International Journal of Care and Caring • vol 1 • no 1 • 27–43 • © Policy Press 2017 • #IJCC

Print ISSN 2397-8821 • Online ISSN 2397-883X • https://doi.org/10.1332/239788217X14866281687583

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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key words neoliberalism • Polanyi • homines curans • democratic care

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

Seeing neoliberal care as a theoretical problem

Many articles and books have been written that see neoliberalism as a problematic
way to organise human societies. Indeed, in the literatures on care, there is also a
focus upon how neoliberal institutions and practices affect the adequacy of care.
Yet, the main response of scholars to neoliberalism has been either to treat it as the
new normal or to think of it as invincible. Among the first group, what is surprising
is that scholars continue to accept this state of affairs rather than to react against it.
Even feminist and queer scholars now begin their work by acknowledging that this
is the reality within which they must write; consider, for example, Robert McRuer
(2006: 2): ‘Throughout Crip Theory, I take neoliberal capitalism to be the dominant
economic and cultural system in which, and also against which, embodied and sexual
identities have been imagined and composed over the past quarter century’.
Angela McRobbie notes that among today’s post-feminists, neoliberalism has
transformed expectations:

Most vivid here is the expectation of ‘equality’. Where there is no question

of this being fulfilled in socio-economic terms, or even of it becoming a
lively subject for discussion, nevertheless it is promulgated as a prevailing
cultural norm, as though to say in capital letters ‘Girls and Women Are Now

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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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In letting markets decide our present and future, neoliberalism wholly

abandons the project of individual or collective mastery of existence. The
neoliberal solution to problems is always more markets, more complete
markets, more perfect markets, more financialization, new technologies,
new ways to monetize. Anything but collaborative and contestatory human
decision making control over the conditions of existence, planning for the
future; anything but deliberate constructions of existence through democratic
discussion, law, policy. Anything but the human knowledge, deliberation,
judgment and action classically associated with homo politicus. (Brown,
2015: 221–22, footnote omitted)

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.

Neoliberalism and care

Neoliberalism seems to be an unstoppable and hegemonic global set of forces that
remake human societies to conform to market logics. Although scholars emphasise
different elements of neoliberalism – some emphasising its description as the newest
form of capitalism (Harvey, 2005); others seeing it more in Foucauldian terms as

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a regime of subject formation (cf Foucault, 2008) – it is also a political ideology,

a set of ideas that offer a coherent view about how society should be ordered. For
the purposes of this article, three elements of neoliberalism are critical. The first is
the assumption that the market is the institution that is best able to resolve disputes,
allocate resources and permit individuals freedom through exercising choice. The
second is that societies work best when they allow rational actors to make choices
in the market and that anything that interferes with such choices reduces people’s
freedom.2 The third is that humans are taken to be the kinds of creatures who fit
within such a market-driven world, and neoliberal practices shape people to fit this
image. As Wendy Brown made the point:

Not only is the human being configured exhaustively as homo oeconomicus,

but all dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality….
[It results in] the production of all human and institutional action as rational
entrepreneurial action, conducted according to a calculus of utility, benefit,
or satisfaction against a microeconomic grid of scarcity, supply and demand,
and moral value-neutrality. Neoliberalism does not simply assume that all
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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, 2005: 40)

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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:

America, at its best, is a place where personal responsibility is valued and

expected. Encouraging responsibility is not a search for scapegoats, it is a call
to conscience. And though it requires sacrifice, it brings a deeper fulfillment.
We find the fullness of life not only in options, but in commitments. And
we find that children and community are the commitments that set us free.
(Bush, 2001)

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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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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views on virtually everything: accounts of ontology, epistemology, ethics and politics.

In 1990, Berenice Fisher and Tronto offered this broad definition of care:

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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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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responsibilities: and such allocations can occur by formally or informally assigning

them, or through a default mechanism where care responsibilities follow older
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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?

