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10 Tronto, Joan (2017) - There Is An Alternative Hominescurans and The Limits of Neoliberalism
10 Tronto, Joan (2017) - There Is An Alternative Hominescurans and The Limits of Neoliberalism
article
There is an alternative: homines curans and the
limits of neoliberalism
Joan Tronto, jctronto@umn.edu
University of Minnesota, USA
Neoliberal policies around the globe have made caring more difficult. Yet, many scholars seem to
have accepted neoliberalism as an inescapable reality. This article argues against this view. Instead, it
suggests that care stands as a major alternative way to the neoliberal paradigm, both conceptually
and historically. Formulating a conceptual account of people as homines curans (caring people) and
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drawing upon Polanyi’s history of market ideologies, the article argues that a democratic form of
care – which makes the reallocation of care responsibilities its central concern – can provide the
basis for a theoretical challenge to neoliberalism.
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To cite this article: Tronto, J. (2017) There is an alternative: homines curans and the limits of
neoliberalism, International Journal of Care and Caring, 1(1): 27–43,
DOI: 10.1332/239788217X14866281687583
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Joan Tronto
Equal.’ This provides a new horizon of power against which all sociological
analyses must now proceed. (McRobbie, 2011: xi)
Even scholars who argue that the concerns of care are contrary to neoliberal impulses
end by noting that:
Each time the politicians or responsible officials tidy up the havoc caused by
a crisis of care, the order becomes reorganised, slightly reformed. Obviously,
the result is unlikely to be a completely new economic order. Perhaps only
a new apparatus of monitoring is introduced, or some new legislation is
passed, so as to avoid further distractions of a similar kind, and in order to
get all these needy and caring bodies and their relationships under control –
indeed, so as to enable the constant extraction of profit from those bodies.
(Hoppania and Vaittinen, 2015: 87, footnote omitted)
On the other hand, those who think at a more theoretical level have called
neoliberalism a ‘stealth revolution’ whose power is unassailable. Wendy Brown,
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an articulate and thoughtful political theorist, despairs in Undoing the demos about
neoliberalism’s grasp on the present. She writes:
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The point of this article is to take a different, more optimistic, approach. If we have
lost touch with homo politicus, perhaps that is because after so much trucking with
homo economicus, we can no longer understand this more political way of thinking,
of calculating not only (or primarily) for the self. Suppose, instead, we were to
introduce a different route to greater collective political concerns, one that begins
with acknowledging that humans are essentially, in the plural, homines curans,1 ‘caring
people’? What if we were to argue against neoliberalism from the standpoint of care,
understood within a democratic society’s frame that care must be adequately and
equally provided for all, and that all must contribute their fair share to care? This
article is a contribution to that task.
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There is an alternative
aspects of social, cultural, and political life can be reduced to such a calculus;
rather, it develops institutional practices and rewards for enacting this vision.
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Brown thus argues that neoliberalism creates its own vision of society and of humans
living within such a society. Aihwa Ong demurs on the possibilities of describing
neoliberalism in one vein since its manifestations around the globe will be different.
Nevertheless, after this critique of what she calls big ‘N’ neoliberalism, she still asserts
that the problem of neoliberalism is ‘how to administer people for self-mastery’ (Ong,
2007). Thus, self-mastering humans have to be developed, and are developed, by
existing in a world rich with markets and choice.
Like every political theory or ideology, neoliberalism contains a concept of care
within it (cf Tronto, 2013: 25). Care is an essential part of human life, whether one
relies on the broadest definitions of care or upon more narrow ones that see care as
activities to provide for the needs of vulnerable others, often in face-to-face settings.3
No account of human society can be fully adequate unless it also accounts for how
the needs for the care of the young, aged and infirm will be met.
Neoliberalism has three ways to account for care. The first response, personal
responsibility, falls in line with Ong’s account of neoliberalism as the imperative of
self-mastery. An especially revelatory version of this view appeared in US President
George W. Bush’s First Inaugural Address:
This passage is fascinating in how it turns ‘personal responsibility’ into a central moral
principle. Bush invokes caring as requiring sacrifice, but such sacrifices are at the
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heart of freedom, ‘the commitments that set us free’. Another important piece of this
statement is his assertion that ‘encouraging responsibility is not a search for scapegoats’.
