Socializing Care: Feminist Ethics and Public Issues, * Maurice Hamington and Dorothy C. Miller (eds), * Oxford, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006, pp. ix + 233, ISBN 0 7425 5040 0, $28.95

Abstract

In an era in which neoliberal capitalism has taken hold in an increasingly globalizing world as never before, in which profits are put above human life, dignity and care, a book dedicated to re-introducing care ethics into the public domain is timely and essential to social work theory, practice, research and policy. One of the sustained themes across the eleven chapters is the critique of the liberal framework of justice that presumes the autonomous individual, capable of making choices freely ignoring structural constraints on choices and reducing care to the private sphere of life. This is captured in the lead chapter by Joan Tronto, upon whose theoretical insights many of the authors base their work, when Tronto asserts ‘the language of the market and of choice here diminishes our abilities to see the ways in which economic inequalities contribute to social incapacities’ (p. 9). In addition to the focus on economic inequalities, some of the chapters speak to the intersections of race, class and gender and how these impact on the perception and practice of care within the neoliberal framework.