Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

human capacity to self-determination. [8] This was, anyway, an explicit
and open discussion, a highlight topic of the political controversial at
those times, where everything was to be questioned, even the limits
of what can be questioned.
In this process of communitarian self-determination, every person
capable of logos could participate [9] - having logos is to be able to make
speeches. The Aristotelian definitions of human being as Political
Animal and as Rational Animal can be in this sense interrelated:
rationality makes human being capable of Politics, of self-determination.
Rationality inaugurates Politics as pursuit and struggle for the order
of coexistence - all rational beings participating in this search, making
speeches…
Politics cannot be understood without this. It is a contest for the
Polis, by people who know this is in their hands to decide - and who
know that they decide themselves by the same process.
This search for the city, as a political task, is a polemos involving
different people. And this also specifies Politics among Greeks. What
is absolutely new in Politics is the invention of an order of coexistence
within which not only one can achieve eudaimonia as self-realization.
That distinguishes political regimes from family or barbarian despotisms,
systems of coexistence where eudaimonia is possible to only
one. Political orders face a new task: how to make possible, to many
citizens, achieving self-realization at the time? In this sense, equality
remarks a regime as political. Monarchy can still be considered a political
regime while this is orientated to common good. But if it doesn’t, it
stops being a political regime, and becomes despotism. The relations
among people under such regime are not political - for same reasons
according to which the relations among people in the horizon of the
family are not political.
Viewed from this point, Politics shows its compromise to common
good. Please note that common good is not considered as a dogmatic
19
POLITICS AND EQUALITY
IN GREEK INVENTION
OF DEMOCRACY
Nuno M. M. S. Coelho
8
Participating in this discussion, Antiphon stated that we are all equally accomplished
by nature to be Greeks or Barbarians.
9
At that time, a lot less people than we nowadays admit for this discussion - women,
children, slaves, foreigners were excluded. But this does not invalidate the incommensurable
importance of Greek invention of Democracy. In certain sense, contemporary
Democracy also excludes many people.