Here, Bush recognises that others do see the focus on personal responsibility as a way
to blame others for their own less fortunate circumstances. (For example, a recent
letter-writer to a local Minneapolis newspaper reacted to a story about a woman and
her six children trying to advance themselves by asking why she had been irresponsible
enough to have six children [Morgan, 2016].) If this is a call to ‘conscience’, it is a
call that requires people to ignore the needs of others or that allows them to judge
others’ choices by their own standards.
The second neoliberal response is to see care as a market problem. Since markets
are expected to meet needs, if a need exists, then a market solution will emerge. The
website Care.com claims to have 22 million subscribers in 19 countries, matching
their members with short- and long- term care providers for ‘childcare’, ‘adult and
senior care’, ‘pet care’ and ‘home care’ (Care.com, 2017). In this way, all needs can
be considered met; if there is not yet a market solution to a problem of need, then
one will emerge.
The third neoliberal response, already anticipated by the other two, is to see the
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family as the proper locus of care. As Bedford and Rai (2010: 9) observe, ‘familialism
is undergoing a resurgence as a model of securing care’ around the globe. From
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caring for patients with HIV in the global South (Bedford and Rai’s example) to
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the practice of sending patients who once would have been hospitalised home to be
cared for by family (Ward-Griffin and McKeever, 2000; Williams, 2002), neoliberal
principles of reducing government costs and improving efficiencies have reached
into the organisation of care itself to orient it towards the market. Moreover, as such
institutional reordering occurs, as Brown argued, the effect is also to think about
the inhabitants of the family in neoliberal terms as rational actors interacting with
others in intimate settings. Gary Becker (1991) received a ‘Nobel Prize’ in economics
for his work in applying market principles to human behaviour; among his more
famous cases was an attempt to understand the dynamics within the household using
market logics.
Putting these three pieces together provides us with a kind of theoretical account
of how people should care for themselves and those close to them within a neoliberal
society: care for yourself by acting rationally and responsibly; if there are care needs
that you cannot meet for yourself, then use market solutions; and, finally, if you
cannot afford market solutions, or prefer to care on your own, then enlist family
(and perhaps friends and charities) to meet your caring needs.
That neoliberal forms of caring are injurious to people’s health has been well
documented by following care and social welfare provision (Coburn, 2000). This
is also documented in depth in numerous locales where neoliberal ideologues have
changed state policy, as Fiona Williams (2001) noted in her account of changes in
the UK, and in various forms of care policy – for example, caring for the disabled in
Canada (Wilton and Scheur, 2006); further examples could be added from around the
world. Within the framework of neoliberalism itself, these failures are understood as
individual failures, not as a collective responsibility or failure. If people are now less
well cared for, it must, by definition, be a failure of their own personal or familial
responsibility. If this is the perspective within which we are operating, then Brown
is correct to argue that there is no way to escape from this closed circuit of ideas.
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There is an alternative
Let me argue, though, that neoliberal ideas can be revealed for their inadequacy
in two ways. In the first place, they are inadequate because they misunderstand the
nature of human beings. In the second place, though, neoliberal ideas of the market
need to be placed in a historical context that reveals their inadequacy and shows that
they can be defeated. We will consider each argument in turn.
Homines curans
The fact is that humans cannot achieve self-mastery on their own. Dependent at
birth, as death approaches and when we are ill or infirm, as well as dependent all
the time on somehow meeting our ongoing needs for food, shelter and sustenance,
humans are not only social animals, but also caring animals.
