The revolutionaries invoked the authority of Harrington, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, and meditated on the history of earlier republics. But neither in England, nor America, nor France, did anyone, apparently, ever give serious thought to the possibility assigning any public function by lot.It is noteworthy, for example, that John Adams, one of the founding fathers who was most widely read in history, never considered selection by lot as a possibility, not even for the purposes of rejecting it." In the lengthy descriptive chapters of his Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America devoted to Athens and Florence, Adams briefly notes that those cities chose their magistrates by lot, but he does not reflect on the subject. When representative systems were being established, this method of choosing rulers was not within the range
of conceivable possibilities. It simply did not occur to anyone. The
last two centuries, at least up until the present day, would suggest
that it had disappeared forever.