Winning the Lottery:
Rancière on (Energy) Democracy
Darin Barney
Presented at the workshop Teaching Energy Democracy: A Four-Part Series, organized by the Public Power Observatory, New York, 8 May 2025, launching the Energy Democracy Syllabus.
My title today is “Winning the Lottery: Rancière on (Energy) Democracy.” I did not suggest Jacques Rancière’s very challenging text “Does Democracy Mean Something?” for the Energy Democracy Syllabus, but I was excited when I saw it there. This text was first published in 2007, and appeared later in the volume Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010; all quotations from this volume unless otherwise indicated). It is presented as Rancière’s response to a question raised by Jacques Derrida about a statement attributed to Pericles by Plato.
Now, already, we are deep in the weeds, very far from the goal for this syllabus and these teach-ins as set out by Stacey Balkan and Ashley Dawson: “the idea is for teachers and community practitioners to introduce a work to an audience of educators and activists who might then be able to teach the work in their own classroom, or use its core ideas in their community work.”
That is a tall order for a text like this - let’s see what we can do.
The remark attributed by Plato to Pericles is that while Athens was a democracy in name, it was in fact an aristocracy. The question for Rancière is how to account for this “disjunction between the name and the thing.” Perhaps it is just a case of disinformation: that Athens was a democracy was the lie that Athenian elites told to everyday people to legitimize a government that actually excluded them. It surely was that, but Rancière thinks the disjunction between the name and the thing also points to “something more radical,” a paradox that, he says, “constitutes democracy as something other than a kind of government.”
If democracy is something other than a kind of government, then what is it? To answer this question, we need to consider three of Rancière’s core propositions: the distinction between politics and police; the presuppositions on which politics is based; and Plato’s so-called “seventh title.”
Police vs politics
In Rancière’s account, what we understand as “the political” is constituted by an arrangement or distribution of parts, roles, rights, privileges and powers – who gets what, who does what, who gets a part and who plays a part, who registers as speaking or legible (and, therefore, eligible) and who is registers as mere noise and illegible (and ineligible), who counts and who does not, who is counted and who is discounted. What we might also call an order. The political order manifests in a variety of forms, including government.
We are normally inclined to think of this as the space in which politics happens. Rancière thinks this is an error. In his account, the name for what takes place according to and within an established distribution, order, or count is not “politics.” It is, instead, “police.”
As he writes in the essay: “There are men who rule other men because they are – or, more accurately, because they play the part of one who is – elder, wiser, richer and so on. And there are patterns and procedures of ruling that are predicated on a given distribution of qualifications, places and competencies. I call this the logic of the police.”
Politics, by contrast, arises in the disagreement between an existing distribution or count that constitutes “the political” order and the ineradicable fact of the discounted, those whose exclusion structures the existing distribution, in which they play the part of the excluded or what Rancière sometimes calls “the part that has no part.” This disagreement is not merely a difference of opinion, but the appearance (or the sound) of a structuring miscount or contradiction – like two columns in a ledger that will not balance – between the radical equality of all people and the contingent inequality that constitutes a given political order.
Rancière puts it as follows: “Politics does not exist because men, through the privilege of speech, place their interests in common. Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account, setting up…the contradiction of two worlds in a single world” (Disagreement, 1999).
It is here that the distinction between politics and police comes into focus. The function of police – which includes most of what we think of as the normal operation of an existing governing order – is depoliticization. Its purpose is to contain and prevent the possibility that a fundamental disagreement between “two worlds in a single world” might break out and reconstitute “the political.”
The mad presupposition
We might be inclined to think that Rancière’s conception casts politics as exceptional and rare. But there is another sense in which it suggests politics is quite common. In another essay in Dissensus, Rancière says there is a way of life that “lays claim to one present against another and affirms that the visible, thinkable and possible can be described in many ways. This way has a name. It is called politics.” Rancière goes on to write that, “Politics is the way of concerning oneself with human affairs based on the mad presupposition that anyone is as intelligent as anyone else and that at least one more thing can always be done other than what is being done.” He describes this disposition, the disposition of politics, as claiming “the right to attend to the future.”
There are two parts to the “mad presupposition” upon which politics is predicated. One is contingency, or what we might simply call history: the fact that, as Rancière puts it, “what is, is not all there is.” Things change and can be changed.
The second part is more interesting: the mad presupposition that “anyone is as intelligent as anyone else,” which expresses the radical egalitarianism at the core of Rancière’s theory of politics. Here, equality is not an abstract principle, an imaginary, or a goal. It is a material fact or truth, the predicate upon which the actuality of politics rests. People just are equal and, because of that, politics happens. Politics expresses the radical truth of equality and exposes the arbitrariness of any political order that is based on a principle that qualifies some people to rule over others.
