Abstract
Plato's main strategy to attack democracy and to defend the regime of philosopher-king was to compare politics with gymnastics or shoe-making where there are specialists recognized as such. Sophists denied his premise that in politics discovering the right answer matters, on behalf of relativism of truth and justice, saying what matters there is rather consensus. But in the long tradition of political philosophy simple regime of demos was not very popular and some ingredients of 'mixed regime', philosophers thought, are necessary.
But in contemporary mixed regime who would be aristos and what would they be expected to know better than demos? Well, they should know better the limits of government first of all. This is the problematic of liberal or constitutional democracy where these limits are set by the concept of human rights. It is argued that here we are limiting the kind of association as being societas or civil condition prohibiting any approach to government in analogy with universitas or enterprise association. They are aristos in the sense that we do presuppose there are better men and women whom we are to entrust the government. That means we are in the weakest sense of the word no-egalitarian, finding sense in trying ourselves to be better and in looking for better people for better politics.