Conceptual inadequacies of neoliberal care

There are several reasons why, when viewed from the vantage point of the reality of
caring people, the logical underpinning of neoliberalism falters. An obvious flaw from
this perspective of care is the idea that actors are rational and achieve self-mastery.
Without this assumption, the market is not a place of equals exercising their freedom
of choice, but a world of people taking advantage of others. Humans are not only
rational, but also emotional. Moreover, humans do not enter the world able to control
themselves. Adequate education is thus an important feature of every society, but for
neoliberals, education is fraught with several further implications. In the first place,
it raises the question about who should pay for education. For neoliberals, intent on
limiting the state, education should be a choice of parents, not a public responsibility.
Nancy Folbre (1994, 2001) has long argued that children should be understood as a
public good, that is, a benefit that extends across all of society. Providing for public
goods is one important exception to the hegemony of markets that most classical
liberals and neoliberals allow.5
However, an equally serious question is what children and young adults should
learn in school. What they might learn is human cooperation and conflict resolution.
What they are increasingly likely to learn, though, is how to ‘invest’ in themselves so
that they are a better and more marketable product than their neighbour. As Aiwha
Ong continued her investigation of neoliberalism’s problem of self-mastery, she noted

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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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not fit the neoliberal paradigm of acting according to one’s self-interest.

There is a further problem: not all people can be self-mastering. The idea that
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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.

The historical context of neoliberalism and its form of care

‘Neoliberalism’ is ‘neo’ because it was preceded by a period of classical liberalism
in which arguments for market sovereignty held sway. Putting contemporary
neoliberalism into its historical context may help us to recognise that it is not so
strong or as hegemonic as it appears. While no human society can be oblivious to the
demands of economic life, a shift occurred in the modern era. Many scholars over
the past half-century have demonstrated that in the period since the 18th century,
social theory has primarily placed economic life close to the centre of its concerns;
economics came to be not only about who had what, but about becoming more
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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:

the organization of labor would change concurrently with the organization

of the market system. But as the organization of labor is only another word
for the forms of life of the common people, this means that the development
of the market system would be accompanied by a change in the organization
of society itself. All along the line, human society had become an accessory
of the economic system. (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]: 75–7)8

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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[The double movement] can be personified as the action of two organizing

principles in society…. The one was the principle of economic liberalism,
aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market … the other was the
principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature
as well as productive organizations, relying upon the varying support of
those most immediately affected by the deleterious action of the market.
(Polanyi, 2001[1944]: 138, quoted in Baum, 1996: 11)

Historically, then, liberal principles of market fundamentalism conjure up its own

opponents, those who will support ‘social protection’.
Homines curans were part of the solidarity of working-class parties in the first half of
the 20th century that emerged to create systems of social security, income support,
‘social rights’ and health care throughout Northern Europe. The thrall of liberal ideals
lost its power, and the Keynesian idea of using government as an economic support
for individuals emerged and continued to be the leading idea for decades. It was
during this period, indeed, that the liberal thinkers we now consider the founders of
neoliberalism, such as Hayek, began their assault on Keynesian ideas. Homines curans
re-emerged to challenge colonial, sexist and racist worlds in the 1960s. The growth of
movements for social change and demands for rights made upon the state are usually
understood as rights-based. However, among the things demanded, for example,
adequate welfare support, even social justice, can also be read as demands for care.9
Many scholars, for example, Frances Fox Piven, have written about the exceptional
period in the US from the 1930s until the early 1970s, when support for egalitarianism
and ‘social protection’ was at its highest and the US economy performed well but
taxed the wealthy more heavily (Piven and Cloward, 1997). These demands created
the massive pushback of Thatcherism – ‘There is no alternative’ – and neoliberalism
in the US and around the world (Harvey, 2005). Not surprisingly, the goal of those

36
 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.

Democratic caring as an alternative to neoliberalism

The argument in this article suggests that this is the promising direction in which to
move. Insofar as care requires that resources be more equally shared in order to make
the burdens and benefits more equally distributed, then to recognise such caring
needs on the social level requires that we further democratise our polities and that
we reorient our understanding of freedom to fit better with this newly conceived
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relationship of care to equality.

