ABSTRACT
Unlike in antiquity, when the political system of Democracy constituted a polity entailing specific public obligations of the citizen to the state, in its present-day variant it has come to denote - exclusively and one-sidedly - a system of individual rights and access of citizens to the exercise of political power. In this way the demand for democracy, which in antiquity constituted a compulsory civil directive (cogens) from above, in the modem age acquired the character of a petitioner’s demand from below. In the ancient model the heart of the democratic polity was the Citizens’ Assembly and its public procedures for opinion formation throughout the polity. By contrast modem democracy focuses on the power-holders' problem of gaining ratification for their decisions by means of a “popular mandate” of some kind. But naturally in neither case does Democracy compensate for or “correct” economic or social inequalities between citizens, nor is it dependent on them. It simply brings into existence a special field - the political - on which citizens act as formal equals, even if they remain exceptionally unequal on the other planes of social life. The question is, what is the specific value of this political field and in exactly what relation does it stand to the other areas of social life?
