Abstract

In a time deeply marked by the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, uncertainty appears as a dominant cognitive and emotional condition, both as a result of epistemic failures in understanding phenomena, and of their existential reverberations on interpersonal relationships and on the prospects of economic and social well-being. In order to understand the roots of this condition and to advance visions capable of orienting new political and social assets, it seems appropriate to trace the connections that the sociological and philosophical literature of recent decades has highlighted between the pervasive uncertainty of life and the neoliberal economic and political order, and between the latter and the widespread experience of social vulnerability. The Covid crisis was particularly revealing in this regard, having amplified, along with the vulnerability of bodies, a whole range of human essential needs that require people and structures capable of “careµ in order to be satisfied, and exposed the “crisis of careµ of neoliberal societies. In this framework, the feminist philosophy of care offers a theoretical perspective capable of challenging the idea of the individuals’ self-sufficiency, opening up the possibility of a radical critique of the social ontology underlying neoliberalism, as well as a normative reflection on the forms in which democratic politics can aspire to mitigate uncertainty.