Polanyi described the desire to turn everything into a marketable commodity as
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a ‘satanic mill’. To stop it, one first needs to agree with his analysis. However, from
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within a world in which everything becomes commodified, how is such a change

possible? Some dissenting economists have argued that we need only engage in
an alternative economy (eg bartering) and deny the power of capitalist economics
(Gibson-Graham, 1996, 2006). This strategy, though, can be easily contained by a
neoliberal frame: let those people ‘drop out’ or ‘leave the grid’. If abhorring capitalism
is just another ‘choice’, then neoliberal critics have a simple task to respond to this
critique.
The reason that the existence of homines curans is so much more powerful a critique
is because if we take the care perspective seriously, it requires us to change the terms
of the discussion. Including the ‘necessarily excluded’ is not the same thing as a
‘choice’ to include or to ignore them. From a care perspective, humans can see that
they have a stake in creating a sense of collective fate, which undoes the simplicity
of the ‘personal responsibility’ response.
Several elements seem critical to an understanding of care.11 For the purposes of
this article, we might use Stephanie Collins’s ‘slogan’ that at the heart of care ethics
is the idea that ‘dependency relationships generate duties’.12 Closely following
Collins’s idea, it becomes apparent that such duties or responsibilities are not, then,
a matter of ‘choice’. Indeed, Collins (2015: 152–3, emphasis in original) notes that
people ‘sometimes have duties to take steps to form personal relationships’ when ‘we
are best placed to fulfil another person’s important interests in experiencing the
meaning, value, love and intimacy that personal relationships bring’. Such duties
cannot be reduced to formal structures such as families (though families will often
create their conditions), or to contractual or market relations. By its nature, the real
concrete existence of human relationships establishes the centrality of relationships in
human life. Such relationships belie the ideology of the market-operating individual.
Neoliberalism reveals itself to be an ideology in the face of an ethic of care.
To return to the larger historical arc described in this article, though, I have argued
that neoliberalism was a response to feeling too many responsibilities. The problem

37
 Joan Tronto

of hierarchy in care relations is not eliminated in the highly personalistic account of

care that Collins provides. Moving forward, the challenge for care ethics approaches is
not simply to refute neoliberalism as a realistic view of human society, but to address
this large remaining problem. How can democratic societies, committed to a starting
assumption of equality, be squared with dependency relationships? How can care
eliminate hierarchies in allocating the responsibilities for care?
This truly is a problem for a concept of care that recognises that care often
involves dependency relationships. Mignon Duffy and others have demonstrated
how gendered, raced and classed the allocation of care responsibilities remain
in modern societies (Glenn, 2010; Duffy, 2011; Boris, 2012; Duffy et al, 2013).
However, concepts only come to have their full meaning in the context of broader
social and political theories. It is for this reason that I have argued elsewhere that to
advance a political agenda for better care requires that we understand the allocation
of caring responsibilities as the understanding of the substantive work of democratic
life (Tronto, 2013).
Caring democracy is not a self-executing solution to all of the problems of
democratic life. It does not automatically eliminate the two greatest dangers of
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reallocating caring responsibilities: parochialism and paternalism. Parochialism refers

to the ways in which caring relationships tend to be drawn in narrow circles, for
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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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of Albertus Magnus (1899: 380).

2. For a slightly different version of this definition, see Tronto (2013: 37–8).
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3. Sociological definitions of care often reflect its face-to-face character; consider

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Francesca Cancián’s (2000: 137) definition as ‘A combination of feelings of affection and

responsibility, with actions that provide for an individual’s personal needs or well-being
in a face-to-face interaction’. For a review of competing definitions of care, see, among
others, Tronto (2013: 19–21), Engster (2007: 21–9) and Collins (2015).
4. See, among others, Groenhout (2004), Koggel (1998, 2006a, 2006b) and Robinson

(1999, 2008, 2011).

5. Milton Friedman uses the term ‘neighbourhood goods’ in speaking of public goods, but

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

systematically to obfuscate the issue of domination in human development; that the

liberal state cannot account for its own manner of imposing preferences is simply a case
in point’ (Bowles and Gintis, 1987: 126).
7. Although recent work suggests that children are also increasingly ‘marketised’ and

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

39
 Joan Tronto

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

schools in the Southern US is described by Siddle Walker and Tompkins (2004).

10. Elsewhere, I call this problem ‘privileged irresponsibility’ (see Tronto, 1993, 2013).
11. Among competing definitions of care, see discussion in Tronto (2013) and Collins

(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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restricted definition helps us see the larger claims here.

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