ABSTRACT
People have always been attracted, fascinated and horrified by the extremes. To transcend the limits of the trite, the average and the traditional, and to push things to their outermost limit, could, in the last consequence, be seen as the thorn of renewal and progress, but likewise as a danger for the existing, the attained and the tried and true. The Aristotelian mesotês doctrine became the determining factor for the
political tradition and language of occidental constitutionalism. A mean seen as the epitome of virtue constituted the centre of a continuum whose extreme points were equated with extremeness and degeneration. The mesotês doctrine reached back to numerous intellectual traditions already in pre-Socratic time. In the fourth book of the Politics, where the preferences of democratic and oligarchic elements of a mixed ‘polity’ are discussed, Aristotle Phokylides of Milet (approx. 550 BC) states: ‘Many things are best for the middling; I would be of the middling sort in the city’.1
