The proceedings of yesterday’s Municipal Council meeting inspired this comment that we received and are happy to publish.
Sophism is an intellectual attitude widely shared among the political class.
The latter has an unfortunate tendency to believe that “saying is doing,” and to think that nothing beats a good speech to change reality.
Sophists are not dangerous insofar as they are quite clear-sighted and cynical enough to know that, in the current democratic-media system, repetitive rhetoric is a mandatory exercise, even if it is quite pointless.
What should we think of this discursive evolution beyond this poor rhetoric, in the sophistic political tradition?
We should reread our Ancients, Greeks and Romans, who made the res publica, a notion upon which they all took the time to reflect, the affair of the City.
We should meditate on this thought of Marcus Tullius Cicero: “the res publica is the affair of the people. But the people are not just any assembly of human beings gathered haphazardly, but the assembly of a great number of people associated according to an agreement concerning the participation in the common good.”
by Garibaldino
