ABSTRACT
The contemporary political arena is, at least in principle, open to all adults.1 Widespread agreement on this principle has been achieved only recently, and its practical implementation is by no means universal, as we may see in the ongoing struggles of women and of non-white groups. The philosophical seeds of universal equality were planted by seventeenthcentury Natural Law theorists. In the name of reason, they waged a war against tradition and received wisdom, a war which took the philosophy of Aristotle and his late epigones as its polemical target. Hobbes stated clearly in his Leviathan that a thorough elimination of Aristotelian errors would lead to a new political science.