‘Care’ is a complex and slippery word with such remarkably broad meanings in
English that it can often not be translated into other languages. It conveys both a
disposition and a set of actions. It can mean a burden, as in the phrase, ‘cares and
woes’, and it can mean love, ‘she cares deeply for her’. It easily becomes an advertising
slogan for companies and organisations, and can identify economic sectors (eg health
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care). However, in the last generation, feminist thinkers (and then others) have used
the term to offer an alternative perspective that has grown from its initial identification
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as a ‘different voice’ (Gilligan, 1982, 1993) to a perspective that asks us to change our
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On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity
that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so
that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our
selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex,
life-sustaining web. (Fisher and Tronto, 1990: 40, emphasis in original; see
also Tronto, 1993: 103)
This definition is extremely broad and not very precise; through it, almost all
human practices can also contain some elements of care. Care does not have precise
boundaries; yet, we can also recognise some acts and institutions as more caring
than others. Fisher and Tronto proposed four phases of care; Tronto has since added
a fifth, and a way to think about the moral dimensions of care. The phases do not
necessarily proceed in this order, but in this order, they provide a holistic account
of care. They are:
1. Caring about. At this first phase of care, someone or some group notices unmet
caring needs.
2. Caring for. Once needs are identified, someone or some group has to take
responsibility to make certain that these needs are met.
3. Caregiving. The third phase of caring requires that the actual caregiving work be
done.
4. Care receiving. Once care work is done, there will be a response from the person,
thing, group, animal or plant, or environment that has been cared for. Observing
that response, and making judgements about it (For example, was the care given
sufficient, successful or complete?) is the fourth phase of care. Note that while the
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care receiver may be the one who responds, it need not be so. Sometimes, the
care receiver cannot respond. Others in any particular care setting will also be in
a position, potentially, to assess the effectiveness of the caring act(s). Furthermore,
in having met previous caring needs, new needs will undoubtedly arise.
In 2013, Tronto added a fifth phase of care: Caring with. Caring with occurs when
a group of people (from a family to a state) can rely upon an ongoing cycle of care
to continue to meet their caring needs. When such patterns become established and
reliable, they produce the virtues of trust and solidarity.
Understood in this way, care promises to revolutionise our way of looking at
the world in a number of ways. Other philosophical positions, such as the African
philosophy of Ubuntu and Confucian thought, are often invoked to demonstrate that
the rational individual of liberal thought is not the only possible human. This article
will focus on care, though, in part, because since it is a cousin of the Western ideals
embodied in neoliberalism, it can speak more directly to them.
Care conceptually offers a different ontology from one that begins from rational
actors. It starts from the premise that everything exists in relation to other things;
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it is thus relational4 and assumes that people, other beings and the environment are
interdependent. The care world view is not about ‘bodies in motion’ that collide,
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or about the unforeseen consequences of such collisions. Instead, care presumes that
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people become autonomous and capable of acting on their own through a complex
process of growth, in which they are both interdependent and transformed as they
live. They can be more or less attentive to the effects that they have on others and
the world, though care approaches err on the side of being more, rather than less,
attentive. Assigning responsibility is a collective act, not an abstract, scientific or legal
endeavour.
While individuals, and their liberty, can still matter greatly, it makes little sense to
think of individuals as if they were Robinson Crusoe, all alone, making decisions.
Instead, all individuals constantly work in, through or away from relationships with
others. Those others are in differing states of providing care and needing care from
them.
A second ontological shift that follows from this first is to understand that all humans
are vulnerable and fragile. While it is true that some are more vulnerable than others,
all humans are extremely vulnerable at some points in their lives, especially when they
are young, elderly or ill. Human life is fragile, and people are constantly vulnerable
to changes in their bodily conditions that may require that they rely on others for
care and support. Third, all humans are at once both recipients and givers of care.
While the typical images of care are that those who are able-bodied and adult give
care to children, the elderly and the infirm, it is also the case that all able-bodied
adults receive care from others, and from themselves, every day. Furthermore, it is
also the case that humans engage in caring behaviour towards those around them.
Children as young as 10 months old imitate the activity of feeding; they try to feed
their caregivers and they open their mouths as the spoon nears the other person’s
mouth (Bråten, 2003). Children describe their activities as caring for parents (Mullin,
2005). People are both givers and receivers of care all the time, though their capacities
and needs shift for each person throughout life. At any moment in a society, there
are those who are neediest and those who are the most capable of helping themselves
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There is an alternative
and others. This shifting in needs and capacities for care is an important way to think
about how our human lives change through time.
