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From Hobbes and Locke to Rousseau and Kant, and up to and including Rawls, Western liberal political theorists upheld a separatist view of the person, largely ignoring the reality of human dependency and interdependency (Nussbaum 1995a). As contractual models of social relations tend to inform dominant moral theories, and as these are built on liberal models of social relations between strangers (Held 2006: 80), the role of moral judgement and concern for others is marginalized in political understandings (Benhabib 1992). The separatist concept of the person and the focus on contractual models of social relations have combined to blind political theorists also to the material significance of care relations as central matters of social justice (Tronto 2013: 7–11).

Within classical economics, the core assumption has been that the prototypical human being is a self-sufficient rational economic man (sic) (Ferber and Nelson 1993; Folbre, 1994, 2001). Within sociology, neither Marxist, structural functionalist nor Weberian social scientists identified any major role for the affective system of social relations independent of the economy, polity or status order. The affective domain was defined almost exclusively in terms of the heterosexual family, as exemplified in the work of Talcott Parsons. Caring was assumed to be ‘natural work’ for women, not an autonomous system of social relations that operated both inside and outside families. In Marxist, and even neo-Marxist feminist, traditions, domestic work and care labours were defined as unproductive, creating use value but not exchange value (Engels 1942; Mitchell 1971).

The indifference to matters of vulnerability and inter/dependency in the human condition led to the framing of social injustices primarily in terms of the coercive political relations of the state and the economic relations of market economies, and thereby in terms of inequalities of income and wealth, status and power. This is exemplified in the three key conditions Nancy Fraser lays down as essential for realizing the social justice principle of participatory parity, namely equality in economic relations, political relations and cultural relations (Fraser 2005). The ways in which affective relations operate as a discrete and relatively autonomous site of social relations that impact on participatory parity is not conceptualized within this framework, as it is not defined as a key site of politics. As the production and reproduction of labour power are integral to the survival of capitalism (Dalla Costa and James 1972; Federici 2012), and as they cannot be completely commodified and ‘brought into the sphere of market transactions’ (Oksala 2016: 299), any theory of justice must take account of how care relations impact on participatory parity in everyday life.