Review

Caring democracy: Markets, equality and justice

Joan Tronto
New York University Press, New York and London, 2013, x+228pp.,
ISBN: 978-0814782774

Contemporary Political Theory (2016) 15, e22–e25. doi:10.1057/cpt.2015.32;
published online 2 June 2015

Don’t let ‘care’ distract you. This book is about democracy, what it requires, what
troubles ours and how we might remedy contemporary political malaise. Care, Joan
Tronto compellingly argues, is at the heart of both our democratic deficit and our
democratic potential.

Tronto leads a multidisciplinary field of scholars who have developed a rich
literature on care. In this latest pioneering contribution, she brings the insights of care
theory to bear on democratic theory and practice. This long-overdue connection
reveals much about our political present and possible futures.

With Caring Democracy Tronto contributes to renewed efforts to theorize the
interaction between economic and political forces of contemporary life. The work
vividly illustrates how democracy depends on activities that are often ignored,
undervalued and left out of public discussions, and provides a devastating account of
how gender norms, tropes of choice and personal responsibility, and market mechan-
isms are deployed in the neoliberal context to undermine both care and democracy.

The book is of two parts. The first is conceptual, an argument about the
connections between democracy and care, and the implications for self-consistent
democrats (care-ist and other); the second is a critique of current practices, rhetoric
and rationality. Both are powerful and compelling.

Tronto’s argument begins with that oft-forgotten fact of which she has spent her
career reminding us: we human beings depend on care.

‘Care’ is a vexing political concept. Its maternalist roots suggest something
women do in ‘the private sphere’. Tronto’s signature contribution is to expand our
understanding of what care is and why it is an essential concern of politics and
political theory. In Caring Democracy, she returns to a definition that she and
Bernice Fisher developed in 1990: ‘care is 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’ (p. 19). If this sounds like nearly everything we do, it is.
Expansiveness, in a sense, is her point. It is essential to the political project of

© 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 15, 2, e22–e25
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exposing and revaluing the swaths of too often ignored activity upon which our lives
– and democracy – depend. We are interdependent beings. Living well is not a solo
endeavor; it is the result, and Tronto would argue, the activity of care – giving,
receiving, taking, sharing – broadly understood. This is the case she makes:
production (for example, factory work) and societal protection (for example,
policing) ought to be understood as caring activities, similar in key ways to, for
example, educating, meal preparing and house cleaning (p. 21). It follows, as she
shows, that the distribution of care has profound impacts on the distribution of social
and political power. Receive inadequate care and one is less likely to develop the
capacity to function well as a democratic citizen; shoulder too much caregiving and
one is less likely to have the resources to participate in the democratic process. Call
these the facts of care.

What we ought to do about these facts, Tronto insists, is a political question.
Indeed, as she points out, acknowledged or not, every political system and theory has
an account of care and its demands (p. 28). In refreshing divergence from the
dominant strains of care theory, Tronto filters the facts of care through democratic
commitments. Thus she adds to her earlier definition a ‘final phase of care’: ‘caring
with … requires that caring needs and the ways in which they are met need to be
consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality and freedom for all’
(p. 23). If a commitment to democracy implies a commitment to equal voice, then it
also entails – at very least, Tronto argues – a commitment to making the distribution
of caring responsibilities the first concern of politics.

Tronto – it should be highlighted – writes as a partisan of democracy, albeit
democracy defined in light of the facts of care. ‘Democratic life rests upon the
presumption that citizens are equal … What is distinctive about democratic caring,
though, is that it presumes … that we are equal as democratic citizens in being care
receivers …. This quality of being needy is shared, equally by all humans’ (p. 29).
Building from this Tronto argues that ‘[t]o be a citizen in a democracy is to care for
citizens and to care for democracy itself. I call this practice “caring with” ’ (p. x). And
to do this, the distribution of care needs to be the first concern of our political lives.

Some will worry that she puts outcome (that is, a certain distribution of care)
before democratic process. In fact, though, her position is deeply faithful to
democratic process; the concern about the distribution of care stems from a
commitment to what she quite plausibly claims is the defining value implicit in a
commitment to democratic process, that of equal voice. Once ‘a democratic society
makes a commitment to equality of all of its members, then the ways in which the
inequalities of care affect different citizens’ capacities to be equal has to be a central
part of the society’s political tasks’(p. 10).

