The fourth point is based upon particular views of the general character of
(democratic) politics and of politics in modern democracies. I shall refer specifically to Ranciere’s version. He argues that democracies, both ancient and modern, are mixed forms, as anticipated by Aristotle when he characterized ‘a good regime’ as a ‘mixture of constitutions…there should appear to be elements of both (oligarchy and democracy) yet at the same time of neither…the oligarch sees oligarchy and the democrat democracy’ (see Aristotle, politics IV: 1294b, cited in Everson [1996]). This follows from the fact that ‘the question of politics begins in every city with the existence of the mass of the aporoi, those who have no means, and the small number of the euporoi, those who have them’ (Ranciere, 1995: 13). The task of politics is to calm and control the irreducible conflict between rich and poor, which means curbing the excesses of democracy. What we now call ‘democracies’ are actually oligarchies in which government is exercised by the minority over the majority. What makes them specifically democratic is that the power of oligarchies rests upon the power of the people, most obviously because governments are elected, In democracies, oligarchy and democracy are opposing principles in tension, and any regime is an unstable compromise between them. The public sphere is the sphere of encounters and conflicts between these principles: governments tend to reduce and appropriate the public sphere, relegating non-State actors to the private sphere; democracy is the struggle against this privatization, to enlarge the public sphere and oppose the public/private division imposed by government.