L�evinas's ethical politics / Michael L. Morgan.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Overview -- Tears the civil servant cannot see: ethics and politics -- Judaism, Zionism, and the state of Israel -- Philosophical articulation -- The third party: transcendental ethics and realistic politics -- Ethics as critique -- Responsibility for others and the discourse of rights -- Liberalism and democracy -- Ethics, politics, and Zionism -- Teaching prophetic politics: ethics and politics in Levinas's Talmudic lessons -- Zionism and the justification of a Jewish state -- Ethics, politics, and Messianism -- Levinas's notorious interview -- Defense -- Levinas and his critics.

Print version record.

Emmanuel Levinas conceives of our lives as fundamentally interpersonal and ethical, claiming that our responsibilities to one another should shape all of our actions. While many scholars believe that Levinas failed to develop a robust view of political ethics, Michael L. Morgan argues against understandings of Levinas's thought that find him politically wanting or even antipolitical. Morgan examines Levinas's ethical critique of the political as well as his Jewish writings-including those on Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state-which are controversial reflections of Levinas's political expression. Unlike others who dismiss Levinas as irrelevant or anarchical, Morgan is the first to give extensive treatment to Levinas as a serious social political thinker whose ethics must be understood in terms of its political implications. Morgan reveals Levinas's political commitments to liberalism and democracy as well as his revolutionary conception of human life as deeply interconnected on philosophical, political, and religious grounds.

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