On the Care of the Self and the Care of the Other:

On the Care of the Self and the Care of the Other develops the underspecified political consequences of what I call the category of practices of ethical self-change. This grouping includes Michel Foucault’s ethics of “the care of the self;” Pierre Hadot’s “spiritual exercises;” what Georges Friedmann, the founder of the sociology of labor in France, refers to as both “spiritual exercises” and the “interior effort;” the concept of “self-purification” invoked by Martin Luther King Jr. as a condition of direct action; and Audre Lorde’s enigmatic and often-misquoted claim that caring for herself amounts to a form of “political warfare.”

Because this literature overwhelmingly focuses on individual exercises of self-change, the political implications of such practices have remained largely uninvestigated. This underspecification has also lead to the unfortunate consequence that what I call the politics of self-change are often merely assumed to amount to what Friedmann calls “moralism.” In his words, “the more or less conscious illusion, the pride and hypocrisy of those who pretend to bring a “morality” to human beings, without addressing or attending to the material conditions necessary for a truly human life” (La puissance et la sagesse, 141), or, as I put it, the reduction of the political lives of groups and systems to the mere aggregation of the ethical behavior of individuals. I argue that while all of these conceptions are indeed vulnerable to the moralist charge, they are generally far more aware of that danger than critics consistently assume and do not, in fact, ultimately succumb to it. Indeed, I argue further that it is a consequence of their own arguments that these conceptions must be able to counter the moralist charge, lest they inadvertently endorse forms of practice that preclude rather than foster robust relations with others, including liberatory political relations. Using that challenge to put productive pressure on the category as a whole, I show that these conceptions can instead collectively articulate an understanding in which the care of the self, the care of the other, and care of the community are coterminous.

I demonstrate the ways in which these forms of care come together through a historical-theoretical reading of the events of the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, understood as a collective political-religious practice. I engage King’s reflections alongside primary-source archival documentation of the nonviolent training that prepared members for mass direct action, and first-person accounts of practices such as walking to work and passive resistance to police, all through the framework of ethical self-change. I demonstrate that certain spiritual exercises, tailored to a given political-religious context, can serve as the condition for efficacious political transformation, such that they are immune to the moralist charge. On this reading, the Boycott (and thereby any number of other social movements) can be seen as a representative space in which any distinction between caring for oneself and caring for others is necessarily effaced, thus articulating a radically different conception of the relationship of changing selves to changing material conditions.

Building on my book research, my work is currently focused on the role of training exercises and preparation for direct action within the tradition of nonviolent resistance. I am specifically interested in the history of the concept of “self-purification” in nonviolent thought and practice, as it is invoked by figures like King, Krishnalal Shridharani, Richard Greg, Bayard Rustin, MK Gandhi, and others. I am less interested in non-violence per se, as I am in the well-documented forms of personal and collective discipline that have been so central to nonviolent struggles in differing historical, political, and religious contexts. In this way, I take nonviolence as one among many representative sites for the study of the politics of self-change, with future research on such practices in the context of political violence building on the tools and methods gathered here.