With the conceptual frame of a ‘feminist democratic ethic’ in hand, in the three
central and perhaps best chapters of the book, Tronto turns a critical eye to
contemporary life. Patriarchal gender norms, neoliberal rationality and marketization,
she shows, distort the realities of care and real costs of democracy, and threaten both.

Review

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Some citizens shoulder more care responsibilities or receive inadequate care and thus
have inadequate resources to participate in politics; other more privileged citizens can
purchase better care and are given ‘passes’ that exempt them from significant care
responsibilities. Heteronormative masculinity underpins the ‘production’ and ‘protec-
tion’ passes that exempt cis-gender men from giving care typically associated with
women. Tronto’s expansive definition of care is key here. For her, both production and
protection are caring activities. It is not, then, that men do not care, but that our
ideologies of gender, citizenship and the private sphere obscure the ways in which care
is distributed. Gender norms are also at work, she shows, where recipients of ‘nurturant’
care are cast as feminized dependents and recipients of ‘protective’ care have their status
as a citizen affirmed. Gender thus links threats to care and democracy.

Neoliberal practices and rationality do much the same. Tronto’s illuminating and
much-needed discussion of the marketization of care calls attention to the ways in
which class and race mark some as ideal caregivers and thus more likely to be assigned
caring responsibilities. For others, class and race function as passes of ‘privileged
irresponsibility’ that allow them to shunt caring responsibilities onto others. Neoliberal
rationality also underwrites the ‘bootstrap’ and ‘charity’ passes. Representing the
refrains of ‘personal responsibility’ and obligation as the results of unfettered choice
respectively, both feed the conclusion that care should be left to the market. Without
rejecting the value of market mechanisms altogether, Tronto makes a powerful case that
this turn threatens both care and democracy. Not only do the market values of efficiency
and fungible exchange conflict with the nature of key varieties of care, but markets have
very bad memories; they thus tend to re-entrench social inequality and are ill-suited to
relieving it. Indeed, without historical memory – and the realities of interdependence it
reveals – the basis for the far-reaching sense of responsibility she advocates is lost.
By effacing the facts of care, neoliberal rationality and the market mechanisms it
champions threaten care and democracy.

In the final two chapters, Tronto begins to paint a picture of how we might think
about care democratically. Her broadly compelling account provides essential
foundations for further work on how care and democracy might be harmonized.

This is an important and pioneering book. Any effort of such ambition is bound to
leave unanswered questions. Caring Democracy is no exception. To say, as many
have, that Tronto’s definition of care is broad is close to an understatement. Indeed, it
is not entirely clear what human activity would not fall into the category of care.
Poetry, play, violence? Given its baggage of, for example, the connotation of
altruism and the historical connection (in scholarship and practice) to motherhood
and gendered labor, the question is important. Tronto’s efforts to address it – saying
that the general concept can be refined for particular purposes – are successful in part
but not, I think, entirely. Take, for example, the function of necessity in the concept.
The language of need is central to Tronto’s discussion. Clearly, she has in mind
activities that are essential – not superfluous – to living well. The normative power of
this status is important: if none of us can do without care, if we have no choice but to

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depend on the care of others, then to claim that we are in some sense mutually
responsible for one another makes sense. And yet, as Hannah Arendt has argued, the
introduction of necessity into political discourse has a way of closing off real
deliberation. One is tempted to ask: what happens, on her account, when the demos
doesn’t care about care? What if an actual democratic process does not produce the
conclusions she shows are the essential to the realization of democracy’s defining
values? Explicitly, Tronto sides with the democratic process. But one wonders then
what to do with the force of necessity highlighted by care.

To be sure, this is a vexing question for all democratic theory. The essential
contribution Tronto makes here is to help us see just what is at stake, really, in our
commitment to democracy.

Once again, Tronto has broken new ground. The path laid here is one down which
anyone interested in democratic, feminist and care theory, and our political world
more generally is wise to follow.

Tamara Metz
Reed College, Portland, OR 97202, USA

Review

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	Caring democracy: Markets, equality and justice