"Charles W. Mills' The Racial Contract", in Jacob Levy (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory (Oxford) Chapters uri icon

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abstract

  • Abstract Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract (TRC) was a landmark intervention that set itself no less a task than raising the topic of race up to mainstream philosophical investigation. As remarkable in its scope as in its perspicacity, the book re-envisions modern political theory by centering its racialized constitution and imbrications in Euro-American practices of racial exploitation. Taking a half-millennium of global white supremacy as its point of departure, it both exposes racial divides encoded within social contractarianism and lays the groundwork for a non-ideal theory of justice, conjoining a penetrating critique of white domination with a methodologically innovative liberalism. This chapter (a) situates TRC’s main arguments within their contexts of emergence, (b) considers certain lines of criticism to which it has been subjected, along with Mills’ adaptations to them, and (c) reflects on its downstream impacts, in terms of Mills’ own trajectory and of the discipline’s grappling with race.

publication date

  • 2022