Families are not about moving fast and breaking things
A new alliance between tech and the family?
Encountering The Dignity of Dependence in 2026 may inspire an odd déjà vu in readers of a certain age, or at least a certain academic background. Leah Libresco Sargeant’s “feminist manifesto” aims at “putting dependence at the heart of our account of what it means to be human,” against liberal political philosophy’s privileging of individual autonomy. Her effort focuses our attention on women’s numerous and visceral experiences of dependence and care, especially their experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing. Sargeant’s book chronicles the many ways that America’s economic, social, and even physical architecture discourages and penalizes care, and exhorts us to reverse our priorities.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it recapitulates a debate from the 1980s in academic social science. In 1982, the psychologist Carol Gilligan published the book In a Different Voice, challenging Lawrence Kohlberg’s then-dominant theory of moral development. Kohlberg’s stages of moral development culminated in the capacity for abstract reasoning through universal principles about justice. In Kohlberg’s studies, more men than women attained such “moral maturity.” Gilligan countered that the reason for this discrepancy was that such abstract rationality was not more sophisticated but only more typically masculine. Women exhibited a different “orientation” toward justice that emphasized “relationships and interdependence” over rights and impartiality, and this orientation issued in an “ethic of care” — a different approach to justice, but no less morally sophisticated than the abstract rationality of men.
The Gilligan–Kohlberg debate did not long remain confined to psychology. Gilligan’s thesis was immediately taken up by feminist political theorists to critique the then-dominant vision of liberalism, John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. Rawls’s approach, feminist critics alleged, also made the mistake of presuming an implicitly male liberal subject — an autonomous agent who defines justice primarily in terms of rights and procedural fairness. But this presumption overlooked important considerations of justice that only become visible from within an ethic of care — the needs of dependent individuals who can’t be autonomous, the needs of those who care for them, and the entire web of relationships of private life that Rawls’s approach put beyond political consideration.
These debates all took place not only in the last century but entirely within the frame of liberalism. Gilligan was a liberal critic of the liberal Kohlberg, as were the feminists who took on Rawls, himself a liberal straight out of central casting. What they sought was a more expansive liberalism, particularly a more expansive welfare state that subsidized the costs of care work in addition to the other sorts of costs, like housing and health care, that liberal theorists already acknowledged.
The question about Sargeant’s book then is: Why now? In a moment when liberalism itself is in question and the autonomous individual is barely a scarecrow in current debates, when the anti-individualist visions of socialism and nationalism are the ascendent ideologies, why revive a thirty-year-old “ethics of care” critique of liberalism?
That Sargeant seems unaware of this history is beside the point. She is hardly alone in raising concerns about care and dependence against liberal autonomy. An analogous interest has appeared on the far left, with books like Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Liberation and Care and M. E. O’Brien’s Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care invoking dependence as a basis for a revolutionary reorganization of society against “neoliberal” capitalism. Something about the present moment other than a resurgent liberalism is calling this argument back from the dead, and the most obvious candidate is the sense that the family is in crisis.
On the right — and for Sargeant — the clearest manifestation of this crisis is fertility decline: the unwillingness of the young even to start families. The left downplays this, since concern about it would violate its commitment to neutrality about individual sexual and reproductive decisions, and instead points to the stresses of childcare costs, the isolation of the nuclear family, and the toll these burdens take on mental health. On both sides, the significant financial and psychological toll of modern family life motivates the turn to care ethics as a solution.
Sargeant draws on it to support family formation against the economic pressures that women are under to advance professionally in a male-centric world where little is designed with their bodies or desires in mind, and which offers them little support to form the families they want. Like the care-ethicists before her, she calls on the state to recognize the value of caretaking by supporting and subsidizing it. Legislating nationally standardized and extended parental leave, re-writing Medicaid caregiving rules to encourage and better compensate familial caregivers for disabled family members, removing income limits for recipients of Supplemental Security Income, reforming Social Security to account for non-waged caretaking work in pension calculations — these are all examples Sargeant offers of what a dependence agenda could do. “Aid to those in need should be expected and accommodated,” she writes.
These policies would extend the purview and costs of the federal government, but this would be worth it, Sargeant implies, because they would buttress the overstressed nuclear family in the process, whose solidity is required for the flourishing of the rest of society. “It doesn’t work well to offer a patchwork of unreliable, red tape–obstructed benefits and exceptions for ordinary needs,” she writes. “Criminalizing care, overprofessionalizing it, obstructing its most natural outlets, and treating it as an individual hobby rather than a key load-bearing part of civilization all leave our society on an unstable foundation.”
