Admittedly, external circumstances also helped relegate to the
background the problem of distributive justice in the allocation of
offices. In the large states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
the sheer ratio between the number of offices to be filled and
the size of the citizen body effectively meant that, whatever the
method of selection, any given citizen had only a minute chance of
attaining those positions. The fact remains, however, that if Aristotle,
Guicciardini, or Montesquieu were right, lot would have distributed equally that minute probability, whereas election did so unequally.