Yet neither the American nor the French revolutionaries ever contemplated assigning local offices by lot. Apparently, not even in the towns of New England (which de Tocqueville was later to characterize as models of direct democracy) were municipal officials chosen by lot in the seventeenth and eighteenth c enturies; they were always picked by election.In those small towns of homogeneous popula tion and limited functions, where common affairs were discussed by all the inhabitants in annual town meetings, conditions today put forward as necessary for the use of lot must have been approx imated. The difference between the city-republics of Renaissance Italy and the towns of colonial and revolutionary New England did not lie in external circumstances, but in beliefs concerning what
gave a collective authority legitimacy.