The long awaited new book of Joan Tronto was released on April 12th, 2013.
Book Description
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 Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care
6 June, 2013
“We need to think about democracy as the allocation of caring responsibilities” is a major statement made by Joan Tronto during her lecture The Challenges of Medical Care in a Caring Democracy delivered at a French University. The entire lecture, in which Tronto explains what is in her book Caring democracy, can be seen and heard using the below link. Tronto starts by saying that care and democracy don’t seem to go well together, because care implies assymetry among people and democracy considers all as equals and care has been kept out of politics. There is, she says, a need to think about what democracy is and about democracy to become more inclusive by including caring. Thinking about these issues Tronto expanded her model of care by adding a fifth phase: caring with, which carries the moral dimensions solidarity and trust.