Bernie Sanders With Emmanuel Levinas: Thinking Philosophically About a Human Rights Revolution

Abstract

In this paper I sketch a Levinasian theory of human rights in relation to contemporary political calls for a Human Rights Revolution. In so doing, I identify three ways in which liberalism, the original political-philosophical harbinger of human rights, is ultimately inadequate to the task of preventing human rights travesties. No longer the “Rights of Man”—the rights of the individual, the right to possess, the right to assert oneself within the boundaries of a social contract—the rights of today’s burgeoning Human Rights Revolution are being articulated distinctively in terms of an ethics of alterity and social responsibility.