Prosopocracy is a government in which citizens exercise power personally, not through representatives. Not a vote cast on their behalf. Not a term of office delegated to someone else. The power itself, in the person.
Two roots, put together to name something that hasn't had a clean name of its own.
πρόσωπον(prósopon) means person — the self who acts, not a role performed on someone's behalf. It's the root behind the Latin persona, and it survives in Modern Greek in νομικό πρόσωπο, "legal person."
Paired with -cracy (from kratos, power or rule), prosopocracy means, literally, rule by the person — power that stays where the person is, rather than passing to a face acting in their place.
Prosopocracy is a government in which citizens exercise power personally, not through representatives.
Προσωποκρατία είναι διακυβέρνηση στην οποία οι πολίτες ασκούν την εξουσία προσωπικά, όχι μέσω αντιπροσώπων.
Prosopocracy doesn't replace democracy — it completes what the word was always reaching for.
"Democracy" means rule by the people, but says nothing about how that rule is exercised. Left open, that gap has let the word cover almost anything: a citizen voting once every few years for someone else to rule in their name gets called democracy, and so does a citizen ruling directly, in person. Prosopocracy names the second half of that promise — the part democracy gestures at but never guarantees. It isn't a rival to democracy; it's the mechanism that makes the word mean what it always claimed to.
Prosopocracy names what power should look like — exercised by citizens themselves, not delegated away. ROTA is the specific proposal for how to build that in practice: citizens rotating through short terms of civic duty, so that power passes through everyone in person, and no one holds it long enough for it to stop being theirs.
Read the ROTA proposal →