Garden-Variety Liberals: Discovering Eden in Levinas and Locke

Abstract

Over the last decade theorists have begun to examine the political implications of Emmanuel Levinas's ethical phenomenology. Looking at Levinas's work as a whole, but with special emphasis on his major works, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, I argue that Levinas revives a Lockean state of nature politics, although with a novel and more compatible epistemology. Levinas's liberalism manifests itself most clearly in his concern for human rights, his fear of tyranny, and his use of a Lockean temporal scheme for political judgment. Both thinkers locate the source of ethical revolt in an abstracted apolitical past that represents the authoritative history of the moral individual. Levinas's "pluralism" is a return to a moral and metaphysical brand of liberalism partly at odds with deconstruction and other radical currents in contemporary social theory.