The First Enclosure
THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION Sortition Series · No. 0 of 5 Before we talk about sortition, we need to talk about what was taken — and how long ago it was taken from us
The standard story of democracy runs like this: humanity began in small bands with flat, egalitarian structures, then developed chiefdoms, then states, then — eventually, after millennia of monarchy and tyranny — democracy. The Greeks invented it. The Romans improved it. The moderns perfected it, more or less, in the form of representative government. The story has a direction: from primitive to sophisticated, from flat to complex, from the many governing to the few governing on behalf of the many.
Almost every word of this story requires correction.
Not because the facts are wrong — the Greeks did develop the form of democratic governance we most commonly cite, and the moderns did develop representative systems of considerable institutional sophistication. But because the story’s direction is wrong. It presents hierarchy as the destination of political development, the natural endpoint toward which human societies tend. It presents the concentration of governance authority in the hands of the few as the achievement of civilization rather than as its specific pathology. And in doing so, it makes the alternative — the distributed governance of the many, the collective self-determination that the few have progressively enclosed — appear to be the primitive beginning rather than the persistent aspiration.
Before we can talk about sortition — about the governance lottery, about what the jury system is really doing, about why it matters — we need to get the story right. Because the story’s direction determines what sortition means. If it is an Athenian invention, it is a historical curiosity from a specific cultural moment that may or may not translate to ours. If it is the recovery of something much older, something that existed before the hierarchies were entrenched and that survived in fragments through every subsequent attempt to suppress it — then it is something else entirely. It is the memory of the governance commons, offered back to a demos that has been living under the enclosed version for so long it has forgotten the open one existed.
The Names That Need Correcting
Democracy. The word enters political vocabulary as an aristocratic insult. The demos — the undifferentiated many, the people without distinction, the rabble in the aristocrat’s usage — and kratos, rule, governance, power. Democracy was what the Athenian aristocracy feared was happening when the demos began asserting its claim to participate in governance. The term was subsequently inverted — claimed by the democratic movement as its own, the insult repurposed as a badge of belonging — but the inversion did not resolve the underlying contest. It named it. Democracy has always meant, at its contested core, the struggle of the many against the few for governance authority over collective life. The name records the struggle, not its resolution.
Representative democracy. Presented as democracy’s mature form — the practical improvement on direct democracy, the mechanism by which large modern populations exercise the governance authority that Athenian direct democracy required physical presence to exercise. What representative democracy actually is, in practice as opposed to theory, is the substitution of an elected oligarchy for an appointed one. The election legitimizes the concentration of governance authority in the hands of the few. It does not distribute governance authority to the many. The many choose which few will govern them. This is not self-governance. It is the periodic ratification of delegation. The delegation has been so complete and so long-standing that the demos has largely forgotten there was ever an alternative — that governance authority could be distributed across the community rather than delegated to a professional class.
Political participation. Presented as voting, party membership, running for office, advocacy, petition — the forms of civic engagement the representative system has defined as the legitimate channels for democratic activity. What political participation actually means — what it meant before the enclosure of the decision space — is direct involvement in collective governance: the assembly, the council, the lot, the rotating authority that cycles governance through the community rather than concentrating it in a permanent class of governors. The participation that the representative system offers is participation in the selection of representatives. This is not governance. It is the periodic exercise of a residual right — the right to choose among pre-screened candidates which person will exercise the governance authority that the demos has already surrendered.
When Did the Many Stop Governing Themselves?
The most important question the standard story does not ask is: when? When did the many stop governing themselves directly? When was the governance commons enclosed? The standard story implies the answer is: always, or nearly always, with Athens as the brief and exceptional interruption. The archaeological and anthropological evidence says otherwise.
Catalhoyuk in present-day Turkey — a large Neolithic settlement occupied from approximately 7500 to 5700 BCE, with a peak population of perhaps eight thousand people — shows no evidence of hierarchy in its physical organization after nearly two millennia of continuous occupation. No palace. No temple complex that would indicate a priestly ruling class. No monumental public architecture dedicated to the glorification of rulers. The houses are built to nearly identical specifications. The burials show no significant differentiation in grave goods. A settlement of eight thousand people, maintained for nearly two thousand years, without the material signatures of concentrated governance authority.
