Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics of Democracy

A week-long Seminar of intensive text-based examination and discussion of politics and democracy viewed from the perspectives of the ethics of responsibility elaborated by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995).  Opposing the war and suppression of human-wolves of Hobbesian ‘realpolitik’, on the one hand, and the isolated individualism of the liberalism of Lockean propertied freedom, on the other, Levinas roots the political in the radical imperatives inter-personal obligation and ethical responsibility – for each other and for all others – which is to say, in the quest for social justice.  Such a perspective, binding the political to the ethical, to morality and to justice, makes democracy not one regime among others but the best regime, the ideal of politics.