Americans now face a caring deficit: there are simply too many demands on people’s time for us to care adequately for our children, elderly people, and ourselves.At the same time, political involvement in the United States is at an all-time low, and although political life should help us to care better, people see caring as unsupported by public life and deem the concerns of politics as remote from their lives. Caring Democracy argues that we need to rethink American democracy, as well as our fundamental values and commitments, from a caring perspective. The idea that production and economic life are the most important political and human concerns ignores the reality that caring, for ourselves and others, should be the highest value that shapes how we view the economy, politics, and institutions such as schools and the family. Care is at the center of our human lives, but Tronto argues it is currently too far removed from the concerns of politics. Caring Democracy traces the reasons for this disconnection and argues for the need to make care, not economics, the central concern of democratic political life. Joan C. Tronto is a Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (Routledge).
This book reflects on theoretical developments in the political theory of care and new applications of care ethics in different contexts. The chapters provide original and fresh perspectives on the seminal notions and topics of a politically formulated ethics of care. It covers concepts such as democratic citizenship, social and political participation, moral and political deliberation, solidarity and situated attentive knowledge. It engages with current debates on marketizing and privatizing care, and deals with issues of state care provision and democratic caring institutions. It speaks to the current political and societal challenges, including the crisis of Western democracy related to the rise of populism and identity politics worldwide. The book brings together perspectives of care theorists from three different continents and ten different countries and gives voice to their unique local insights from various socio-political and cultural contexts. Chapter 11 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
The commitment to &“end welfare as we know it&” shaped public policy in the 1990s. Analysts all seemed to agree that public welfare programs were a resounding failure. What should better public care look like? Democracy, Justice, and the Welfare State sets up a dialogue between work on the ethic of care and studies of public care in practice. White argues that care as it is currently institutionalized often both assumes and perpetuates dependency and so paternalistic relationships of authority. Better public care requires that such paternalistic practices be challenged. Care appropriate to a democratic context must itself be a democratic practice.
Confucian traditions have ingrained gender stratifications in Chinese culture today. Yuan proposes re-reading early Confucian texts as a vision of Ren with Dao with the unity of heaven, earth, and humanity, in order to reclaim the egalitarian aspects and develop openness for gender equity with integration of feminist critical care ethics.
This book reflects on theoretical developments in the political theory of care and new applications of care ethics in different contexts. The chapters provide original and fresh perspectives on the seminal notions and topics of a politically formulated ethics of care. It covers concepts such as democratic citizenship, social and political participation, moral and political deliberation, solidarity and situated attentive knowledge. It engages with current debates on marketizing and privatizing care, and deals with issues of state care provision and democratic caring institutions. It speaks to the current political and societal challenges, including the crisis of Western democracy related to the rise of populism and identity politics worldwide. The book brings together perspectives of care theorists from three different continents and ten different countries and gives voice to their unique local insights from various socio-political and cultural contexts. Chapter 11 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Sets up a dialogue between work on the ethic of care and studies of public care in practice. The author argues that care as it is currently institutionalized often both assumes and perpetuates dependency and so paternalistic relationships of authority.
This is an important, revealing study by a knowledgeable, provocative stimulating scholar. Constructed on the basis of unprecedented and extensive interviews of students in representative Chinese universities in widely different locations within Greater China, the study provides an invaluable indicator of the thinking of young intellectuals in China today.
In this book Kauppi develops a structural constructivist theory of the European Union and critically analyzes, through French and Finnish empirical cases, the political practices that maintain the Union's "democratic deficit". Kauppi conceptualizes the European Union as both an arena for political contention and a nascent political order. In this evolving, multi-levelled European political field, individuals and groups construct material and symbolic structures of political power, grounded in a variety of social resources such as nationality, culture, and gender.