Poverty Point in Louisiana — a complex ceremonial and settlement site built between approximately 1700 and 1100 BCE by a hunter-gatherer population — involved the movement of millions of cubic meters of earth to construct six concentric ridges and several large mounds. The scale of the construction is extraordinary. It required social coordination of a kind we typically associate with hierarchical authority: planning, labor mobilization, sustained effort across generations. But the material evidence shows no elite burials, no differential access to goods, no monumental architecture dedicated to a ruling class. The coordination was achieved without the concentrated authority we assume coordination requires.
The clan system documented across many Indigenous nations of North America is a transversal identity that cuts across language, territory, tribe, and political community simultaneously. The clan is not the family in the biological sense, not the nation in the political sense, not the linguistic group. It is a social identity that sits on top of all of those differences and generates a specific set of obligations that supersede them. You are Beaver clan. You travel five hundred miles into territory whose language you do not speak, whose customs you do not know, whose political arrangements are entirely unfamiliar to you. You find the Beaver clan members of that nation. They are obligated to receive you, feed you, shelter you, and protect you: not because you are kin, not because you share their political community, but because the clan identity creates a bond that supersedes every other difference. And you carry the same obligation in return, for any member of the Beaver clan who comes to your territory, however distant, however different in every other respect. A person could travel from what is now the Pacific Northwest to what is now the Gulf of Mexico and have, at every point along the journey, a community of obligation waiting. Mutual aid guaranteed across an entire continent, without writing, without a central authority, without a legal enforcement mechanism, without a police force, without a state. Through the specific cultural technology of the transversal identity and the obligations it generated.
The European Union, with its twenty-seven member states, its Court of Justice, its Commission, its regulations, its enforcement mechanisms, and its annual budget of approximately two hundred billion euros, cannot guarantee that a citizen of one member state traveling in another will receive the basic mutual aid and protection that the clan system guaranteed across a continent without any institutional apparatus beyond the cultural knowledge of who belonged to which clan. The EU has freedom of movement. The clan system had the obligation of care. These are not the same thing. We call the civilization that built the clan system primitive.
The most precise evidence for what the clan system actually felt like from the inside is not archaeological. It is the testimony of the European settlers who went into the forest and would not come back. Benjamin Franklin observed in 1753: when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, though ransomed by their friends and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no recuring them. Thousands of Europeans are Indians, but we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European. This is the comparative evaluation made not by philosophers reasoning from first principles but by ordinary people who had lived both systems from the inside and chose. The colonial authorities became alarmed at the scale of the phenomenon. The Puritan colonies passed laws imposing penalties on those who voluntarily remained among the Indians. The British colonial administration developed protocols for the recovery of captives who did not want to be recovered. The managed consensus was operating from the earliest days of European contact: the social technology that was demonstrably preferred by those who had experienced both systems had to be suppressed, because it posed a direct challenge to the social order the colonial project was imposing.
The women deserve specific attention. The European legal architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries imposed coverture on married women: no independent legal existence, no right to own property, no right to sign contracts, no right to bring legal action. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, whose clan system is among the best documented, gave clan mothers the authority to select and remove male leaders, to declare war and make peace, to control the longhouse and its resources. The European woman who went into the forest and encountered a social system in which women exercised genuine governance authority and genuine economic autonomy, and was then told she must return to coverture, had made a comparison. The colonial apparatus that had to be built to force that return tells us everything about which system those who experienced both preferred. Call them primitive. Rescue the captives whether they want to be rescued or not. Pass laws against going native. The first enclosure required this. The governance commons of the clan system was too attractive to be permitted to survive as a visible alternative. It was enclosed by the colonial apparatus in the same way that the English commons were enclosed by the Parliamentary acts: not because it was failing but because it was succeeding in ways that threatened the social order being imposed around it.
These are not isolated anomalies. David Graeber and David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything, assemble evidence from dozens of archaeological sites and anthropological studies to demonstrate that pre-state societies were far more varied in their political organization than the standard narrative allows. Some were hierarchical. Many were not. Many oscillated deliberately between hierarchical and egalitarian modes — seasonal variations in authority, ritual inversions, the conscious alternation between concentrated and dispersed governance. The hierarchy was not the destination of political development. It was one option among many that human communities explored, adopted, modified, and sometimes deliberately reversed.
