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. One can also argue that, this probability being so low,
the distribution of offices became a less pressing and politically
urgent problem, since the stakes were smaller than in fifth-century
Athens or fifteenth-century Florence, even assuming that the value
placed on office-holding was the same in each case. It is certainly
true that from the standpoint of an individual eighteenth-century
citizen, it did not much matter whether his odds were slightly
higher or slightly lower than those of his fellow-citizens (since in
any case they were quite small). It does not follow, however, that
the difference in the distribution of offices achieved by one or the
other of the two procedures was inconsequential. It is not, for
example, a matter of indifference that a governing assembly contains
more lawyers than farmers, even if it is a matter of relative
indifference to each individual farmer that a lawyer should have
more chance than himself of entering assembly.
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. One can also argue that, this probability being so low,
the distribution of offices became a less pressing and politically
urgent problem, since the stakes were smaller than in fifth-century
Athens or fifteenth-century Florence, even assuming that the value
placed on office-holding was the same in each case. It is certainly
true that from the standpoint of an individual eighteenth-century
citizen, it did not much matter whether his odds were slightly
higher or slightly lower than those of his fellow-citizens (since in
any case they were quite small). It does not follow, however, that
the difference in the distribution of offices achieved by one or the
other of the two procedures was inconsequential. It is not, for
example, a matter of indifference that a governing assembly contains
more lawyers than farmers, even if it is a matter of relative
indifference to each individual farmer that a lawyer should have
more chance than himself of entering assembly.
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