After the end of superstitious religion, what is the meaning of the world? Baruch Spinoza's answer is truth, Emmanuel Levinas's is goodness: science versus ethics. In Out of Control, Richard A. Cohen brings this debate to life, providing a nuanced exposition of Spinoza and Levinas and the confrontations between them in ethics, politics, science, and religion.

Spinoza is the control, the inexorable defensive logic of administrative rationality, where freedom is equated to necessity--a seventeenth-century glimpse of Orwellian doublespeak and Big Brother. Levinas is the way out:...