In asking this question the fool’s argument neither rests on the concept of covenants (promises) nor the definition of justice as the keeping of covenants. The question posed by the fool is ‘Why should I keep promises when I can gain from breaking them?’ Why should Adam abstain from eating the apple when he could receive untold pleasures from doing so? Why should Iran not create a nuclear bomb when having it would give it an upper hand in future situations? Firstly the fool that Hobbes talks about is not stupid in the sense that we now know the word now but rather the biblical or Hebrew translation of ‘ k’ciyl’ which implies moral, not intellectual deficiency. However first we should more clearly define the concept of ‘the fool’ and what his objections are.
It also develops the idea of the ‘social contract’, an idea that was taken up by Rousseau and Locke in subsequent centuries. In answering ‘The Fool’ Hobbes crystallises what the structure of society should be and what constitutes legitimate government. This essay looks to answer ‘The Fools’ objection to Hobbes concept of the ‘commonwealth’, an objection that whether consciously or not sets itself opposed to many of the ideas of Machiavelli. He then shows a way out of this state of nature by indicating how humans could organise themselves in another way, into a ‘commonwealth’ that stood between the poles of unlimited freedom and servitude.
It famously created in the mind of the reader a vision of the World that Hobbes called a ‘state of nature’, a condition with only freedoms but no rights or responsibilities. Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’ is one of the most important books in political philosophy chiefly because it offered a view of how we should organise ourselves in order to avoid a life that was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.
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