Care theorists have had enough. Decades of neoliberalism, followed by financial crisis, austerity, gender backlash, and, in 2020, a worldwide infectious disease pandemic, have clearly tested their patience. The titles alone of three recent books on the ethics and politics of care suggest a change in tone; indeed, “radical,” “revolutionary,” and “manifesto” are generally not words we associate with the scholarship of those interested in the everyday practices of responding to the needs of others. And yet for Maurice Hamington, Lynne Segal, and co-authors Jennifer Nedelsky and Tom Malleson, these quotidian practices, and the ethos that underlies them, are more radical than they seem. Indeed, these volumes suggest that a commitment to care—a commitment that is both ideational/ethical and material—is necessary to usher in the kind of politics we so desperately need today. It could be, then, that with their latest books, these authors are edifying and formalizing what we might call the “radical turn” in research on care—a turn that can be roughly said to have begun in 2020 with the Care Collective’s The Care Manifesto (Verso) and the parallel Care Manifesto (Femnet) written by and for women of Africa, Asia, and Latin America a year later.

“Care,” of course, has a range of meanings, and research on the subject engages different aspects of care from the perspective of multiple academic disciplines. But whether the focus is on practices of caring labor or the “ethics of care,” there has been a recent convergence of emphasis around our collective failure to care—for one another and for the more-than-human world around us. While this failure became most painfully evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a widespread consensus that the “care crisis” is rooted largely in the particular form of the capitalist social order that has reigned since the 1980s. While neoliberalism is clearly experiencing a decline—or at least a reconfiguring—it has by no means disappeared. The push toward deregulation and competition, which were its hallmarks, is still evident, despite the rise of economic nationalism. Indeed, neoliberalism’s continued effects on care remain evident in much of the world, due to its individualist and competitive ethos, its vilification of dependence, and its fiscal austerity. And unsurprisingly, scholars of care—including care ethics—also consider “patriarchy” in all its forms to be an obstacle to the creation of caring societies. That care is “feminized” refers not only to the fact that it is done mostly by women but also the fact that the gendering and racialization of care are key to its devaluation and to the maintenance and reproduction of hegemonic forms of masculinity. Of course, patriarchy, in its many forms, is nothing new. But its presence and effects seem particularly heightened at this time of rising authoritarian nationalism, as “anti-gender” policies and so-called “family values” appeal to conservative bases while distracting them from democratic backsliding.

In these books, Hamington, Segal, Nedelsky, and Malleson are acutely aware of the corrosive effects of neoliberalism and patriarchy on our ability to give and receive care. And each of them provides us with an alternative vision—visions that are hopeful, often deeply personal, and, yes, revolutionary. These visions are thoughtful and theoretically rich, while also setting out practical visions for change—from Nedelsky and Malleson’s “Part Time for All” (PTfA) to Hamington’s call for mass mobilization and institutional change (pp. 216–217) to Segal’s attention to the “small ways” that care is being prioritized, even revolutionized. These are beautiful, well-conceived futures, but ones that, in these dark times, may still lead us to ask: what will it really take to achieve caring societies?

Of the three volumes, it is Hamington’s that is most clearly a work of moral and political philosophy and thus closely tied to scholarship on care ethics—but with a twist. Hamington eschews the phrase “care ethics” in favor of the broader “care theory”—in part to distance his approach from the particular lineage of white, Western feminists who were engaged in a critique of traditional, masculinist approaches to ethics and moral development. Indeed, Hamington correctly points out that a range of Latinx, Indigenous, and other non-Western thinkers have developed rich relational ontologies and placed care at the forefront of their worldviews (p. 29). For Hamington, care has an “emergent” normativity; in other words, its response to the “normative question”—how should we act?—“emerges or unfolds as knowledge of the other and their context increases” (p. 51). In this sense, care is both like and unlike traditional moral theories—it can guide moral judgement and action, but it does so not through an a priori decision or calculation but rather as a result of relational processes that include reflecting and learning from and about others (p. 51).

There is another sense, however, in which care is wholly unlike traditional rationalist theories: care is itself a good to be pursued. It has “value and beauty,” and its embodied nature gives care “texture and feel”—an aesthetic quality. Care is, moreover, a skill of improvisation—of embodied performance—as we respond to the particular people and circumstances confronting us. As Hamington puts it, care theory is “nonideal and process-oriented, directed toward building competencies” (p. 32). While cognizant of the dangers of seeking a precise formula for what can be judged to be “good” care, he believes that we can, and should, identify patterns of behavior or practices or habits that lead us toward better care. With this in mind, Hamington identifies three aspects or (non-sequential) phases of good care: humble inquiry, inclusive connection, and responsive action (p. 32).

