Care theorists have had enough. Decades of neoliberalism, followed by financial crisis, austerity, gender backlash, and, in 2020, a worldwide infectious disease pandemic, have clearly tested their patience. The titles alone of three recent books on the ethics and politics of care suggest a change in tone; indeed, “radical,” “revolutionary,” and “manifesto” are generally not words we associate with the scholarship of those interested in the everyday practices of responding to the needs of others. And yet for Maurice Hamington, Lynne Segal, and co-authors Jennifer Nedelsky and Tom Malleson, these quotidian practices, and the ethos that underlies them, are more radical than they seem. Indeed, these volumes suggest that a commitment to care—a commitment that is both ideational/ethical and material—is necessary to usher in the kind of politics we so desperately need today. It could be, then, that with their latest books, these authors are edifying and formalizing what we might call the “radical turn” in research on care—a turn that can be roughly said to have begun in 2020 with the Care Collective’s The Care Manifesto (Verso) and the parallel Care Manifesto (Femnet) written by and for women of Africa, Asia, and Latin America a year later.

The politics of sexual minorities has been an understudied topic in the political science discipline. Recent years have seen a growing body of scholarly research that examines these often marginalized people and their challenges when building communities. Sexual minorities whose sexualities differ from dominant sexual norms are conventionally conceived as stigmatized outsiders, which contributes to their social movements and identities. However, differences among sexual minorities concerning ideology, race, and lifestyle may (1) undermine group cohesiveness and (2) show how debates among sexual minorities reflect divisive society-wide debates on inclusiveness and belonging. The four works in this essay, which focus on American and European cases, make significant contributions to these debates.

These three books are strong contributions to contemporary democratic theory. They are, however, very different in tone, intent, and argument and represent a wide range of methodological and philosophical traditions with little overlap. Mary Scudder and Stephen White both draw on a deliberative democracy background with deep roots in Jürgen Habermas’ communicative ethics. They build their arguments in the language of ontology, affective imagery, and aesthetic resonance to paint a picture of the sort of ethos needed to bridge the divide between two competing visions of democracy. Jack Knight and Melissa Schwartzberg offer a more eclectic mix, but rational-choice institutionalism and a type of Madisonian realism certainly feature — as does the postwar no-nonsense pluralism of Robert Dahl, Charles Lindblom, and David Truman. In their view, politics is about power and competing interests, and democratic politics is about the regulation of power and competition in the interest of citizens understood as equals. Bargaining is the key to this regulation. Finally, using the precise tools of analytic philosophy, Adam Lovett argues that empirical social science offers clear evidence that American democracy is so compromised that the state loses its moral authority to command obedience. Under these conditions, he contends, philosophic anarchism is the only defensible position.