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AbstractThis article reviews the development of critical thinking in social policy over four decades. First, it draws out the key insights of the early foundational critiques of the 1970s and 1980s especially around gender and race in their articulation with class. Second, it synthesizes two attempts in the 1990s to provide integrated critical analyses of the destabilization of the Keynesian welfare state and situates them in relation to the movement of mainstream theory at that time. Third, it looks at critical analyses that emerged in the first decade of this century in the wake of global neo‐liberalism and post‐structuralism. These are summarized as four 'turns': the agentic turn; the ethical turn; the global turn; and the (re)turn of intersectionality. The context of the decade since 2008 of financial and humanitarian crises and austerity provides the backcloth to argue, in conclusion, for a more integrated and multi‐dimensional critical approach which encompasses different spaces, claims and social relations in which alternatives can be articulated.

Care has become an urgent personal and political issue. This article focuses on the different interpretations of care needs; it examines the dynamic between, on the one side, the claims around care to emerge from different constituencies 'from below', that is, from movements and organisations of those with unpaid and paid caring responsibilities and with needs for support, and, on the other side, the framing and implementation of care policies 'from above' by European supranational organisations and national governments. The argument developed is that these perspectives represent overlapping but competing frames for interpreting care needs – social justice (from below) and social investment (from above) – and that while the social investment frame provides some opportunities for claims to be met, at the same time it delimits the scope of social justice claims. The conclusion discusses how care as an activity and an ethic might find greater social value.