Book Review: Levinas’s Politics: Justice, Mercy, Universality, by Annabel Herzog

• Author: Martin Shuster
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Date: 01 December 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211005194
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

1052 Political Theory 49(6)

protections for gig economy workers. Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash funded the

200-million-dollar campaign that featured their workers claiming they pre-

ferred not to have protections or rights. A campaign in which workers embrace

their precarity as a form of pride could only be imagined in the United States.

Coerced isn’t all bad news. The book finishes with two chapters about

worker resistance and agency. Inspired by James Scott’s work, Hatton

explores different modes of resistance, from exit to overt and covert resis-

tance. Hatton explores how particular themes of citizenship, rights, and the

dignity of work can be marshalled in resistance to authority, as well as used

to shame the workers in these situations. We use the same vocabulary to dif-

ferent ends. As a labor union leader, I wanted to see more exploration of col-

lective action and a stronger counter narrative about work itself. Nonetheless,

even as the landscapes of labor become more punitive, people still have a

strong sense of the way they would like to be treated. Hatton’s efforts to dem-

onstrate the punitive aspect of our experiences with work in less obvious

places pays off in the sense that the book reveals how common these experi-

ences are. I would be surprised if many readers did not identify with some of

the instances documented in this book. Erin Hatton has assembled another

round of evidence demonstrating how badly we need a new way of thinking

about work, and fighting for dignity.

Notes

1. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics

and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

2. Andrea Komlosy, Work: The Last 1,000 Years, trans. Jacob Watson and Loren

Balhorn (London: Verso Press, 2018).

3. Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the

Modern World (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2018).

4. Keally McBride, Punishment and Political Order (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 2007).

5. Albena Azmanova, Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve

Radical Change without Crisis or Utopia (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2020).

Levinas’s Politics: Justice, Mercy, Universality, by Annabel Herzog. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, 174 pp.

Reviewed by: Martin Shuster, Department of Philosophy, Center for Geographies of

Justice, Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211005194