A road not taken? A brief history of care in economic thought.

Care is central to the human experience and part of the social provisioning process. Adam Smith recognised this, associating care with sympathy. Later contributions in the political economy tradition also provide scope for an analysis of care, but none as developed as Smith's. With the emergence of the current mainstream, care is marginalised. Kenneth Boulding's analysis provides an opportunity to interrogate care in the economy, but he fails to explicitly acknowledge care. It is left to feminist economics to highlight the centrality of care. An implication is that it challenges the conventional rubric of economic organisation predicated on self-interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]