Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction. Tracing the Ethical Turn  1

1. Crafting a Democratic Subject? The Foucauldian Ethics of Self-Care  21

2. Levinasian Ethics, Charity, and Democracy  53

3. The Democratic Ethics of Care for Worldly Things  85

4. Partisanship for the World: Tending to the World as Home and In-Between  111

Epilogue. Self/Other/World: Forging Connections and Fostering Democratic Care  139

Notes  153

Bibliography  195

Index  207

“Ella Myers’s new and debut book offers a timely and most welcome invitation to democratic theorists to rethink two influential versions of the so-called “ethical turn” that has, for some time now, influenced much of the discussion in contemporary democratic theory—namely, Foucault’s ethics of self-care and Levinas’s ethics of care for the Other.”—Gent Carrabregu, Theory & Event

“Ella Myers’s new and debut book offers a timely and most welcome invitation to democratic theorists to rethink two influential versions of the so-called “ethical turn” that has, for some time now, influenced much of the discussion in contemporary democratic theory—namely, Foucault’s ethics of self-care and Levinas’s ethics of care for the Other.”—Gent Carrabregu, Theory & Event

"Ella Myers's contribution—to compare self-caring ethics to other-caring ethics to world-caring ethics—is original, simple, and brilliant. Worldly Ethics makes its most important contribution in conceptualizing politics and ethics differently. There is no single book that deals with this topic in this way. Using caring—for the self, for others, for the world and worldly things—is unique and powerful. I think that this book is very important and—I rarely use this word—wise."—Joan C. Tronto, author of Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care

"Worldly Ethics is the smartest, subtlest treatment of the fraught relationship between democratic politics and the 'ethical turn' I have ever read. Ella Myers is not the first theorist to warn against the reduction of political questions to ethical ones, but this is no mere screed against the easy target of 'Kantian' moralism. Instead, through a series of engagements with other theorists who have brought more capacious ethical visions to bear on political life, Myers shows—with Arendt—that a properly political ethics must make the world rather than the self or the Other into its first object of concern, and—against the Arendtian grain—that such a worldly ethics can help bring problems of material deprivation and inequality into politics, rather than keep them out. Myers is a generous and incisive reader, and a perceptive observer of contemporary politics, and Worldly Ethics is a terrific debut."—Patchen Markell, author of Bound by Recognition

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