Despite the emphasis on process and context, Hamington eschews a highly naturalized understanding of care. Indeed, it is notable that Hamington (like Nedelsky and Malleson) seeks to move beyond care as an “optional” value or practice. For Hamington, care is a “categorical commitment—the foundation of our moral selves and an expression of our relational humanity” (p. 68). Building upon yet also departing from the Kantian notion of the “categorial imperative,” his “categorical commitment to care” is a foundational moral position of embodied beings that arises from “personal agency” rather than from “external imposed restrictions” and “should be easily chosen given human capacities and needs” (p. 15). Despite invoking the primary canonical thinker in Western ethics, Hamington’s vision of care relies on numerous non-Western thinkers and modes of thought. In chapter 4, he theorizes care as an “ethos”—“the psychosocial momentum to fuel, drive, and maintain the movement even when systems fail” (p. 107); in the chapters that follow, he considers care in relation to feminism and masculinity, socialism, religion, and veganism. But throughout the book, Hamington emphasizes the need for big transformation—indeed, for revolution. He notes that this word is typically associated with bloody historical events and the violent overthrow of regimes. His revolution, however, is a populist one, and it will be “methodical” (p. 11) and nonviolent, consisting of “internal transformations that lead to relational and institutional change” where “everyday interactions” will “aggregate and congeal into a social revolution” (p. 12). In this sense, Hamington’s revolution may already have begun, but there is still much work to be done.

While Hamington theorizes “good (revolutionary) care” as a philosopher, Nedelsky and Malleson have written a practical manifesto for the rearrangement of work and care—one centered around the project of Part Time for All (PTfA). In this sense, their book can be compared to the manifestoes from the Care Collective (2020) and FEMNET (2021), but Nedelsky and Malleson are focused on a specific issue—namely, that of the “care crisis,” or what used to be called “work/life” balance.” Nedelsky and Malleson’s approach to this issue, however, eschews the well-worn heteronormative and classist biases of this trope in favor of their plan, Part Time for All, which seeks to account for the numerous inequities and hierarchies of power that condition work and care. Specifically, the proposal is that all capable adults are expected to do between 10 and 30 hours of paid work per week, leaving them time for between 20 and 25 hours of unpaid care work” (p. 1). Their starting point, as noted above, is the many failures of care—the “chronic stress of so many households who are trying to meet both their care needs and the demands of workplaces” (p. 29), and the real costs that such overwork produces in terms of health, well-being, and economic productivity.

In contrast to Hamington’s “ethotic” conception of good care (p. 90), Nedelsky and Malleson take a practical and practice-based understanding of care. Following Evelyn Glenn, they define care as the “relationships and activities involved in maintaining people on a daily basis and intergenerationally” (p. 33), including directly caring for people, maintaining the physical surroundings in which they live, and fostering relationships and social connections. Notably, they specifically add the requirement that care builds personal relationships (p. 33, italics in original). Defining care is important for Nedelsky and Malleson, since they need to clearly differentiate it from “work” in order to achieve their goal of changing the norms of both paid work and unpaid care. For this reason, they do not include doing paid care as part of one’s responsibility to contribute unpaid care (p. 34; italics in original), although they recognize that there are nuances around this issue. On the thorny issue of ‘self-care’, Nedelsky and Malleson believe that it should be a “separate, and thus protected category” (pp. 120–121). Recognizing that self-care can be particularly challenging and urgent for racialized women—such that engaging in it may be understood as an act of “political warfare,” as Audre Lorde famously put it in A Burst of Light (1988)—they suggest a norm of at least seven hours per week, but are aware of the demand for flexibility given the varying needs of people with health challenges, etc. (p. 121). Indeed, Nedelsky and Malleson suggest that what matters is not whether everyone shares their judgement about what constitutes work and care, but rather the process of caring itself—and practices of ongoing reflection which, they hope, will bring more and more consciousness of the fact that care is important everywhere (p. 120). Like Hamington, Nedelsky, and Malleson see care as an iterative process, where deliberation over care is constitutive of caring itself and helps to build the commitment to its value everywhere.

