It is certainly true that political actors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not regard selecting rulers by lot as a possibility. Electing them appeared as the only course, as indicated by the absence of any hesitation about which of the two methods to use. But this was not purely the deterministic outcome of external circumstances. Lot was deemed to be manifestly unsuitable, given the objectives that the actors sought to achieve and the dominant beliefs about political legitimacy. So whatever role circumstances may have played in the eclipse of lot and the triumph of election, we have to inquire into which beliefs and values have intervened to
bring this about. In the absence of any explicit debate among the founders of representative government as to the relative virtues of the two procedures, our argument inevitably remains somewhat conjectural.