In Prophetic Politics, Philip J. Harold offers an original interpretation of the political dimension of Emmanuel Levinas's thought. Harold argues that Levinas's mature position in Otherwise Than Being breaks radically with the dialogical inclinations of his earlier Totality and Infinity and that transformation manifests itself most clearly in the peculiar nature of Levinas's relationship to politics.

Levinas's philosophy is concerned not with the ethical per se, in either its applied or its transcendent forms, but with the source of ethics....