While the PTfA plan is deceptively simple, Nedelsky and Malleson do not shy away from the hard questions that inevitably emerge. These include: who is “able” to undertake this caring? Are these new care norms a form of privatization? Why 22 hours of care per week? And, perhaps most pressing, “why does everyone have to limit their paid work and do unpaid care, regardless of their preference, inclination, talent or contribution through paid work? (p. 106)” The authors respond to these questions in more or less expected ways—they recognize differences in ability, skills, and preferences but also encourage creativity and involvement in communities of care for the social benefits and personal learning as well as to reduce the reliance and strain placed on the public sector to provide care. (Notably, they don’t seek to eliminate this sector.) They also address the transition from where we are now to the full implementation of PTfA as well as the model’s practical economic feasibility. Indeed, Nedelsky explains in the Acknowledgements that Malleson was drafted into the project for his expertise on the “political economy side of the issues” (p. xiii). There is no doubt that this book is a manifesto for change, but it is one that is nevertheless aware of the many obstacles that stand in the way of the particular revolution it is imagining.

Of the three volumes under consideration here, it is Lynne Segal’s which is the “lightest” read. This is due to its narrative, almost “autoethnographic” style. Segal’s slim volume is part memoir, part feminist manifesto, harnessing personal reflections to advocate for a political commitment to a “politics of compassion” (p. 200). To call the book “light,” however, is not to detract from the book’s academic rigor or its political “weight”; indeed, Lean on Me is rich with historical context and profound political analysis. Segal is no stranger to the “radical turn” in care scholarship; she is one of the members of the “Care Collective,” a group of scholars based in London interested in the contemporary crises of care. Like many scholars of care, Segal recognizes the COVID-19 pandemic as a key moment—one that laid bare our fundamental interdependence and revealed the importance of care to our day-to-day lives while also illuminating extreme inequalities in health, mortality, security, and well-being globally (p. 9). While the pandemic did not create the care crisis, it cast it into bold relief and gave rise to the hope that, even belatedly, such failures might have prompted governments to embark upon rebuilding caring infrastructure. The case of the UK, Segal notes, has seen the exact reverse. It is this post-pandemic regression that provides the context and starting point for the remaining chapters of the book, which interrogate motherhood and mothering, education, feminism, and caring for nature and “the planet,” among other topics. In addition, there is a chapter devoted to vulnerability, examining it both conceptually and in the context of British welfare regimes with an eye to disability and aging.

In some contrast to Nedelsky and Malleson’s universal plan for the restructuring of work and care, Segal’s vision for “caring futures” focuses on the “everyday”—the ongoing practices of “resistance and hope” that, these days, “often involve the need not just to prioritize care but to revolutionize it” (p. 185). These include the neighborhood food banks and community kitchens, the heroic struggles of prison abolitionists and champions of radical criminal justice reform in the US, and the activist volunteers countering the “inhumanity towards those in need of asylum” (p. 196). She concludes the book by emphasizing the need to cultivate hope and build more compassionate communities, both in our daily interactions and in our institutions across all scales of life (p. 214).

While it is a much shorter book and less committed to advancing “care theory” than Hamington’s, the two books share the same kind of optimistic urgency and conviction that care must provide the basis for a new radical, even revolutionary, politics. Moreover, it is notable that all three books rely in part on a narrative approach, with Hamington beginning each chapter with a story of caring behavior among people—often in the face of significant ideological, political, and moral divides and as a result of moral epiphany—while Nedelsky and Malleson and Segal pepper their analyses with personal anecdotes, including Nedelsky’s dying mother and Segal’s familial dynamics. These narratives remind us that care is, in large measure, about real people in relationships. Segal ties this conviction to her feminist politics: “as feminist thinkers have always stressed,” she notes, “we depend upon support throughout our lives, both interpersonal and public, in the process of becoming our unique selves, gaining a sense of our place in the world and how to surmount its constant challenges” (p. 2). Notably, Segal also celebrates the return of the “left feminism.” Likewise, Hamington argues that care ethics cannot be disentangled from its feminist roots and insists that being a feminist—an inclusive, critical race feminist—is vital to creating a caring society, especially insofar as it involves resistance to dominant forms of “toxic masculinity” (p. 116). While Nedelsky and Malleson do not discuss feminist theory or politics, they emphasize early on in their book that the link between gender and the degradation of care is part of a larger picture of gender inequality that is incredibly resistant to change. It is, they argue, a “central contention of this book is that we will never obtain gender equality until we rearrange the distribution of care, which itself requires the transformation of paid work” (p. 6). To be sure, all of these authors recognize the uphill struggle facing them and therefore the need to tackle cultural norms and institutional and economic processes simultaneously.