The implication is precise: the governance commons — the collective capacity for distributed self-determination — existed before the hierarchies were entrenched. Not as the primitive condition of unorganized bands, but as the sophisticated institutional practice of large, complex communities that had developed specific mechanisms for maintaining distributed governance against the tendency toward concentration. The enclosure of the governance commons was not the natural development of civilization. It was a specific historical process, with specific mechanisms, serving specific interests.
The First Enclosure
The enclosure of the decision space is the enabling enclosure — the one that made all the subsequent enclosures possible. Before the commons of land could be enclosed, before the commons of water and forest and fishery and productive life could be transferred from collective to private control, the commons of collective decision-making had to be concentrated in the hands of those who would then direct the enclosures of everything else.
The logic is not complicated. A community that governs itself collectively — that makes binding decisions about its own affairs through distributed participation — can decide collectively that its land will not be enclosed, that its water will not be privatized, that its productive commons will not be transferred to private control. The people who would benefit from those enclosures cannot accomplish them against the collective will of a self-governing community. To accomplish the material enclosures, the governance commons must first be enclosed. The people who will lose the land must first be excluded from the governance decisions that determine whether the land can be taken.
This is what the English enclosures required: the progressive exclusion of the rural commons from parliamentary representation — the rotten boroughs, the property franchise, the systematic disqualification of the landless from the governance decisions about land. This is what the Russian privatization of the 1990s required: the elimination of Soviet governance structures before the productive commons could be transferred to nine men through a mechanism the population did not understand and had not authorized. This is what the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact accomplished: the transfer of fiscal governance authority to unelected institutions before elected governments could use that authority to maintain the welfare commons against financial sector pressure. The enclosure of the decision space is always prior to the material enclosure, or concurrent with it. They cannot be separated because they are the same process at different levels.
The governance commons was not abolished at a specific historical moment. It was enclosed progressively, unevenly, with resistance, across millennia. The resistance left traces. Every community that maintained collective governance against the pressure toward concentration left a trace. The Athenian democratic movement’s recovery of sortition — the lot, the random selection, the distribution of governance authority across the citizen body — was not the invention of a new idea. It was the partial restoration of an older practice, the recovery of a governance commons that the aristocratic families had been enclosing for centuries before Cleisthenes’ reforms began to restore it. Athens was remembering, not inventing.
The Domestication
The governance commons enclosure did not only change the external political arrangement. It changed the human beings who were subject to it. This is the dimension the standard analysis of enclosure consistently underestimates: not what was taken from the many, but what was done to the many by the taking. The material commons can in principle be restored by changing a law. The self-governing capacity of a domesticated population cannot be restored by changing a law. The domestication has to be undone from the inside, which is considerably harder and takes considerably longer.
The person who has never been asked to govern — whose parents were never asked to govern, whose grandparents were never asked to govern, across generations of exclusion from collective decision-making — does not simply lack governance experience. They have been formed by its absence into someone who does not expect to govern, who does not recognize governance as their right or their capacity, who looks outward for direction rather than inward for judgment. The habit of self-direction atrophies through disuse. The political imagination narrows to the choices the enclosed system offers. The expectation of external authority becomes so normalized that its absence feels not like liberation but like abandonment. This is the domestication: not the breaking of a will through force but the shaping of expectations through the accumulated experience of exclusion, generation by generation, until the excluded no longer remember that there was ever an alternative.
Slavery and serfdom are not aberrations of this process. They are its completion — the logical terminus of the governance commons enclosure carried to its extreme. The slave is the human being whose domestication has been made total: their body itself enclosed, their labor claimed, their movement restricted, their children the property of another’s governance authority. The serf is the human being whose domestication stops just short of this: nominally free in body but entirely excluded from governance authority over the conditions of their working life. These are not separate historical phenomena that happen to resemble the enclosure process. They are the enclosure process at its most complete — the full realization of what becomes possible when the governance commons has been sufficiently enclosed and the domestication sufficiently advanced that some human beings can claim governance authority over other human beings’ bodies without effective collective resistance.