In this respect, The Dignity of Dependence is an effort to give policy substance to what has been called the “populist quadrant” on the political spectrum — the elusive and neglected socially conservative and economically liberal position — that the post-liberal right has been trying to simultaneously define and champion since 2016. Sargeant has embraced this position elsewhere, and in the book echoes its complaints against the individualism of liberal philosophy. The difficulty with the populist quadrant is that it is a philosophical blank — its economic policies are those of the conventional left, while its social policy often consists of little more than fervid moral exhortations. It has no distinct political identity and offers no justifications for its constituents to see themselves as other than simply heterodox — or fatally confused depending on whom you ask.
Everything Sargeant calls on the state to do is of a piece with the standard demands of her analogues on the left. Indeed, if what we are seeking is a society oriented around dependence and care, the left offers to provide even more fully for the beleaguered modern woman by deconstructing capitalism and replacing it with a need-based economy that socializes the “burdens of care.” Sargeant wants the state to limit the tyrannical demands of private employers on workers’ time and to subsidize the non-market care work of (mainly) women. This would “accommodate the exuberant outpouring of love and risk-taking so many of us want to undertake for the sake of another” without imposing all the economic disadvantages that absence from the labor force now entails for women. But why not do women one better and replace the tyrannical private employers hamstrung by a benevolent state with a benevolent state employer that ensures everyone has the time and resources to exuberantly pour out their love on whomever and in whatever way they wish?
Undoubtedly, the “abolish the family” part of the left’s vision would not sit well with Sargeant or the populist quadrant. (And certainly their rallying cry of “free abortion on demand” would send her running for the hills.) What Sargeant wants above all is to protect and buttress the family. But calling in the state to support its most intimate needs blurs the boundaries between Sargeant’s aims and those of the socialists. With government shekels come government shackles, as the saying goes. What the government subsidizes, it must regulate. What it regulates becomes progressively less private. Americans have historically temporized with this problem through federalism, keeping Leviathan away from their front doors while allowing smaller fish in through the windows, but it’s precisely this inconsistent, unreliable “patchwork” of federalist policies that Sargeant rejects. With a central government taking care of us so we can take care of others in “concentric circles of care” that are by no means limited to the immediate family, it becomes harder to see the distinction in practice between Sargeant’s vision for care and that of the family abolitionists.
When socialists like Sophie Lewis or M. E. O’Brien call for family abolition, they do not propose the end of personal relationships of care, only the formal severing (or “liberation”) of these relationships from nuclear kinship and waged labor. Individuals could in principle retain love-based ties to whomever they desire, including parents, partners, and children, and they could still direct their labor to them, but they need no longer rely exclusively on these relationships for their support and identity. This vision may entail various fatal mirages of its own, but the question for Sargeant and the populist quadrant is why this would be a less effective solution to the problems they name than a centralized administrative accounting of the functions of family life.
The answer, one suspects, is the undefended premise of Sargeant’s argument: Catholicism. Catholicism’s elevation of parenthood to a vocation is a reasonably solid barrier against the socialist left’s abolitionist response to the crisis of the family. But while Catholicism is Sargeant’s starting point, it is not necessarily that of the postliberal right or the populist quadrant it hopes to define, nor of any viable majority electoral coalition in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. And Sargeant is not arguing exclusively to Catholics, but to all American women. It may be that the left’s support for abortion and contraception is sufficient to repel Sargeant from joining it, but this rejection is not sufficient to ground a coherent account of socially conservative, economically liberal family policy that on its face looks indistinguishable from the care ethics of the liberal feminists of the 1990s, which gave way to the socialism of the feminists of the 2020s.
To be sure, not everything Sargeant proposes relies on centralized state intervention. Civil society re-emerges when she praises stalwarts like neighbors, and novelties like local online buy-sell-trade groups, as ways to meet needs, and proposes habituating ourselves to asking for help through small gestures like taking turns treating and being treated by friends, so that a running debt is created whose precise size no one can recall. This creates a general but unburdensome sense of obligation to others, maintaining ties and preventing us from ever getting fully “in the clear” — that is, independent of one another. But such private associations are ultimately not systematic and reliable enough to achieve her ends.
Yet the populist quadrant, or any combination of socially conservative, economically liberal policies, will need a much clearer account of the public vs. private to achieve liftoff. The coherence of the prevailing alignments of the left and right rested on an imperfect but intelligible dichotomy between the right’s effort to protect the private realm against the left’s efforts to publicize it. If social conservatives are to entrust the family to the stewardship of an economically liberal centralized administration in exchange for greater support to meet the exigencies of dependence, they might reasonably demand some safeguards for the protections they fought for in their previous incarnation as economic conservatives: homeschooling, religious liberty, rights of noninterference with parental discretion broadly.
It may well be that a more care-oriented state is needed to prop up the sagging American family. But what will protect that family from the state’s exuberant outpouring of love?
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