Some words in the theory and practice of politics just seem to go together—rights and freedoms, equality and justice, states and markets. Each term in these pairs appears to be a natural partner of the other—sometimes existing in tension, other times in harmony. But no such partnership is obvious in the case of “democracy” and “care.” It is thus not surprising that a book entitled Caring Democracy begins by posing some hard questions regarding its own central purpose: “[W]hy connect caring with democratic theory, life and practice?” “Why does a connection between care and democracy seem so strange?” (18).
In her most recent book, Joan Tronto offers compelling answers to these questions. Through her thoughtful, plainly stated, but highly sophisticated analysis, Tronto demonstrates why a truly democratic society cannot exist unless it is focused squarely on care responsibilities: “their nature, their allocation, and their fulfillment” (30). As a work of critical theory, Tronto's book reveals the conditions and assumptions that guide our current, inadequate conception of care—including its relegation to the “private sphere” and its association with “dependency”—and sets out the conditions that must be in place to facilitate the transformation toward caring democracy.
For legions of scholars and students around the world, Tronto's new book has been eagerly anticipated. Her first book, Moral Boundaries: Towards a Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1993), was truly ground-breaking. An ethic of care, Tronto argued, belonged not to a rarefied world of individual ethics or psychology, but to the public world of politics. Indeed, Tronto showed us why these familiar dichotomies—ethics and politics, private and public—are untenable and obfuscatory, blinding us to the importance of caring values and practices for defining and realizing a good society. Caring Democracy furthers and deepens the important work done in Moral Boundaries, holding up a mirror to ourselves, our values, and our societies in a way that is both deeply dispiriting and profoundly optimistic.
Tronto's analysis focuses on the role and organization of care in contemporary Western democracies—especially, but not exclusively, the United States. Central to her critique is the astute discussion of contemporary neoliberalism and its implications for care. Refreshingly, Tronto doesn't mince words: “[f]rom the standpoint of an ethic of care, neoliberalism is a disastrous worldview” (38). Most obviously, this is because neoliberalism seeks to limit government expenditures and improve “efficiency”; giving and receiving adequate care is necessarily labor-intensive, requiring at least some increased public expenditure. But this is only part of the story: as Tronto and other care theorists have revealed, the challenge of politicizing care goes beyond familiar dichotomies between left and right, states and markets. Most disastrous for care are the insidious neoliberal logic of “individual choice” and the mantra of “personal responsibility.” These are damaging to care not only because they obscure and demean human relationality and vulnerability, but because they portray as neutral an ideology that is sustained by heavy state investment and that supports some—those who have already succeeded “in the market”—at the expense of others (40).
As an antidote to this all-pervasive neoliberalism, Tronto argues for a rethinking of responsibility in terms of the “real and actual practices” in any given society (64). From this perspective, politics becomes about action (who does what) rather than distribution (who gets what), and care becomes the substantive focus of this action-oriented ethic of responsibility. Perhaps the most original and illuminating aspect of this book is Tronto's use of the metaphor of “passes” to explain how people manage to evade care responsibilities. She explains how the “bootstrap” and “charity” passes are two sides of the same coin: people meet their own care needs by acting through the market. If they wish to help (or be seen as helping) others, they can use the charity pass, which buys them out of collective social responsibility for care. In addition, the “protection” and “production” passes (also, perhaps, two sides of the same coin) legitimate and valorize violence and “work” and are constituted in and through hegemonic constructions of masculinity. The idea of “passes” is not just a clever turn of phrase; it reveals clearly how it is that the unequal distribution of care and care work continues to be sustained and how and why it is demeaned and sidelined in most liberal democracies.
In setting out the processes and structures that lead to the marginalization of care, Caring Democracy is precisely the kind of feminist political theory we need today. While it is Chapter 3, “Tough Guys Don't Care … Do They?” that explicitly ties constructions of masculinity and femininity to our attitudes and assumptions about who cares, woven through the entire book is a rich, measured analysis of contemporary gender politics and a hopeful vision for a feminist future.
There will always be critics of the ethics of care. Some will dismiss this book as utopian; others will (ignorantly) describe it as “socialist.” Still others will proclaim that care can be folded into a (liberal) theory of justice despite Tronto's clear explanation of why this is inadequate (154). Even sympathetic critics will want more specific proposals about the institutions and policies that must be put in place to make democracies more caring and to make care more democratic.
But to insist on concrete policy recommendations on care is, really, to miss the point. Joan Tronto's point—made clearly and convincingly throughout this book—is that we need to place considerations of care at the center of our political deliberations in democratic societies. In democratizing care, we are able to “flatten” hierarchy and improve the quality of caring. But in so doing, we also improve the quality of our democracies—for all.
