Lecture by Chloé Santoro, winner of the Collège de France Award 2025 for young researchers.
Abstract
After some initial experiments in the 1980s, the last fifteen years have seen the development of political systems based on the drawing of lots and deliberation by ordinary citizens. For Chloé Santoro, the Citizens' Convention on the End of Life (France, 2022-2023) was an invaluable field of observation, giving her access at a micro level to the processes by which a group of " lambdas " gradually develop their discernment. This is what theorists of epistemic democracy now call collective intelligence. This new concept resonates with a historical case, both iconic and little-known : Athenian democracy. A false friend and a false ancestor, this political regime of the Vth and IVthcenturies BC encompasses a complex set of institutions, fundamentally different from our own, whose sophistication and democratic radicalism have been constantly revised upwards by the historiography of the last thirty years. This talk will highlight both the urgent need for contemporary political theory to take on board this Athenian renewal and, conversely, the explanatory value of the concept of collective intelligence for the political history of Athens. From the point of view of political philosophy, this encounter between the ancient and the contemporary leads us to rethink democracy as a mechanism for producing enlightened popular decisions.
