“What happens to social cohesion and trust when the individual is held to expectations imposed by a regime of ‘personal responsibility’, tempered slightly by some recognition of ‘individual rights’ against state excesses? What damage is done to the social fabric of a society when the failure to thrive is blamed on the individuals, and the social institutions and relationships upon which we are all dependent are drained of the resources they need in order to provide constitutionally mandated equality of opportunity and access? What are the social and individual implications of a society built around competition, not compassion?” (p. 85). These questions lie at the heart of Martha Fineman’s lectures at Trinity College Dublin in 2022. This book presents those lectures, edited for publication with an introduction, a new chapter on its background in feminist theory, four chapters containing each of the four lectures, each beginning with a new introduction, and a concluding chapter. There are also added footnotes that enhance and explain some of the ideas and concepts presented in the lectures.

Chapter 1, “Feminist Origins,” provides the background for Fineman’s shift from feminism to vulnerability. In it, she faults feminism for “bringing the gendered family within a gender-equality (or neutrality) paradigm,” which led reformers to focus “too much on gender discrimination or disadvantage and not enough on the need to reallocate the necessary dependency work that must be done to replicate society across a wider range of social institutions” (p. 10). This may be particularly true of feminist legal theorists, which is her field and focus, but it is arguably true of some care theorists who focused on the injustices of the uneven sexual division of labor and who describe care in interpersonal terms. In Fineman’s view, this is a mistake, and we need to change our starting point from one centered on individual autonomy to that of the vulnerable subject.

The lectures begin in chapter 2, “Reasoning from the Body.” Starting with the “ontological fact of vulnerability,” Fineman argues that, “as embodied beings,” we are vulnerable—to illness, starvation, weather, thirst, loneliness, and fear—and we are thereby “all inherently and inescapably embedded in social institutions and relationships throughout our lives” (p. 31). This entails “the necessity of social institutions, including those of governance” (p. 31). The liberal view of vulnerability as a condition of some—children, the elderly, the disabled or ill, the extremely poor—who are dependent on others who are themselves not vulnerable but independent and strong fundamentally misunderstands the human condition and has led to the profound misstructuring of society and government that political and legal theory have promoted. When freedom is defined in abstract terms, justice is seen as entitlement based on assumptions of dessert, political obligation is based on contract and consent, it legitimates institutions that positively respond to some as if it is common sense (e.g., corporate tax cuts based on claims of benefit to the overall economy) and negatively to others as if it is equally deserved (punitive food assistance policies that blame poor people for their poverty). By contrast, Fineman says dependence is inevitable and universal because our embodiment makes us unavoidably vulnerable: “the physical and developmental realities of the human body render us inescapably embedded in and dependent upon social relations and institutions throughout life” (p. 44). This is not a negative moral judgment, but a fact: “Dependency is not a variation or example of vulnerability but the manifestation or realization of it.” She goes on: “our dependency is the very basis for society and its institutions. Social relationships and structures are necessary to provide the resources that simultaneously give us the ability to adapt, adjust, survive, and even thrive,” what she calls “resilience,” which is “acquired over time within social institutions and relationships … created by and through law and policy” (pp. 44–45). Certainly, the specific institutions on which we depend “var[y] and fluctuate … over time in response to the circumstances or developmental stage in which the individual is located” (p. 44). But “dependency on some set of social institutions and relationships – be they the market, financial, and employment systems or educational and healthcare institutions [not to mention families] is inevitable and ongoing for everyone throughout life” (p. 45). This is what she means by her subtitle “institutionalizing the individual”—not that individuals should be placed in institutions, but that we always already are dependent on institutions by virtue of our vulnerability. Recognizing this fact opens up new questions about how these institutions should be structured and changed.

