ABSTRACT
For a long time, Levinas was regarded as a thinker of the ethical who had little to say about political matters. However, since the turn of the millennium, a ‘political turn’ has emerged in Levinas scholarship that aims to rehabilitate him as an ‘ethico-political’ thinker. Following this, this chapter will reconstruct important stages of Levinas’s political thought. It will first demonstrate that, like many of his contemporaries, Levinas grappled with the question of how barbarism could arise in the heart of Europe, leading to the loss of millions of Jewish lives. Levinas’s response posits that Western history is marked by a denial of transcendence, and, as a consequence, it has lost touch with the fundamental significance of the ethical. In the following section, the chapter will delve into Levinas’s exploration of ethics that arise from the face-to-face relationship, demonstrating that both ethical responsibility and political justice originate from it. Subsequently, Levinas’s notion of a “just state” is taken up and situated within the tradition of republicanism. The chapter concludes by arguing that Levinas’s philosophy holds particular relevance today, especially when viewed through the lens of the politics of difference and radical democratic theory.