Although this article casts care at a highly abstract and ideological level, and I
draw primarily on the case I know best, which is the US, we should note that care
is always contextual and, as a result, non-essentialist. While it is true that all humans
have the same basic needs, no two people, groups, cultures or nations realise and meet
caring needs in the same way. As a result, focusing on care requires much attention
to the precise details of the situation. Just as Ong argued that neoliberalism needs
to be understood in specific cases, so, too, care needs close examination in different
settings, as scholars of care in myriad fields (sociology, anthropology, geography, policy
studies, bioethics, philosophy, even engineering) have explored.
A final point needs to be made about the way that I am speaking about care. As a
political ideal, care has a specific meaning. At this broad political level, care is about
the general allocation of caring responsibilities, not the daily work of care, which is
always done in more specific contexts. Rather than refer to the state, I have elsewhere
argued that we should use the more inclusive language of democratic caring (Tronto,
2013, 2015). A primary task of democratic societies, then, is to allocate caring
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historical (and, in the US, gendered, raced and classed [Duffy, 2011]) patterns. While
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a full account of this argument is beyond the scope of this article, recognising that
allocating responsibility is the political dimension of this discussion helps us to see
how homines curans can reawaken in people their own expressions of homo politicus.
How might such homines curans respond to the arguments of neoliberals about the
nature of care and the allocation of care responsibilities?
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that the World Bank’s approach for development is to ‘move from production of
goods to production of educated subjects’ (Ong, 2007: 5).
Neoliberalism’s ‘educated subjects’, though, have a strange form of subjectivity.
Wendy Hollway (2006) observed that even an ethics of care does not necessarily
provide the kind of internal capacities of compassion and empathy that are necessary
for adequate caring; so what happens when no one is trying to develop such capacities?
Lynne Layton, a psychoanalyst working in the US, has observed that neoliberal
subjectivity is ‘marked by a repudiation of vulnerability that has arisen from the
social, economic, and political milieu of the past 30 years’; she continues that such a
repudiation causes ‘a decline in empathic capacities and in the capacity to experience
ourselves as responsible and accountable for the suffering of others’ (Layton, 2009:
105). On the one hand, this seems to prove Brown’s point about the ways in which
neoliberalism completely overtakes people’s abilities to react in another way. On the
other hand, though, despite Layton’s findings, empathy and helping others is also a
part of life for neoliberal subjects, even if they do not understand such actions in a
framework of social care (Folbre, 2001; Stone, 2008). Such activity is understood as
a ‘choice’ to be generous or a good person. However, the activity is there and it does
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‘everyone’ is free in a free market society ignores the realities of dependency and
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domination. Bowles and Gintis (1987) observe that any ‘free market’ excludes some
people, those who are deemed incapable of ‘choosing’ and are reduced to the status
of ‘learning’.6 Children are among those who are, historically, not ready to choose,7
but so, too, have been women, people with disabilities, servants, denizens of ‘non-
civilised’, that is, colonial spaces (Mill, 1998), and so forth. Reifying choice and
self-mastery has the effect of masking the hidden assumptions in society about who
is not ready to exercise choice.
Can markets really meet all needs? The claim that the market will generate solutions
to all needs fails to add that markets operate to make a profit. Thus, if there are needs
that the market cannot reasonably accommodate and still turn a profit, such needs
will go unmet. Perhaps this is the way to understand the ongoing global crisis in the
inadequate number of care workers. Nurses, doctors, allied health professionals and
teachers are in short supply everywhere. The perversity of care markets is that they
are becoming globalised to meet the needs of those located in richer global locations
while those in poorer locations scramble to meet their care needs (Ehrenreich and
Hochschild, 2004; Weir, 2005; Yeates 2009; Safri and Graham, 2010; England and
Dyck, 2012).
