Unreasonable people that are not so unreasonable

In chapter 15 of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes introduces the famous objection of the fool. The fool believes that it is rational to break covenants and to take a greater advantage of it (Hobbes, 2008: 96). There is plenty of speculation about the genuine intent of Hobbes in this passage.People think of the fool as the personification of the most immediate objection to commonwealth, a real possibility that could hinder collective sake for peace and stability. People also consider the objection of the fool as nothing more than a heuristic move, which we acknowledge in order to open the theory to further clarifications. In this paper, I argue that we can read Rawls’s idea of unreasonable doctrines representing a serious menace for stability alongside these two trajectories: either as a real threat for a liberal democratic regime or as something like a heuristic stratagem. In the first case, pace Rawls, containing the spread of unreasonable doctrines is much more difficult and unlikely to bring back stability than we usually think. In the second case, unreasonable doctrines would not be as unreasonable as we may prima facie think. In this way, unreasonable doctrines that are a serious menace for stability would serve to posit the very limit of political liberalism. In the two cases, however, the appeal to containment reveals a comprehensive component in the project of political liberalism: political liberalism, to borrow from Rawls, as much as liberalisms of Kant and Mill, ‘would require the sanctions of state power to remain so’.