Awards
- Winner of Benjamin E. Lippincott Award (United States).
- Winner of Benjamin E. Lippincott Award 2020 (United States)
- Winner of Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award (United States).
- Winner of Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award 2020 (United States)
- Winner of Winner of the Myers Outstanding Book Award (Gustav.
Overview
The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged ""contract"" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence ""whites"" and ""non-whites,"" full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the ""separate but equal"" system of segregation in the twentieth-century United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume's and Immanuel Kant's claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War. Mills suggests that the ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy's invisible white male bias, Mills's explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.
Full Product Details
Author: Charles W. Mills
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Imprint: Cornell University Press
Edition: New edition
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 1.10cm
, Length: 21.60cm
Weight: 0.454kg
ISBN: 9780801484636
ISBN 10: 0801484634
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 21 June 1999
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Replaced By: 9781501764288
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Out of Print
Availability: Awaiting stock
Language: English
Reviews
This is a significant and compelling work. In the modest compass of an extended essay, Mills succeeds in altering our view of a central strand of modern political thought, the social contract tradition. Inspired by the historical success of socialist critics in placing class and socioeconomic inequality on the political-theoretical agenda and by the ongoing success of feminist critics in doing the same for gender and patriarchy, Mills turns our attention to the racial domination and exploitation that have been equally pervasive features of the history of liberalism. Thomas McCarthy, Northwestern University
This is a significant and compelling work. In the modest compass of an extended essay, Mills succeeds in altering our view of a central strand of modern political thought, the social contract tradition. Inspired by the historical success of socialist critics in placing class and socioeconomic inequality on the political-theoretical agenda and by the ongoing success of feminist critics in doing the same for gender and patriarchy, Mills turns our attention to the racial domination and exploitation that have been equally pervasive features of the history of liberalism. -Thomas McCarthy, Northwestern University
Author Information
Charles W. Mills is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, also from Cornell, and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism.
