Charles Mills

This has been a sad week for those of us who read, study and care about political philosophy. That’s because Charles W. Mills, a U.K.-born and Jamaica-raised philosopher whose life’s work was the interrogation and critique of the foundations of liberalism, died on Monday.

Throughout his long and fruitful career, Mills worked to show how, despite its pretenses to universalism, liberalism as a political tradition and philosophy has historically been strongly biased toward the material interests of white people and white polities to the detriment of nonwhite peoples and nonwhite polities. Put another way, Mills sought to answer the question posed by the great English literary critic and poet Samuel Johnson on the eve of the American Revolution, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

Mills’s most famous work, “The Racial Contract,” published in 1997, is both an addition to and critique of the social contract tradition within Western political theory. It is an addition in that Mills, following the classic contractarians — Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant — attempts to use the conceit of a social contract to “explain the actual genesis of the society and the state, the way society is structured, the way the government functions, and people’s moral psychology.”

Mills shows how those classic contractarian theories were built on an assumption of white racial domination, a racial contract, so to speak. “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today,” he announces at the very start of the book. And the “racial contract,” he explains, “establishes a racial polity, a racial state, and a racial juridical system, where the status of whites and nonwhites is clearly demarcated, whether by law or custom.” (continues)