Face-to-Face, but Behind a Veil of Ignorance: A Levinasian Analysis of Rawls's Political Conception

The works of John Rawls and Emmanuel Levinas are rarely discussed together. In this essay, however, I engage with the work of both in order to resolve an unresolved difficulty facing each of their accounts, namely, that Levinas's analyses apparently have no concrete relevance for normative, and especially political, theory; and that Rawls is unable to achieve his ultimate goal in Political Liberalism, which is to show how a liberal political conception can be more-or-less universally affirmed by most people today. I resolve the first of these difficulties by showing how Levinas's analyses can help us solve the second.