be required to meet in convention where its delegates would vote on a formal nullification of the offending law (this step inspired by Jefferson’s 1798 Kentucky Resolutions). If a supermajority of the other States failed to reject the nullification, the offending law would be rescinded. But if not, this State would either comply or else hold a second convention to unilaterally pursue the sovereign option of secession. This machinery of the concurrent majority is my precision of Calhoun, which I do not find specifically in his Disquisition on Government.

The Enlightenment attempted to rescue the state as the enforcer of Classical Liberalism. It did so by trying to provide a rational foun­dation to legitimize its claims. But all of its political philosophers foundered on what is probably the greatest distinction in all of modern philosophy: David Hume’s demonstration that no “ought” can be derived from an “is.” That is, philosophers can erect a perfect government according to sweet reason, but they cannot provide for its moral necessity; they cannot provide any moral principle necessary for its legitimacy. The moral foundation of any society is ultimately subjective.[k]

Furthermore, any sovereignty is up against a second problem, just as insurmountable as Hume’s. In 1979, Alfred G. Cuzán (now at U. of W. Florida) published an essay provocatively entitled “Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?”[2] His answer was “no.” For him, the question was not “whether” there is anarchy, but “who” is to enjoy it. There really should be no astonishment in this, since his point simply restates the dilemma framed three centuries earlier by the 17th century absolutists.[l] The dilemma is this:

There must be some final arbiter of disputes in any society, and it must be perforce anarchic by virtue of standing above the dis-putes it arbitrates; the only question is the administrative extent of that arbiter. Either there will exist a single centralized arbiter from whose monopoly on police power there is no escape, or there will exist many dispersed arbiters limited by the threat of abandonment.[3]

So then, how do we provide a constitution of limited government, based on Southern principles?First we must recognize that the traditional Southern reverence for the near and familiar does have a principled defense.

The foundation for this general preference for the near and familiar must begin with Johannes Althusius (1557-1638),[4] specifically with his principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the insistence that as far as practical, the smallest, most local unit perform any govern­ment task. This rule demands a corollary: To prevent these smaller units from being overruled by the larger, the smaller must have the power of secession. Without this corollary, there is no hindrance to the larger units overruling the smaller. Secession is the abso­lutely necessary political tool that enables subsidiarity.

So, once we accept the principle of secession, as logic demands, we must confront the most salient objection to it: Where does it stop? What is the smallest unit that can claim the right of secession?

The Second American Revolution that ended on April 9, 1865, was fought between two nations: North and South; Colin Woodard, Richard Kreitner, and George F. Kennan (the famous diplomat) propose about a dozen nations; Jefferson’s ward republics suggest thousands, and Ludwig von Mises, an unlimited number, saying:

If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determi­nation to every individual person, it would have to be done.

We reject the argument of von Mises.

Secession, or self-determination, seeks not smallness for its own sake but to achieve autonomy. A man proclaiming himself to be a society cannot achieve autonomy; he simply casts himself out of the social network that everyone requires for life. And yet the state has mythologized just such a hyperbolically isolated individual, by pretending that its power rescues him from the mutual hostility of “man in a state of nature.” Every defense of the state form of government, from Jean Bodin to John Rawls to Robert Nozick, begins with some form of the “state of nature” argument.

Calhoun has demolished the myth of man in a state of nature in his Disquisition on Government:

Instead of being the natural state of man [the state of nature is] the most opposed to his nature – most repugnant to his feelings, and most incompatible with his wants. His natural state is the social and political – the one for which his Creator made him.

The hyperbolic individual in a state of nature is the creation myth of the state, his pretended savior, and the darling of “critical theory,” which claims that every intermediating institution is an agent of oppression of the individual. The source of critical theory, the Frankfurt School,[5] has been discussed else­where by one of our conference speakers, Wanjiru Njoya. For these theorists of cultural Marxism, every intermediat­ing ring is not a bastion of defense, not a shaper of identity, but an iron ring, a shackle, a manacle enslaving this boundless, amorphous, un­shaped hyperbolic individual of unlimited will. As we approach the lunch hour, some of us may embrace one theorist of systemic oppression. I refer to San Francisco’s “fat positivity expert” Virgie Tovar, a 250 pounder who explains that “eating less cake is op­pression.” We laugh, but for these theorists, any limitation on the unlimited will of the hyperbolic individual – whether it be the limi­tation of any social structure or the limitation of his very sex – is not just oppression, but evil. And this hatred for those limitations imposed by the world, by the flesh, is the very definition of gnosti­cism. The hyper­bolic individual in a supposed ‘state of nature’ is gnostic man, who strives for a solipsistic fulfillment deriving solely from his will. Every government – every one – models a standard of excellence in its ideal type: Achilles for the Greeks, Aeneas for the Romans, the self-reliant frontiersman for the American West, the Christian gentleman for the South. As for the state, it has idealized gnostic man, and this role, as a natural aspect of its hostility to democratic intermediating institutions, has made it an engine of total absolutism.