The modern forms are less visible but structurally continuous. The worker who cannot collectively govern the conditions of their own labor — who must accept the terms the employer offers or seek another employer offering similar terms — is the serf’s descendant in the specific sense that matters analytically: their body is nominally free but their governance authority over the conditions of their working life has been enclosed by the property rights framework that the original governance commons enclosure made possible. The citizen who can vote but cannot govern is the domesticated descendant of the community member who once participated directly in collective decisions. The domestication is not complete in the modern form. It is sufficient.
The Names They Gave the Herd
The domestication required a language to sustain it. Not the language of force — force alone cannot maintain a governance enclosure across generations — but the language of contempt: the vocabulary that made the exclusion from governance appear to be a natural consequence of the excluded’s own inadequacy rather than a specific historical act of enclosure. This vocabulary is among the most durable products of the governance commons enclosure. It has been refined across millennia and it remains operational today.
The herd. The mob. The rabble. The masses. The vulgar. The common people — where common means low, not shared. The great unwashed. The deplorables. The rednecks. The chavs. The bogans. The white trash. The sheeple. The NPC — the non-player character, the background figure in someone else’s game, with no agency of their own. Each era has its preferred term and its preferred social register, but the function is identical across all of them: to name the governed in a way that makes their governance by others appear to be a natural consequence of what they are rather than a political consequence of what has been done to them. The vocabulary of contempt is the ideological maintenance of the first enclosure — the ongoing production of the belief that the domestication is deserved.
The trail runs from antiquity without interruption. Plato — who knew better than almost anyone that ordinary people were capable of sophisticated moral and political reasoning, since his dialogues document exactly that — nonetheless built into his Republic the philosopher-king premise: that the many, without the guidance of the wise few, would inevitably choose badly. Aristotle identified the demos as one of the deviant forms of governance, the rule of the many poor in their own interest rather than the common interest — and in doing so gave the vocabulary of contempt its most intellectually respectable ancient formulation. Edmund Burke called the revolutionary French crowd the swinish multitude. Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that the people are turbulent and changing, seldom judging or determining right. Walter Lippmann, the twentieth century’s most influential theorist of modern democracy, called the general public the bewildered herd — a phrase he used not with contempt but with what he considered honest realism — and argued that the herd needed to be managed by a specialized class whose function was to manufacture consent for decisions the herd could not be trusted to make directly.
Notice what all these names share: they describe the governed as a collective without internal differentiation, without individual agency, without the capacity for the kind of reasoned judgment that governance requires. The herd moves together. The mob is irrational. The rabble is destructive. The masses are manipulable. The bewildered herd needs management. In every case, what is being described is not a natural human condition. It is the condition produced by domestication — by generations of exclusion from the governance practice that develops and maintains the self-directing capacity. A person who has never been asked to govern, whose expectations have been shaped by centuries of exclusion, does behave more like a member of a herd than like a self-directing citizen. But this is the evidence of the domestication’s success, not the evidence that the domestication was justified. The vocabulary of contempt presents the product of the enclosure as the reason for the enclosure. It is the oldest available circular argument: we must govern them because they cannot govern themselves; they cannot govern themselves because we have governed them.
The jury is the most precise available refutation of every word in this vocabulary. The bewildered herd, the swinish multitude, the people who cannot be trusted with consequential decisions — these are the same people who are selected at random to decide whether someone lives or dies, and who, when asked to do so, deliberate carefully, take the responsibility seriously, and produce decisions that reflect the community’s values rather than the governing class’s institutional interests. The courthouse does not give the jury the vocabulary of contempt. It gives it the information, the structure, and the expectation of competence. The competence follows. Not because the jury is exceptional. Because the expectation of competence, given to ordinary people, tends to produce competence. This is what the first enclosure suppressed and what the vocabulary of contempt maintains: the knowledge that the herd was never a herd. It was a self-governing community, domesticated by the enclosure of the governance commons, and named contemptuously by those who performed the enclosure to make the naming appear to justify the act.
