Caring in the third way: the relation between obligation, responsibility and care in Third Way discourse

Abstract

In his book The Third Way Anthony Giddens develops the outlines of a new normative framework for New Labour and sketches ensuing policy proposals. Based on his diagnosis of current socio-political problems, Giddens proposes a new relation between rights and obligations and elaborates on this for issues of welfare and family politics. This article critically investigates his normative framework, and argues that a considerable part of the ideas on a third way in politics could be better grounded and refined by taking care into account. It spells out what the consequences would be of taking the ethic of care as a normative guideline for the new programmatic ideas and compares the British discussion with recent policy proposals in the Netherlands. It is argued that care should be seen as a democratic practice, and that democratic citizenship supposes that everybody would be guaranteed equal access to the giving and receiving of care.