"James: What you and most other advocates of assembly democracy don't seem to recognize is how swiftly your own argument turns against you. I've already agreed that, as the number of citizens grows larger the opportunities for them to participate directly in decisions must necessarily decline. This is because, if nothing else has an upper limit, time does. Elementary arithmetic shows that if ten citizens were to meet for five hours-a long time for a meeting!-the maximum equal time each may be allowed for speaking, for parliamentary maneuvers, and for voting is thirty minutes. Small committees are the perfect example of participatory democracy, or at least they can be Even so, as most of us know from experience people who have other things to do would not look forward to attending many five-hour committee meetings a month. But you and Rousseau aren't talking about committees. You're talking about governing a state for heaven's sake! Jean-Jacques: Well, not only states. Other organizations and association might also be democratically run. James: That is so, of course. But let's go back to the arithmetic of participation. Once you go beyond the size of a committee, the opportunities for all the members to participate necessarily decline rapidly and drastically. Look. If the length of the assembly meeting remains at five hours and the number of citizens goes up to no more than a hundred, then each member has three minutes. At three hundred members you approach the vanishing point of one minute. The number of citizen. who were eligible to attend the assembly in classical Athens was twenty thousand. according to one common estimate; the best guesses of some scholars are two or three times that with just twenty thousand, if time were allocated equally in a five-hour meeting each citizen would have less than one second in which to participate! Jean-Jacques: Now, James, I can do arithmetic. I'm aware of calculations like these. But aren't they misleading? After all. not everyone wants to or has to participate by actually speaking. Among twenty thousand people there aren't twenty thousand different points of view on the issue, particularly if the citizens assemble after days, weeks, or months of discussions going on prior to the assembly. By the time of the meeting, probably only two or three alternatives will seem worth discussing seriously. So ten speakers, say, with about a half hour each to present their arguments, might well be plenty. Or let's say five speakers with a half hour each; that would leave time for brief questions and statements. Let's say five minutes for each intervention. That would allow thirty more people to participate. James: Bravo! Notice what you have just demonstrated. Thirty-five citizens actively participate in your assembly by speaking. What can the rest do? They can listen, think, and vote. So, in an assembly of twenty thousand, less than two-tenths of 1 present actively participate and more than 99.8 percent participate only by listening, thinking, and voting! A great privilege, your participatory democracy."