The inadequacy of the neoliberal model of the self-mastered self can only be elided
by the move that President Bush made: to locate individuals into a family where
they are willing to make sacrifices. However, there is no magic intrinsic to families
to provide adequate care; they require material, social and psychic resources to
thrive. Increasingly, as Carbone and Cahn (2014) observe in the US, the only stable
families are those with two college-educated parents, who possess more income,
more property and more prospects than do families with other structures. Ironically,
then, as more care responsibilities are being thrown back on families, their capacity
to cope with problems increasingly rests upon their prior market success. This is no
way to provide adequate care in society. The interesting new neoliberal response – to
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call for ‘resiliency’, another personalised trait for coping with misfortune – is now
widely investigated in the social sciences as a cure for these neoliberal-induced ills.
From the standpoint of homines curans, then, there are serious conceptual problems
in how neoliberalism proposes that human societies organise care. However, a second
argument against this is also important, and that becomes clear when neoliberal
ideology is examined in its historic context.
productive (Wolin, 2004, 2008). Capitalism has produced great abundance. Yet, as
other feminist economists have noted (eg Gibson-Graham, 1996), capitalism is not
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the ‘natural’ state of an economy or the ‘natural’ historical outcome of the advance
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of human civilisation. Many scholars make this argument; here, I focus upon Karl
Polanyi, who argued persuasively in The great transformation that ‘never before our
own time were markets more than accessories of economic life’, and that, historically,
‘[r]egulation and markets, in effect, grew up together’ (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]: 71).
Karl Polanyi’s critique of the excesses of late 19th- and early 20th-century capitalism
showed that the focus on ‘market society’ was uniquely out of touch with the ways in
which most human societies had organised themselves. To Polanyi, market economies
presume a sole motivation for human behaviour: ‘A market economy is an economic
system controlled, regulated, and directed by market prices…. An economy of this
kind derives from the expectation that human beings behave in such a way as to
achieve maximum money gains’ (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]: 71). To do so, politics and
economics must become separate since a ‘self-regulating market demands nothing less
than the institutional separation of society into an economic and a political sphere’
(Polanyi, 2001 [1944]: 74). To Polanyi, this demand upends the normal order in
human societies: ‘Normally, the economic order is merely a function of the social
order. Neither under tribal nor under feudal nor under mercantile conditions was
there, as we saw, a separate economic system in society’ (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]: 74).
However, this demand for a separate economy creates a new kind of society itself:
‘A market economy can exist only in a market society…. A market economy must
comprise all elements of industry, including labor, land, and money’ (Polanyi, 2001
[1944]: 74).
Although it has come to seem natural to us, Polanyi dwelt upon the strangeness
of the transformation of labour, land and money into commodities for the market:
‘But labor and land are no other than the human beings themselves of which every
society consists and the natural surroundings in which it exists’; ‘[L]abor, land and
money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought
and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them’
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(Polanyi, 2001 [1944]: 75, emphasis in original). Transforming labour, for example,
into a commodity, as industrialisation has done, has this effect:
For Polanyi, the relentless logic of this ‘satanic mill’ would end up destroying
everything: labour, land and money, that is, people, the environment and society. As
a result, there has never been, and can never be, a fully realised market society (Block,
2001). Market society creates the conditions for a ‘double movement’ in which the
advocates of the ‘free market’ must constantly battle with those who would look out
for labour, land and money – people, the environment and society – against these
destructive possibilities.
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The notion of the ‘double movement’ is a key to understanding Polanyi and the
possibilities he saw arising from the limits of the market-society argument. Polanyi
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wrote:
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There is an alternative
whose privilege was being attacked was to avoid acceptance of any new forms of
responsibility and to abjure the responsibility to help support the care of others.10
This historical analysis is much too sketchy and brief; nevertheless, it reveals that
while we are now in the thrall of neoliberal ideas, and they insinuate themselves
everywhere, it is still possible to place our hope on the other side of the ‘double
movement’. It is possible to imagine that people can again be engaged at the level
of ideas to think about what our human lives are actually about, and how we should
best live them together. After more than a generation of neoliberal hegemony, it is
time to theorise again the alternative.