So then, how to achieve defense, identity, and autonomy? Through the principle already familiar to you: Through that hierarchy of intermediating institutions that we dramatized at the outset. This hierarchy of symbiotic rights, as Althusius called them, is precisely the Jeffersonian society.

And the smallest administrative unit that best realizes this hier­archy of symbiotic rights is the county. This unit best fits the ideal size for a democratic community, as determined by the re­search of Professor Livingston on the Swiss cantons: A commu­nity of no more than a quarter million people or so. The county is the smallest unit of government that resolves our previously stated dilemma that there must be one, anarchic final arbiter of disputes in society. The final arbiter of disputes in a Jeffer­sonian society is those many dispersed sovereignties in the count­ies. Their functioning, particularly in Texas, is detailed in my book, which is yours free at this email address.

Now, a society whose counties embody the Jeffersonian hierarchy is immensely more free than the state form of government. But its freedom is not secure until one more thing is achieved: The anni­hilation of elective, majoritarian politics. Imagine that blessed dawn where there are no more ranting, lying politicians, no media poseurs, no more of their squealing that the productive pay “their fair share” – as determined by an envious bureaucrat who never met a payroll, who never created anything. Majoritarian politics can only be destroyed by the institution of NON-STRATIFIED SORTITION.

Sortition is simply the election of public officers by random lot; stratification is the tweaking of the initial random pool to achieve the fiction of demographic “represen­tation” by creating quotas arbitrarily chosen for gender, race, age, wealth, etc.[m]

Sortition is no novelty. It has been in use at least from the 5th cen­tury BCE in Athens, down to the present day. However, the recent application of sortition has completely perverted it by its use of demographic stratification. A tool that was once democratic is now its very opposite. Many national sortitions have been conduct­ed in the last 15 years – in Iceland, Finland, Ireland, Britain, and France. They have decided divisive issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and climate change – all with prejudice to favor the state position.[6]

Sortition succeeds with three corrections that restore its democratic essence: By discarding the shibboleth of demographic represen­tation, by demanding private instead of public deliberation,[7] and by forming the necessarily subjective initial pool at the beginning,[8] so that any person chosen from that pool is competent, according to each county’s arbitrarily chosen standard of excellence.

To conclude: I call the society that combines the hierarchy of Jeffersonian interme­diating institutions with non-stratified sortition as KLERISTOCRACY – κληρώσ being the Greek word for random lot. You can easily say “aristocracy,” so just say “KLE” instead of “A”: Kle-ristocracy. – Nothing complicated about it.

I welcome any challenge in fact or logic to my alternative to the failed state form of government. But I do not expect it from the academy: It has been captured by the state and now serves as a moribund sinecure for timeservers who cannot think outside its form. They are unable to demand that the state be defined as a form of gov­ern­ment, so none of them can identify its ills; and so none can possibly offer an escape from those ills. Only KLERISTOCRACY provides a consti­tution for the future, rooted in Southern, Jeffersonian principles.

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ENDNOTES

[a] April 20, 1861.

[b] See Anderson and Hill’s 1980 book The Birth of a Transfer Society for details.

[c] E.g.: Dr. Khiara M. Bridges at Berkeley School of Law, Dr. Michele Goodwin at Georgetown University Law Center, Dr. Bhavik Kumar, of Planned Parenthood, Aimee Arrambide of the Hewlett Foundation.

[d] This is also Luigi Bassani’s definition in Chaining Down Leviathan.

[e] From 1159 to 1669 – between the founding of the principal Hansa city of Lübeck and the date of the last Hanseatic diet in Lübeck.

[f] True intellectuals did not exist until the French Revolution.

[g] From his 1576 Les Six Livres de la République.

[h] From his 1625 De jure belli ac pacis, Law of War and Peace, Book 1, Ch.3.

