In her book, Ella Myers deftly weaves together multiple traditions of thought, including care ethics, existential phenomenology, and democratic theory, to challenge trends in contemporary political theory and advocate putting care for the world at the center of our analysis. This compelling project is sure to resonate with scholars who have an affinity both for the critical and ethical impulses of postmodern political thought and for the constructive and activist spirit of democratic theory.
Myers begins with the recent turn to ethics in political theory, which she sees as potentially problematic but “critically participates in, rather than rejects outright” (p. 9). Specifically, she sympathizes with the quest for an animating spirit to enliven democracy, but sees the ethos emergent from the therapeutic and charitable ethics offered by Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas, respectively, as unsuitable for that task. Care for the self and care for the Other are not guaranteed to tip the scales toward care for the world, and in fact these approaches may “enervate rather than enrich associative action by democratic citizens” (p. 11). Myers thus sets out to articulate an alternative ethical grounding for democracy, focusing on “contentious and collaborative care for the world” (p. 2).
Following an introduction, Chapter 1 addresses Foucault, and secondarily William Connolly. Myers argues that while the “seemingly linear route from purposeful efforts at self-crafting to the creation of new and different kinds of subjectivity is intuitively compelling” (p. 33), the shift from the micropolitics of the self to the macropolitics of the world is precarious: “Why assume the turn inward will give way to a turn outward?” (p. 43). Chapter 2 focuses on Levinasian ethics, which “does little more than gesture toward the importance of . . . politics” (p. 62), and also examines Simon Critchley and Judith Butler’s deployments of Levinas, which “fail to account for the difference between charity and democracy, wrongly supposing that concern for another’s suffering can serve as the basis of cooperative and contentious democratic action” (p. 68). Together, these chapters argue that “dyadic models of care cannot simply be extended to associative democratic politics,” because they do not leave room for “the crucial third term”—the worldly object or issue that inspires democratic projects (p. 14).
Chapters 3 and 4 turn to Hannah Arendt (among others), whom Myers builds on and diverges from in articulating a conception of ethics as care for the world. This is the heart of the book, and it offers a rich account of “worldly things” as multiple, fluctuating, and contested (p. 93). Contra Arendt, “the world” is not only man-made, and not monistic: not one table at which we all sit; it is many tables that reflect particular features of the world that are drawn into relief as things and become sites of contestation and mobilization. This worldly ethics demands recognition that conditions matter: Real change is systemic and institutional—not about subjectivity or even intersubjectivity, nor about merely addressing immediate needs of specific others. Myers thus specifies criteria for judging democratic action: What counts is cultivating the world as a home for all people and creating the world as an in-between that provides broad opportunities for meaningful participation. This elegantly written and concise book concludes with an epilogue that returns to Foucault and Levinas, attenuating earlier claims by suggesting that therapeutic and charitable ethics may “have a part to play in nourishing democratic care for the world, but only if practices are oriented, from the start, toward associative endeavors that aim to affect worldly conditions” (p. 140).
Two virtues of Worldly Ethics—its elegance and concision—may also be vices. Regarding elegance, while Myers’s critical engagement with key theorists is carefully worded and intelligently argued, I occasionally longed for the stakes of the project to be clearer. By the end of the epilogue, one grasps the author’s distinct impatience with political theory that fails to address in concrete terms the precise worldly conditions that should be transformed through specific collective action. The final line of the book implores us to “begin where we are,” a call to action and an important alternative to the “Be the Change” self-focus so often mistaken in consumerist pop culture for politics. There is an implicit critique here that ethics can become an abstract space in which theorists (and citizens) evade dysfunctional contemporary political life. I would like Myers to have put the point more bluntly.
Regarding concision, there are intriguing points that might have been elaborated to enrich the analysis. For example, can “critique” be an object that joins people together, or is that activity too negative to count as associative democratic action? Does a conception of the political remain for Myers beyond collective action? How does her argument that issues call forth publics reject or importantly modify the concept of “issue publics” in political science? Might her point about how features of the world are constituted as “things” through strategies of politicization bring in Butler’s work on framing so as to constructively reengage with the Levinas chapter? In her effort to articulate a nonanthropocentric worldly ethics, does she posit the world as an end in itself, or are people the bottom line? She suggests both at different points.
My broader questions concern Myers’s central claim that self-care and care for the Other only have democratic implications when they are “driven from the start by concern for a worldly problem” (p. 24). This formulation—“spurred by,” “originates with,” activated “from the start” by—appears throughout the book, and is founded on her claim that the ontological priority of the self (for Foucault) or responsibility to the Other (for Levinas) entails a seemingly linear and unidirectional relationship between ethics and politics where the mechanism for shifting from the former to the latter is never articulated. In the epilogue, Myers acknowledges that, in fact, this relationship is more reciprocal. I agree. While ethical relations to self and Other may be cast as a way to “prepare” for politics, engagement in public life is largely episodic, flaring up in face-to-face encounters in concrete contexts that we cannot predict or control, and so we are always tacking between action and self-crafting in a mutually constitutive way. The process is ongoing and messy, and so the notion that self-cultivation must originate with the “presence of a worldly problem that captures the attention of that individual from the start” (p. 51) seems problematic. Often, I think, we cannot perceive the relevant features of a worldly problem until certain self-cultivation has taken place. Thus, when Myers says that “we should be alert to the ways in which collective action, animated by care for the world, enables other practices of care” (p. 145), I wanted more on how, exactly, we become alert in this way. In other words, I wonder how much questions of ethical subjectivity continue to matter for the democratic politics she focuses on, or whether, absent collective action, the selves cultivated are of little import.
For this point another ethical tradition—virtue ethics—may provide a useful framework. Aristotle lurks in Arendt not least regarding action, and he reminds us that “in the Olympic Games it is not the most beautiful or strongest who are crowned but those who compete”—that is, it is not those who are best in theory, but who put their dispositions into action, that we care about. Ethical dispositions must ultimately manifest in particular collective action to count as democratically relevant, yes. But must they “originate” or be called forth by a specific worldly issue? That is a much stronger claim.
All of this is to acknowledge how timely, rich and complicated the issues raised here are—not only for the “ethical turn” in political theory but also for the ascendant “affective turn,” which provokes similar questions. I share Myers’s deep desire to know “what are depoliticizing modes of self-care, and what are potentially politicizing modes?” (p. 49). This is a well-articulated and crucial question for political theory and democratic practice, and it is thoroughly enhanced by the worldly ethics and the commitment to genuine hospitality and collaboration that it is grounded in here. If I am left wanting anything by this book, then, it is simply more, which is a testament to its fine contribution.
