Based on a presentation given at the third International Political Anthropology Association meeting in July 2025, this paper argues that folly, and fools, can not only be represented by negative terms, as an absence of will-power, of rational deliberation, or the capacity of making decisions, but they also possess a kind of power on their own. It will discuss three such possibilities: the power of genuine fools, of fake fools, and of rational fools – or modern rationalism as a modality of madness. A fourth possibility, Gnostic fools, tracing this back to the Oriental Magi, and even further in prehistory, will be discussed in a follow-up paper, in the May 2026 issue, taking off from Agnes Horvath’s recent book Gnostic Fools.
Árpád Szakolczai (Sun,) studied this question.