The Memory That Survived
The Wendat Confederacy of the Great Lakes region maintained a political philosophy built on the specific experience of governance without hierarchy. Kondiaronk of the Wendat — documented through the Baron de Lahontan’s published dialogues in the early eighteenth century — was not the innocent voice of primitive simplicity confronting European civilization. He was a sophisticated political thinker who had spent his life in a governance tradition that had no word for obedience in the political sense, because the concept did not translate into a political culture that had not institutionalized the requirement to obey. His challenge to European governance was not sentimental or nostalgic. It was analytical: your system concentrates authority in the hands of those with the most to gain from its exercise. Ours distributes it. The consequences differ accordingly.
The Tlaxcalan republic, which maintained its independence from the Aztec Triple Alliance for centuries in the direct shadow of one of the most hierarchical polities in the pre-Columbian world, developed council selection processes specifically designed to suppress the ego of the candidate and demonstrate that they understood service rather than status as the purpose of governance. The trials were at points humbling — deliberately so. The message was explicit: you are here because the community needs someone to serve it, not because you deserve to lead it. You are no better than anyone else. Your temporary elevation to governance authority is conditional on your continued demonstration of this understanding.
This is the institutionalization of what the Islamic tradition names al-jihad al-akbar — the greater struggle, the internal struggle against the lower self. Every serious ethical tradition has named the same recognition: the disposition to accumulate power over others, to confuse governance authority with personal worth, to treat the temporary exercise of collective trust as permanent individual entitlement, is the permanent enemy of genuine governance. The Tlaxcalan trials were the institutional expression of the same recognition: the candidate who has not defeated this disposition in themselves cannot be trusted to govern on behalf of the community. The governance commons requires not just the distribution of governance authority but the cultivation of the character that makes distribution sustainable.
The jury box in every common law courthouse is the most direct surviving trace of this tradition. Twelve randomly selected ordinary citizens, asked to exercise binding governance authority over a consequential decision, with no claim to the role beyond their membership in the community. Not an Athenian invention. Not a Greek idea. The survival, in institutional form, of the governance commons — the practice of distributed collective decision-making that existed before the hierarchies were entrenched and that survived every subsequent attempt to enclose it.
What Sortition Recovers
Sortition — the governance lottery, the distribution of decision-making authority by random selection — is not a proposal for the future. It is the recovery of the oldest available democratic practice, from before the first enclosure. It is the method by which communities governed themselves before the governance commons was enclosed. It is the principle that Athens recovered when the democratic movement broke the aristocracy’s stranglehold on governance. It is what the jury box has been quietly demonstrating for centuries: that the randomly selected ordinary citizen, given the information and the deliberative structure, rises to the occasion — not despite being ordinary but because they are ordinary, because their ordinariness is the guarantee that they are deciding as members of the community rather than as members of the governing class.
The managed consensus that presents sortition as an interesting but impractical idea from ancient history has the direction of the argument exactly backwards. It is representative government — the periodic election of a professional governing class — that is the historical anomaly, the specific institutional form that the governance commons enclosure produced. It is sortition that is the original form, the practice that existed before the enclosures, the memory that survived in fragments through every attempt to suppress it.
The series that follows this piece traces those fragments. The courthouse. The municipal ballot. The credit union board. The obscure government office that controls appointments to two hundred and thirty public organizations and changes its name when the institutional memory of who appointed whom becomes inconvenient. Each fragment is a trace of the governance commons — a place where the enclosure is incomplete, where the distributed practice survives against the pressure toward concentration, where the demos is still, partially and imperfectly, governing itself.
The question the series asks is the question Kondiaronk asked the European visitors: what would it mean to govern as if the community’s self-determination were the point? Not the selection of governors. The practice of governance itself, distributed, rotated, exercised by the many rather than delegated to the few.
The courthouse already knows the answer. The question is whether the rest of the political system is willing to remember it.
The next piece in this series — No. 1: We Already Do This — starts in the courthouse and asks why the principle that governs criminal justice stops at the courthouse door.
The Freeze-Frame Revolution · squirrelbrain77.substack.com
Sortition Series No. 0: The First Enclosure · Companion to the Basic Law of the Commonwealth