Geographically, all three books are firmly rooted in the Anglo-American context. Revolutionary Care is primarily a book about care—and the lack of it—in the US; although many of Hamington’s theoretical claims are generalizable beyond this context, the narrative vignettes and political references tie the book to US politics. This is similar to Segal’s volume, which refers mostly to the care crisis in the UK, with an eye to wider care contexts, including those facing the planet itself. Nedelsky and Malleson—both Canadians—state explicitly that their manifesto is written for the “Anglo” countries of the global north, i.e., the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australian, and New Zealand. Certainly, all authors seem to recognize the importance of the global context. Nedelsky and Malleson consider the effect of the norms of PTfA on “global care chains,” as they hope that the harms of migrant care work would be mitigated, although not eradicated, under PTfA. In their final paragraph in the long chapter on care, they admit that they “cannot engage here in any kind of comprehensive analysis of the problems facing the global poor” and that “it is absolutely clear that much needs to be done on this score” (p. 135). They emphasize that rich countries adopting PTfA must also “commit to helping poor countries develop their own care infrastructures” as well as to a “reduction in global inequality, including reparations for centuries of underdevelopment, slavery and colonial exploitation” (p. 135).

These are big claims to be tucked in to the closing words of a chapter, and they hint at the importance of addressing that big roadblock facing the engine of radical care: global capitalism. Hammington gets at this when he cites Nancy Folbre’s explanation of the “hidden economy of relational care” that allows capitalism to function” (p. 137). The fact that over half of all work done in the United States on a daily basis is unpaid and involves the provision of goods and services for oneself and others reveals capitalism’s sleight of hand—one that feminist economists have been telling us about for decades (and which Nedelsky and Malleson seek to reveal and transform – at least in the Anglo countries of the global north—through PTfA). Segal’s discussion of the relationship of capitalism to care is sporadic—from the dark days of Margaret Thatcher and her fatal blows to the welfare state in Britain to the discussion of industrial capitalism’s effects on the environment. Nedelsky and Malleson go to some lengths to demonstrate that, in theory, PTfA is economically feasible. They point out that, despite widespread perception, high taxes can be compatible with efficiency and even with high levels of growth and prosperity. They also point to the Nordic countries, which have seen relatively high rates of growth over the last 30 years, despite high taxes and robust welfare states. Finally, Nedelsky and Malleson dispel the misconception that economic growth must be tied to increasing numbers of work hours by pointing to European countries like Germany, Sweden, and Denmark; these are countries that have gone the furthest with work time reduction but which also spend more on public services than countries like the U.S. – all without affecting their overall economic growth (p. 247).

These meditations on capitalism, socialism, and the economic feasibility of “caring societies” are important because they highlight the challenges of the road ahead. But do they go far enough, both in understanding the nature of the obstacles to a caring revolution and in plotting a course to make it happen? In considering this, I turn briefly to another recent scholarly treatment of the crisis of care, which begins from the premise that any analysis of care must be, first and foremost, an analysis of capitalism. Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism (Verso, 2022) provides a comprehensive account of the tendency of late-stage capitalism—which she describes not simply as an economic system but an integrated social order—to “devour” nature, democracy, racialized populations, and care labor. Fraser devotes an entire chapter to social reproduction and care, emphasizing the deep-seated contradiction or “crisis tendency” between capital accumulation and social reproduction. Indeed, as she puts it, the “division between social reproduction and commodity production is central to capitalism” (p. 9; italics added).

While Fraser’s work on care makes several important contributions, what is particularly relevant for our consideration of these three volumes is her the way her work reminds us that, to some extent, we don’t need to call for “caring societies” or “care economies,” because we already have them. Capitalism has always been dependent on care and social reproduction; indeed, they are a necessity and a constituent of the integrated capitalist social order. As soon as we construe care (or nature, or “society”) as “outside” capitalism, we lose site of the fact that these spaces and practices are integral parts of the capitalist order, Cannibal Capitalism reminds us (p. 32). Fraser worries that political projects that appeal to what they imagine to be capitalism’s “outside” usually end up recycling capitalism’s stereotypes, and even unwittingly reproducing the institutionalized societal order or capitalist society (pp. 32–33). The proper form of critique, for Fraser, is an immanent one—one that “draws on capitalism’s own complex normativity to criticize it, mobilizing against the grain the multiplicity of ideas that co-exist, sometimes uneasily, in an institutionalized society …” (p. 31). It is with this in mind that Nicole Stybnarova suggests, in her 2024 piece for Feminist Theory, that, if we are seeking change, then care must be identified as indispensable to capitalism, so we can then “mobilise this recognised constitutive nature as an arsenal and as a guide for the direction of radical demands” (p. 319).

