Shawn Fraistat’s The Liberalism of Care: Community, Philosophy and Ethics makes an important contribution to rethinking both the liberal tradition and the reading of that tradition in contemporary care ethics. Much of the work on care ethics tends to fall into one of two camps: work that contends that care is absent in the dominant texts of the western traditions or work that contends that care is so fundamental to the human condition that it has always been “there”—if only on the margins and done by the marginalized. Fraistat makes the novel argument that care has been a central feature of the way three philosophers—Plato, Rousseau, and Godwin—have configured the rights and responsibilities of citizens. Because these thinkers do not sit comfortably within the canon of liberalism, nor are they commonly sources for work on care, Fraistat’s task is both novel and ambitious.

The book is organized as a “care”-themed rereading of the texts of these three thinkers. Plato, Rousseau, and Godwin each get two chapters devoted to their respective works: one highlighting care and a second elaborating the relationship between care and political authority. Fraistat begins by offering a reading of Plato that challenges the more conventional one by asserting that the philosopher is not merely contemplative but is also caring: “philosophers retain those elements of eros that find their expression in care for others” (p. 49), and “while Plato presents contemplation as the most exalted activity of which human beings are capable, one that diminishes the urgency of other concerns, it transforms the way one cares for others without wholly displacing it” (p. 50). Because Plato’s philosophers are also “kings” charged with ruling, this care is already a political concept, albeit one that inclines to authoritarianism—a concern that Fraistat acknowledges while also praising Plato for recognizing the value of expert knowledge in caregiving (p. 76).

A key theme emerges here and is sustained throughout the book: expertise, Fraistat claims, need not preclude soliciting the input of or being responsive to one’s charges. Although Plato’s work doesn’t concede this possibility, Fraistat argues that Rousseau’s nuanced account of “subordinate sovereignty” reconciles the role of expertise with meaningful political participation. “Subordinate sovereignty,” as Fraistat defines it, is “the principle that authority relationships should be configured such that the superordinate party molds the judgment of the subordinate, even while the subordinate is entrusted with the final say” (p. 85). Here Fraistat celebrates what many have criticized in Rousseau: the tension between his commitment to participatory democracy and his conviction that it is the general will and not merely majority will that must guide our collective political decisions. Fraistat’s comfort with this tension is grounded in his reading of Rousseau’s work on education in Emile. He sees in Emile’s socialization a commitment to caring authority with greater attention to the problem of domination than evidenced in Plato: “All of Rousseau’s model authority figures, including Emile’s tutor, Wolmar in Julie and the lawgiver in the Social Contract use their authority to promote the well-being of others by meeting important needs. They do so with attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness, and they are described in caregiving terms” (p. 117). And yet, he concedes that Rousseau still suffers from the problem of being insufficiently democratic: “political wisdom remains the preserve of a few and women are excluded altogether” (p. 145). Ultimately it is not, however, the democratic failings of Rousseau that chiefly concern Fraistat. Instead, it is Rousseau’s illiberalism. Although both Rousseau and Plato outline caring institutions, he concludes that they provide “insufficient space for critical reflection and self-determination” (p. 146). It is to remedy this that Fraistat turns finally to Godwin.

Godwin, like Rousseau and Plato, offers an account of education in which caring morality is evident. According to Fraistat, Godwin comes the closest to offering a version of care resonant with the contemporary literature: “Godwin places a great deal of emphasis on responding to and remedying vulnerability by meeting important needs. Stressing the care-ethical value of responsibility, Godwin deplores the neglect with which so many are treated, arguing in favor of a capacious mandate to seek out and assist vulnerable individuals” (p. 159). Centering care must, as feminist work on the subject has recognized, avoid both domination and neglect. Although liberalism has historically been attentive to the problem of domination, it has in both theory and practice had little to say about neglect. Godwin’s anarchist sympathies set him up to avoid rather than address the problem of domination by imagining away the problem of authority altogether. As Fraistat points out, Godwin acknowledges that some tasks might be appropriately “expert” (homebuilding for example), but “politics doesn’t admit of expertise to the same degree” (p. 186). Here, we might understand Godwin as taking a more meaningfully democratic turn in centering conversation and neighborly relations because doing so will “inspire individuals with the caring disposition that will lead them to attend to others without complex coordination or coercion” (p. 189). In Godwin we get the first account of care in which the roles of caregiver and cared-for are potentially fluid, rather than fixed locations rooted in contextually specific responsive rather than recalcitrant relationships of authority.

In rereading these texts with a focus on care, Fraistat offers a challenge to the more familiar theoretical understanding of liberalism as inevitably the “minimal liberalism” he associates with John Locke, John Rawls, and Robert Nozick. This is an important move. But Fraistat articulates his motivation for his project as something more than a revision of intellectual history: “I am pointing to a political crisis around caregiving services: insufficient levels of care are creating political upheavals that pose a threat to individual rights and to democratic governance” (p. 5). Because Fraistat grounds his account of care almost exclusively in the relationship between educator and student, his work is limited in its ability to address this broader crisis. Fraistat ends with a call to “theorize the kinds of educative experiences that might equip students to care more about the interests of others, including those who don’t resemble themselves” (p. 204). Although this is surely appealing from both the perspective of liberal democracy and of care, it is also inadequate for addressing the care crisis. First, without a more grounded analysis of the institutional power and politics within which such an educative experience unfolds, it is unclear how this educative experience informs a move from what Joan Tronto calls “caring about” to “doing the work of care.” That, as Nancy Fraser, Mignon Duffy, and Jennifer Nedelsky have recognized, will require significant intervention in the existing relationship between markets and states. Second, although we may join Fraistat in his concern about the potential excesses of authority on the part of caretakers as “educators,” we are more likely to worry about the potential exploitation of caretakers as nursing assistants or public school teachers under COVID. A more focused engagement with some of the recent work on care ethics would position Fraistat to speak to both sets of concerns.