Having established that we are ontologically vulnerable, and thereby embedded and dependent, Fineman’s subsequent lectures explore the implications of this radical change. In chapter 3/lecture 2 (“Social Justice”) and chapter 4/lecture 3 (“Injury”), she critiques how the notion of the “social” has become dangerously attenuated in a neoliberal era of emphasis on individual achievement and “personal responsibility,” which throws people back on themselves and their immediate circle to address vulnerability needs. This responsibilization not only harms individuals, but society as a whole by ignoring “derivative dependency”—that is, caretakers need resources to provide good care without being forced to sacrifice their own welfare. Similarly, a lack of universal healthcare will impact the sick and disabled at a given moment more than those who are healthy, but that only denies and makes invisible the fact that the “now healthy” will inevitably later be sick or frail. Such inaction constitutes “gross negligence on the part of the state…. The state’s inaction effectively institutionalizes subordination and inequality” not only of the persons in need of care, but of the care workers in turn and society as a whole, because care makes society possible (pp. 74–75). Inaction and “indifference” to such matters, she argues, is a vicious form of harm the state currently perpetrates (pp. 81–83).

In chapter 5/lecture 4, Fineman takes up the concept of “inevitable inequality.” This is the chapter I most struggled with. Equality and inequality have had many measures in the history of political theory, but they tend to boil down to inequality of power, or moral equality, and theorists of equality often argue that regardless of situational or biological difference, we are all morally equal: in a sense, we are all deserving of the very responsiveness that Fineman advocates. But she is not saying this, perhaps because it starts from the wrong end: from individuals to the state, rather than from the state to humanity. As she writes, we are situated in institutions, from the state down to “the institutions that order the relationship between and among individuals in their societal roles or identities, such as parent/ child, employer/ employee, landlord/ tenant, producer/ consumer, and so on. We are not accustomed to thinking of those relationships as contrived and constructed. They seem natural, organic in nature” (98). Moreover, such power is unavoidably state power: “Some sets of state-imposed coercive rules typically specify the nature, terms, and enforceable consequences of these relationships and ultimately shape individual options and aspirations. These institutions typically have some public purpose, even if it is not articulated as such” (98). That purpose currently is liberal autonomy. and if we rethought the purpose to vulnerability, those relationships would change in their character. We might protest that corporate profit is the neoliberal state’s purpose, the individual be damned. But because there is little discussion of how these inevitably unequal relationships can be structured, the inevitability of inequality will leave some political theorists skeptical. At that point the reader might access her journal articles that expand on this idea, and remember that this is one of the inevitable limitations of a book of published lectures. At times it looks like Fineman is headed towards socialism; at other times she seems to believe that capitalism can be made more responsive to vulnerability. She would say, I think, that it is up to us to decide what works as we restructure institutions. This is particularly the case in her concluding chapter where she takes up COVID-19 and climate change as existential crises that governments committed to liberal individualism seem unable to competently address.

Some political theorists will challenge the originality of Fineman’s argument in these lectures, pointing to Susan Moller Okin and Robert Goodin’s earlier work on vulnerability. But Fineman rejects their conception for following the standard idea (i.e., that children, women, and the sick are vulnerable, whereas healthy adult men are not). She instead claims vulnerability as an ontological condition of humanity, and therefore as inevitable and universal. Others will say that she reiterates contemporary care theory, which similarly argues for the universality of care and the reorganization of social institutions (see, e.g., Joan Tronto’s Caring Democracy and Jennifer Nedelsky and Tom Malleson’s Part Time for All, not to mention Nancy Fraser or Premilla Nadasen on social reproduction). But Fineman’s decision to recast the argument in terms of vulnerability provides care theory with macro-level support for its often-rejected starting point that care is a universal need. Because we are embodied beings we need to focus on wholesale institutional restructuring, which begins with the state and how we think about the responsibility and purposes of the state. A third concern might stem from the view, common to many political theorists, that the state is a source of oppression and inequality and therefore is hardly to be trusted as the arbiter of our vulnerability needs. But Fineman responds that the state is a given, we cannot exist without it and other institutions, so we have to figure out how to shift it from its liberal individualistic frame to center vulnerability and dependency. Vulnerability theory—as outlined in these lectures—lays new ground for rethinking our assumptions about how we do political theory, what the state should look like, and most importantly, where we begin our discussions.