Never in recent history was the indispensability of care for the functioning of capitalist economies more evident than during the global COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when so much of the care on which we are so utterly dependent was suddenly unavailable or stretched paper thin, its importance quickly became evident in a way that it previously was not. Balancing unremunerated care with paid labor in the household was no longer just a private struggle; indeed, it became a shared, public crisis that could not be ignored. Gender inequality was a plain and undeniable feature of this “care reveal,” as women’s disproportionate caring burden in many societies became evident. We were also forced to confront the ways way that gender “intersected” with a range of other sources of oppression, as racialized, Indigenous and low-income women suffered the greatest economic hardships through the COVID care crisis and beyond.

But as quickly as this “caring moment” came, it seemed to vanish just as quickly as “workers” got back to “work” and economies turned back to the serious business of growth and investment. The harms caused by the unsustainable burdens of social reproductive labor were not alleviated; instead, we reverted back to a state that has been aptly conceptualized by Shirin Rai as one of “depletion.” In her 2024 book of the same name, Rai theorizes depletion as the individual and systemic harm that occurs when the outflow of labor exceeds the inflow of resources of sustainability for individuals, households, and communities (see the symposium on Rai’s book, also in this issue). In such a depleting, cannibalistic capitalist socio-economic order, how can we ensure that the indispensability of care, and its radical, revolutionary potential, remains visible? Certainly, Fraser’s insights are of great significance for the way that we think about care and about our failure to achieve “caring societies.” Recognizing the deep contradiction between capitalism and care—that capitalism is reliant on care for its continued functioning and yet simultaneously fails to support or invest in that care work—is crucial for avoiding ahistoricism and imagining alternative futures. Indeed, we cannot simply “wish” caring societies into existence by “embracing virtues we forgot,” as Stybranova puts it in her Feminist Theory piece (p. 320). We must ground our analyses of care in the global capitalist socio-economic order and foreground that complex structuring apparatus in all our care-based thinking. In doing so, we may be able to leverage capitalism’s dependence on care to demand change for caregivers and the provision of care.

But understanding our failure to care also requires reflection on vulnerability and the way that hierarchies—the various intersecting forms of power, including gendered relations of power in their many different forms—shield the powerful from their own vulnerability. In so doing, we come to understand that the relations of domination and inequality underwritten by capitalism (and patriarchy, colonialism, and racism) also have an epistemic and psychological function. As Marie Garrau explains in a 2024 book chapter, “Privilege and the Denial of Vulnerability,” when the dominant use their privilege to transfer care work to dominated groups, they are thus able to “keep their distance from taking charge of others’ vulnerability and to avoid feeling concerned by it.” This, in turn, “protects them from being confronted by their own vulnerability” (p. 49).

While the material benefits of privilege for the privileged are evident, the costs, for that same group, are underexamined. Indeed, from an epistemic and ethical point of view, privilege can paradoxically prove disabling, hindering the development of a lucid relationship with oneself and authentic relationships with others, as Garrau points out. In simple terms, this means that there is a possibility that privileged (male, white, rich, settler) people who can get a “pass” from caring for, about, and with others might actually come to realize that this is not all it’s cracked up to be—in part because their lives are devoid of real connection to others and to themselves. Might this just be the linchpin of revolutionary change for care? If so, maybe we should take seriously the idea that the fight against the “epistemic effects of privilege should be a central part of the fight for social justice,” as Garrau concludes on p. 59.

This, I think, gets to the heart of what makes these three recent books on care truly revolutionary: they “think big,” using the imagination—what Hamington describes as the “unsung hero of caring” (p. 143)—to encourage us to rethink what is possible. When Nedelsky and Malleson theorize Part Time for All, they construct a new, possible world, one that is evocative of Karla Elliott”s “practice-based” caring alternative to dominant forms of masculinity, discussed by Hamington (p. 129). Care demands creative, critical thinking, not only on the socio-economic structures that rely on care while cannibalizing it but also on what it will take to change the minds of those who continue to disparage, belittle, and avoid care. That is why we need the expansive and normatively challenging philosophy of Hamington, the reflexive narrative evocation of Segal, and the bold yet carefully considered thought experiment of Nedelsky and Malleson. These three books help us to imagine a world in which care is widely respected, resourced, and practiced, and where this could be understood not as a loss for the privileged but as a gain—in terms of “self-respect, competency and pride, as well as happiness and joy,” as Hamington notes (p. 130).

To be sure, the socio-political and economic climate at the present moment seems very far away from the societies of attentive, equally distributed, and well-resourced caring that these books describe. But just as the ravages of neoliberalism brought a movement of populism and protectionism, so too may the divisive, polarized politics of today lead to a social “tipping point” where we finally recognize care—once seen as radical and revolutionary—as our last, best hope for ourselves and our planet.