As Rancière describes: “Politics means the supplementation of all qualifications by the power of the unqualified. The ultimate ground on which rulers govern is that there is no good reason as to why some men should rule others…This is what demos and democracy means. The demos is not the population, the majority, the political body or the lower classes. It is the surplus community of those who have no qualification to rule, which means at once everybody and anyone at all.”
The seventh title
This is surely Rancière’s most radical proposition. He writes: “there are many patterns of government by means of which men are ruled. The most common are based on birth, wealth, force and science. Politics, however, implies something extra – a supplementary qualification common to both rulers and ruled…this is the qualification of those that are no more qualified for ruling than they are for being ruled.” That is to say: a qualification that, because it is common to both rulers and ruled, makes no distinction between them that would justify the rule of one over the other. It is a qualification in relation to which they are equal, and which thereby renders any relationship of ruling and being ruled arbitrary and paradoxical.
Here, Rancière refers to a section in Book III of the Laws, where Plato sets out the six most common qualifications or “titles” to rule, and the first principles or arkhē on which they are founded, each of which turns on a supposedly “natural” distinction between ruler and ruled: “the power of parents over their children, of the leader over the younger, of masters over slaves, of nobles over villains, the strong over the weak, the learned over the ignorant – all these qualifications relate to objective differences and forms of power already operative in society and can all be put forward as an arkhē for ruling.” As Rancière observes, “Government seemingly requires an account of its arkhē, namely an account of the reasons why some take the position of the rulers and the others that of the people over whom they rule.” Each of these six titles and their corresponding arkhē provides such an account.
There is, however, a seventh title mentioned by Plato. Rancière refers to this as an “extra” title, a queer sort of “title that is not a title” because it does not express a distinction but an equivalence, and so its does not justify an unequal distribution of ruling and being ruled. The seventh title is not really a title at all - it is instead expressed by Plato in terms of a procedure: the drawing of lots, in which randomness is the basis of selection. Sortition, the distribution of parts according to lottery, in which every person has an equal chance to be selected, means there is no distinction that entitles one to rule another. The selection is random. It is perfectly, radically, egalitarian.
For both Plato and Ranciére, this odd seventh title that is not a title, this an-arkhē that expresses no principle of distinction, this condition constituted by the sheer truth of equality, has a name: “democracy”. “Democracy means precisely that ‘the power of the demos’ is the power of those that no arkhē entitles them to exercise. Democracy is not a definite set of institutions, nor is it the power of a specific group. It is a supplementary, or grounding, power that at once legitimizes and de-legitimizes every set of institutions or the power of any one set of people.” In other words, democracy - rule among and by those with no qualification or entitlement to rule, which is to say anyone and everyone – is the only form of government that coincides with the radically egalitarian character of politics itself: the mad presupposition that anyone is as intelligent as anyone else. All the others are just varieties of police.
Energy democracy?
So, when we call for “energy democracy” what are we calling for? Are we calling for Pericles’ Athens - a democracy in name, but in fact an aristocracy? Or are we calling for politics – the right to attend to the future, a fundamental redistribution of parts? Police? Or the lottery? The question Rancière’s text demands of us is not really Does Democracy Mean Something? but, rather, What do we mean when we say Energy Democracy?
At a time when the institutions of liberal democracy are being systematically delegitimized and forcibly dismantled, in the name of empowering a demos who refuses the entitlement of “elites” to rule, and the planet itself hangs in the balance, these questions are not to be taken lightly. It is tempting in this moment to think that the egalitarian anarchy of the lottery is a theoretical indulgence we cannot afford to entertain (and that Rancière’s theory is useless to us).
But it has got me thinking (and that is what challenging theoretical texts are for).
“It’s time for the biggest buildout of public renewable energy in history. The law is written – but the future isn’t. This is where we come in”.
For the past thirty years or so, democracies in name that are aristocracies in fact have responded to climate change and environmental injustice mostly by protecting the fossil capitalist order that produces these outcomes, including by policing periodic outbreaks of politics that challenge that order. This is what comes of the “disjunction between the name and the thing.” It is in this light that we should consider the scandalous proposition of the lottery. Given the consistency with which the “democratic” election of governments produces fossil capitalist aristocracies, I’m inclined to think that a radically egalitarian lottery that includes “everybody and anyone at all” could actually improve the chances that communities will undertake the hard, political, work of building more just energy systems and relations.
The last word goes to Ranciére:
“The power of the people [democracy] itself is anarchic in principle, for it is the affirmation of the power of anyone, of those who have no title to it…Such power can never be institutionalized. It can, on the other hand, be practiced, enacted by political collectives…these subjects intervene in places other than those of executive and representative power (the street, workplace, school, etc.); they give rise to other voices and other objects” (Anarchist Studies, 16:2, 2000).