[i] Rebecca Lavrenz.

[j] According to the Congressional Research Service.

[k] Sam Harris’ attempt to refute Hume: “Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.”

[l] Similar to what Aristotle and Aquinas had said: In moventibus et motis non sit procedere in infinitum.

[m] Failures of “representation”: U.S. Congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia claimed that Guam would tip over with the arrival of too many troops; U.S. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas (and a member of the House Science Committee) claimed that the moon is a planet made up mostly of gases. Black, lesbian, overweight Assistant LAFD Chief Kristine Larson said that if a diversity hire could not carry a man to safety from a fire, then “he got himself in the wrong place.”

[1] Protestantism shaped the historical moment that gave birth to the state form of government. Protestantism might be said to have begun with the 14th century English heretic John Wycliffe (1328-1384). His teachings were repeated on the Continent by the Bohemian heretic Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake in 1415. However, we will define this historical moment as beginning with Martin Luther (1483-1546). Luther held the same principal views as Hus, for example, opposition to indulgences (and thus, to Purga­tory), and they shared a belief in predestination, consub­stantiation, vernacular liturgy, married clergy, and the questioning of the magisterium, the doctrinal authority, of the one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church of Rome. The difference between them is that (1) Luther had a more fully developed theology; (2) he had the support of the local German princes (of which there were some 300 between the Baltic and the Adriatic); and (3) he had a German Bible, first printed in 1534, with over 100,000 copies by 1574 (according to Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church), thanks to the invention of the printing press in Germany in the previous century.

[2] Cuzán, Alfred G., “Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?” The Journal of Libertarian Studies, 1979.

[3] The Constitution of Non-State Government, pages 344-345.

[4] Referencing Althusius, Johannes, Politica Methodice Digesta (Politics Methodically Defined), 1603.

[5] Critical theory began with the Marxist Frankfurt School in the 1930s, whose chief contributors were Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979).

[6] Recent examples of its misuse include:

(1) 2010-2013, Iceland’s attempt to rewrite the Icelandic consti­tution using crowdsourcing, under Hélène Landemore’s influence. (2) 2013, Finland attempt to revise off-road traffic laws, also under Hélène Landemore’s influence. (3) 2015 Irish Constitutional Convention on “marriage equity”;
2018 Irish Citizens’ Assembly primarily on abortion. (4) 2019-2020 French citizens’ climate assembly. (5) 2019-2020 UK Climate Assembly of 2019-2020.

Why does stratified sortition fail? First, stratified sortition fails because every one of its demographic strata is imposed as a purely subjective standard of social justice. Insisting on a quota for race does not assure good policies for a racial group (as witness the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was enacted without a single black vote); nor does a quota for gender, age, wealth, etc. assure good policies for anyone in those groups.

Second, stratified sortition fails because it uses group deliberation, which thwarts the wisdom of crowds, as shown by Adam Grant and by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman.

Third, stratified sortition fails because the order is exactly wrong: It places the undifferentiated initial pool first, followed by the application of the presumptively rational demographic strata.

[7] Grant, Adam, “How to Build a Culture of Originality,” Harvard Business Review (published March, 2016) <https://hbr.org/2016/03/how-to-build-a-culture-of-originality> accessed April 5, 2022.

Kahneman, Daniel; Sibony, Oliver; Sunstein Cass R., Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Little, Brown Spark hardcover, May 18, 2021, ISBN 978-0316451406, 464 pages).

[8] Kierstead, James, “Book Reviews: Sortition & Democracy,” Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought (Volume 39, 2022, doi:10.1163/20512996-12340382, pages 577-589). Online at <https://www.academia.edu/86952726/Review_of_Lopez_Rabatel_and_Sintomer_
Sortition_and_Democracy_History_Tools_Theories> accessed August 20, 2024. The review is of Lopez-Rabatel, Liliane; Sintomer, Yves, editors, Sortition & Democracy: History, Tools, Theories (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2020, ISBN 978-1788360166, 515 pages). Scholars will recognize that I insist on κληρώσεις εκ προκρίτων as the only workable application of sortition.

Terry Hulsey

Terry Hulsey is a former computer programmer now retired in Guanajuato, Mexico. His two major achievements, his two daughters, enjoy successful careers in New York City. His study of sortition resulted in The Constitution of Non-State Government: Field Guide to Texas Secession, available through Shotwell Publishing and elsewhere.

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