Written by one of the world’s most respected care scholars, Revolutionary Care provides original theoretical insights and novel applications to offer a comprehensive approach to care as personal, political, and revolutionary. The text has nine chapters divided into two major sections. Section 1, "Thinking About Better Care," offers four theoretical chapters that reinforce the primacy of care as a moral ideal worthy of widespread commitment across ideological and cultural differences. Unlike other moral approaches, care is framed as a process morality and provides a general trajectory that can only determine the best course of action in the moment/context of need. Section 2, "Invitations and Provocations: Imagining Transformative Possibilities," employs four case studies on toxic masculinity, socialism and care economy, humanism and posthumanism, pacifism, and veganism to demonstrate the radical and revolutionary nature of care. Exploring the thinking and writing of many disciplines, including authors of color, queer scholars, and indigenous thinkers, this book is an exciting and cutting-edge contribution to care ethics scholarship as well as a useful teaching resource.
Introduction: Is Care A Radical Idea?, Section 1: Thinking About Better Care, Chapter 1: Good Care, Chapter 2: Care and Normativity, Chapter 3: A Categorical Commitment to Care, Chapter 4: A Care Ethos, Section 2: Invitations and Provocations: Imagining Transformative Possibilities, Chapter 5: Feminism and Resisting Toxic Masculinity, Chapter 6: Socialism and Creating A Care Economy, Chapter 7: Humanism and Balancing the Primacy of Care with Religious Authority, Chapter 8: Veganism and Post-Human Care, Conclusion: Disponibilité, Moral Progress, and Revolution
Biography
Maurice Hamington is Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University. As a care ethicist, he is interested in both the theory and application of care. Among other positions, Hamington is a Steering Committee Member for the International Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC), Utrecht, the Netherlands. He is also a member of the Advisory Board for Care Aesthetics: Research Exploration (CARE), a multi-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom. As the author, or editor, of 16 books and over 25 articles in refereed journals, Hamington has given invited presentations on care ethics across the globe. See mhamington.com for more information on his scholarship.
"Revolutionary Care invites people of the world to unite for a more caring society. Hamington’s radical as well as nuanced rereading of care ethics breathes new life into feminist philosophy ontologically, epistemologically, and politically as a transformative grand theory for every being."
Yayo Okano, Professor, Graduate School of Global Studies, Doshisha University, Japan
"Care ethics’ initial feminist motivation was to draw upon common experiences and practices of care and show their potential for a world of peace, responsibility, equality, and epistemic justice. This book elaborates the philosophical arguments for care, while also offering powerful practical programs of moral behavior that caring persons could identify with: feminism, socialism, (post)humanism, and veganism. Hamington’s book thereby takes the revolutionary potential of care to the next level."
Prof. Dr. Inge van Nistelrooij, Associate Professor, University of Humanistic Studies, the Netherlands
"In this groundbreaking new book, Maurice Hamington, already recognized as an original and important thinker on the ethics of care, goes beyond the acknowledged values of care and reflects on the radicality of care - radical in the sense that it takes us back to the roots or the core of ethics and politics, to what matters. Care is often not seen as a radical concept in terms of political activism, probably because of the association of care with women's work. However, Revolutionary Care sheds new light on the very power of care, showing how a genuine commitment to care requires resistance to dominant neoliberal values, and an actual nonviolent revolution."
Sandra Laugier, Professor of Philosophy, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
"This work argues for care’s transformative potential given its relational ontology and epistemology of general and concrete knowing, which connect the human and posthuman through reflexive dependencies. It reflects beyond the cliched dualisms of care’s absence versus abundance to focus on the phenomenology of embodied caring practices through their vicissitudes. Hamington pioneers care’s ability to heal conflicts through insights drawn from everyday sensitive and attentive actions, often unsteady and requiring immense patience with their complex fallibilisms. This stands in contrast to the cut and dry abstract intellectualism of ideal theories and rational deliberations. It is a must read as its nuanced articulations of the normativity of caring practices have a global relevance."
Kanchana Mahadevan, Professor of Philosophy, University of Mumbai
