Abstract

Since antiquity, a rhetoric of social fear has been pushing us to tear down all the fixed points of the common good and democratic convictions. This was well known by Thucydides, who recounts a significant episode that occurred between the Mytilenians and the Athenians. Reasoning about what is the common good is the basis of awareness that curbs social fear. As Martha Nussbaum and Tzvetan Todorov point out, fear can be manipulated by true and false information that produces right or wrong reactions, and it is on this “democratic errorµ that many of the historical tragedies are grafted. In this contribution, we attempt to reflect on political reason defeating fear by referring to some pages of Perpetual Peace, in which Kant discusses reason, cosmopolitanism and, above all, the universal “right of visitµ, the Besuchsrecht. In the year of Kant’s celebrations, we would like to bring the discourse back to contemporary times: well before the commitment to human welfare manifested by moral philosophy in the last two decades, the historical reading of progress in Kant is based precisely on the process of humanisation on which justice and, ultimately, peace depend. In the perspective of a “political imaginationµ (on which we reflect with the hermeneutical tools of Martha Nussbaum and Paul Ricoeur), the two argumentative directions in which the Kantian project unfolds, the “unsocial sociabilityµ and the duty to act, are grasped in actuality.