Care presents a conundrum for the social sciences. It lies behind many of the key debates, and yet its presence remains shadowy, vague, off-centre to the core of its subjects, and its nature unfocused, contradictory, managing to be both an ideal – and idealised – set of values, linked to the supreme virtues of love, and yet also a concrete but often messy set of practices, rooted in the day-to-day realities of home and human-service organisations. Part of the difficulty comes from the ways in which these subjects have emerged historically and intellectually. Both sociology and economics made their initial intellectual gains in part through their capacity to ignore key dimensions of life. Sociology focused strongly on work, economy, stratification and power – the serious subjects of politics and the public sphere – lauding rationality in its analyses and its subject matter. In the case of economics, the subject was constituted almost entirely on the denial of the significance, even existence, of care as a value or motivation. Indeed the concept of care contradicts the basic tenets of the discipline, formed as it is around assumptions of individualism and self-interest. In these analyses the subject of care belonged – with women and families – in the shadowy world of the private and domestic, part of the unexplored, untheorised mundane that was of little interest. And this is despite the fact that it was the back-stage mundanities that supported and made possible the front-stage of public life. The arrival of Second Wave Feminism blew this masculine world away and in doing so it brought into view dimensions of life that were previously obscured and passed over analytically: the body and embodiment, sexuality, emotion, the particularity of moral obligations, and the ethics of care. We are still living with the conceptual implications of that ‘genderquake’, which have extended far beyond debates concerning women and their lives. The subject of care was born into this context, though it is no longer limited by it.

In this comprehensive and fascinating account, Fine explores the nature of care and its relationship to important debates in social and public policy. Like all the best Australian academics, he has read widely in both the American and European literatures, of which he presents a masterly review. This wide foundation enables him to reflect on the character of the debate in different political and social traditions. The philosophical work on care has mostly gone forward in a North American context, where care has been discussed, as Fine argues, largely in terms of the deeper moral underlying the actions of individuals and society, and in which there is a conceptual bias towards concern with individual responsibility that reflects American culture. The European literature, by contrast, has been more deeply concerned with social provision, located in the family or public spheres and underwritten by ideas of citizenship and the role of the welfare state. Fine gives particular attention to Scandinavian and British work and its impact on policy development. He also discusses projections in relation to the future patterns of care and need, and their interaction with changes that are occurring in the family and in patterns of work. This takes him into the territory of work/life balance and the analysis of women's involvement in the labour market. He also shows how this theorising relates to debates on the role of the care-ethic in human services like nursing.

In the last sections of the book, he turns to the context of social theory, drawing in new themes and exploring the relevance of care for key debates. He addresses the new focus on the body and its significance for our understanding of care-work. He addresses debates about individuation and the putative transformation of personal life under conditions of high modernity. In a final and particularly interesting chapter, he discusses the ways in which care fits in with the new logic of global capitalism, exploring the rise of the service economy, the role of migrant labour and implications of this for the provision and funding of care. Fine's book is a wonderfully clear and well-based introduction to a central subject for analysis, and I recommend it wholeheartedly both to academics who want to engage with these debates and to students who need to understand them.