Philip Lindsay on the Freedom to Assemble

Philip Lindsay, program manager of the Democracy Innovation Hub at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College (HAC), recently gave a talk entitled “The Freedom to Assemble” at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Lindsay discussed Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and the crisis in representative government, which Arendt noted is “gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.” Lindsay’s talk explored the origins of democracy in ancient Greece and how random selection through civic lottery to form citizens’ assemblies was the foundation for Athenian democracy. The main purpose of these citizens' assemblies was deliberation and agenda setting in governance. Lindsay advocates for the role of citizens’ assemblies within American democracy. “In founding the government that we set up, institutionalizing the government with multiple branches to constrain power, one of the central missing pieces was a branch that involved everyday people and somehow brought them into government beyond just electing representatives,” said Lindsay. 

Over the past three years, HAC’s Democracy Innovation Hub has hosted annual national gatherings for advocates and practitioners of citizens’ assemblies in the United States. These gatherings led to the first deliberative democracy in New York City in 2023 as well as an assembly planned for Fort Collins, Colorado. Lindsay cotaught the course Democratic Innovation and Citizen Lotteries: from Ancient Athens to the French Climate Assembly, which is available online. He also organizes the Doing Democracy Differently Teacher Fellowship, which trains educators on how to bring deliberative democracy into the classroom, and is now accepting applications for its May 2025 program. Email plindsay@bard.edu for more information.

Post Date: 01-28-2025