At a time when same-sex marriage, gay adoption, and the rise of single-parent households challenge traditional views of the family, this innovative volume helps readers put such issues into social and legal perspective. Engster and Metz bring together essential readings in political and legal theory and organise them to illuminate pressing contemporary debates on the family: gender and justice, parents and children, the state and globalisation. Justice, Politics, and the Family is an engaging and a diverse addition to the area of critical legal theory and sociology.

At a time when same-sex marriage, gay adoption, and the rise of single-parent households challenge traditional views of the family, this innovative volume helps readers put such issues into social and legal perspective. Engster and Metz bring together essential readings in political and legal theory and organise them to illuminate pressing contemporary debates on the family: gender and justice, parents and children, the state and globalisation. Justice, Politics, and the Family is an engaging and a diverse addition to the area of critical legal theory and sociology.

Western welfare states are in a period of significant transition. Changes in the nature of work and the family, the growing elderly population, and other developments over the past fifty years have rendered existing welfare policies largely out-of-step with economic and social conditions. While welfare state reform clearly raises important questions about justice and social policy, political philosophers have been slow to address it. Justice, Care, and the Welfare State takes up the important task of developing a theory of justice to guide contemporary welfare state reform. Applying normative political philosophy to public policy issues, it addresses questions such as: What role, if any, should states play in supporting families? Should the state support national health care and, if so, why and in what form? What does society owe to the elderly? What role should welfare states play in supporting disabled people? What obligations does the state have toward the poor? As distinct from many works of political philosophy, Justice, Care, and the Welfare State draws on empirical data about the populations and circumstances of existing Western societies and offers concrete policy advice for reforming welfare policies. Noting that many of the challenges confronting people in post-industrial societies involve issues of care, Engster draws on a public ethics of care to develop his theory of welfare state justice, outlining specific policy proposals in the areas of the family, education, health care, old age pensions and long-term care, disability, and poverty and unemployment. The book offers important insights into how Western welfare states can be reformed in light of recent economic and social changes in order better to promote justice. It should be of interest to political philosophers, welfare state scholars, public policy analysts, and others interested in thinking about contemporary policy reform and justice.

The Heart of Justice provides the first full account of the institutions and policies of a caring society, and should be of interest to anyone concerned with the nature of our moral obligations and the institutions of a just society. Integrating the insights of earlier care theorists with the aims of traditional justice theorists, Engster forges a new synthesis between care and justice, and argues that the institutional and policy commitments of care theory must be recognized as fundamental to any consistent theory of justice.
Engster begins by offering a practice-based account of caring and a theory of obligation that explains why individuals should care for others. He then systematically demonstrates the implications of this account of caring for domestic politics, economics, international relations, and culture. In each of these areas, he reviews the contributions of earlier care theorists and then extends their arguments to provide a more complete description of the institutions and policies of a caring society. Care ethics is further put in dialogue with diverse cultural and religious traditions and used to address the challenges of multicultural justice, cultural relativism, and international human rights.

The Heart of Justice proposes a new framework of political justice based upon the practice of caring. Integrating the insights of earlier care theorists with the concerns of traditional justice theorists, Engster forges a new synthesis between care and justice, and further argues that the institutional and policy commitments of care theory must be recognized as central to any adequate theory of justice.
Engster begins by offering a practice-based account of caring and a theory of obligation that explains why individuals should care for others. He then systematically demonstrates the implications of this account of caring for domestic politics, economics, international relations, and culture. In each of these areas, he reviews the contributions of earlier care theorists and then extends their arguments to provide a more complete description of the institutions and policies of a caring society. Care ethics is further put in dialogue with diverse cultural and religious traditions and used to address the challenges of multicultural justice, cultural relativism, and international human rights.
More fully than other works on care theory, this book provides an over-arching account of the institutions and policies of a caring society. The Heart of Justice provides the first full account of a theory of justice based upon care ethics, and should be of interest to anyone interested in thinking about the nature of our moral obligations and the institutions of a just society

How did the modern state become the Leviathan that Hobbes described? Engster challenges the common assertion that the state emerged from a new secular philosophy at the time of the Renaissance. He argues instead that early modern theorists legitimized state power by portraying it as a sanctified force for moral order within an otherwise secular and contingent world. Engster traces the modern development of state authority to the breakdown of medieval ideas of order encompassed in the "great chain of being." He then shows how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and statesmen such as Montaigne, Bodin, Richelieu, Bossuet, and Hobbes redefined the main principles of the state-including legislative sovereignty, executive prerogative, governmental regulation, and bureaucratic rationality-in ways that underlie state organization even today. Providing a broad synthesis of early modern state theory and practice, Divine Sovereignty suggests that these writers envisioned the state as the center of divine and natural order in a world that had strayed from divine guidance. In revealing how early modern theorists and statesmen justified the new powers of their Leviathan, Engster also illuminates conflicts and paradoxes within the modern nation-state.