a ‘satanic mill’. To stop it, one first needs to agree with his analysis. However, from
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Joan Tronto
example, around families or social groups. Paternalism refers to the ways in which
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caregivers, by virtue of the fact that they often have power over care receivers, are able
to substitute their judgements for those of care receivers about what the caring needs
in any situation actually are. The benefit of caring democracy as a practice for social
life, though, is that it does, however, acknowledge and make central these ongoing
challenges that it needs to address. Rather than celebrating its state of resilience, then,
caring democracy posits real flaws that societies need to address. In this regard, too, it
provides a stark contrast to neoliberal ideologies of the benefits of the global market.
The creation of democratic caring will require further investigation of a number
of empirical questions as well. In the end, it is not for social scientists to decide the
best way to care, since so many other values are implicated in caring. Nevertheless,
some obvious questions follow from the previous arguments.
First, we need to investigate whether and how care inequalities lead to greater
inequalities in society. Given the importance of early childhood growth and
development, there is ample evidence to suggest that this point is accurate. If so,
then the adequate provision of early care, to children and families and through social
institutions and other forms of support, becomes a central issue of justice.
Second, we need to investigate the ways in which care is both innate and trained
in people. Gender differences in care persist; scholars have long argued that this is
a result of the ‘reproduction of mothering’ (Chodorow, 1978). How do we shape
social institutions and practices, from education to the allotment of work time, to
see whether all people can care more? Furthermore, if, as some recent public health
advocates have argued, bad forms of human behaviour such as violence are contagious,
to what extent can care become ‘contagious’ in a society?
Third, we need to be closely attentive to how patterns of care produce exclusions
in societies. Exclusions and segregations are based not only on race, gender and
ethnicity, but also on care status. People who are primarily self-caring rarely meet
people from different generations, abilities and care traditions. They are therefore
apt, as democratic citizens, to overgeneralise from their own experiences and to be
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There is an alternative
unable to put themselves in the places of others. How do such exclusions affect the
capacities of citizens to be empathetic towards others? Can changing caring practices
help to address such problems?
Conclusion
This article has argued that it is time for us to give up organising the world in
neoliberal terms and trying to find ways to squeeze care into that worldview. A
world organised around care would be organised very differently. When people are
reminded that they are not just economic actors, but homines curans as well, there is a
greater frame within which the hard work of explaining that ‘there is an alternative’
can begin. We need now to stop being dazzled by neoliberal forms of resilience and,
instead, have the courage ourselves to return to a forestalled alternative future, one
in which care truly matters.
Notes
1. The term homines curans appears at least once in medieval Latin writings, in the work
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his meaning is clear. Among the neighbourhood goods that he describes are elementary
education and liberal arts higher education (see Friedman, 1962).
6. ‘We suggest, rather, that it is in the nature of the learning–choosing partition
transformed into choosers, even if the basis for their choices cannot arise out of the
rationality that is accorded to economic actors (see, among others, Schor, 2004).
8. ‘To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and
their natural environment indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power,
would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity “labor power”
cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting
also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In
disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical,
psychological, and moral entity “man” attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective
covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social
exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion,
crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and
landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food
and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would
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periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove
as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor,
land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand
the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless
its human and natural substance as well as its business organization was protected against
the ravages of this satanic mill’ (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]: 76–7).
9. An interesting account of the way in which care and justice intersected in segregated
(2015); see also Held (2006) and Kittay (1999). Engster’s definition is perhaps best suited
for social policy work; he defines care as ‘helping individuals to meet their basic needs,
develop or sustain their basic capabilities, and avoid and alleviate unwanted suffering
in attentive, responsive, and respectful ways’ (Engster, 2007: 64). In an exhaustive
philosophical review, Stephanie Collins (2015: 169) argues that the ‘core slogan of the
ethics of care’ is ‘dependency relationships generate duties’.
12. For a number of reasons, I believe that this definition is not broad enough; it ignores
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the nature of self-care, for example, and ignores relationships of non-dependency that
may also be care relationships. For the sake of the argument here, though, this more
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