Charles W. Mills

Race and the social contract tradition

The social contract tradition has historically been viewed somewhat ambivalently by political progressives and radicals seeking a descriptive framework for modelling class, gender and racial domination, or a prescriptive tool for bringing about their elimination. Marx himself had little to say about social contract theory, which by his time, as a result of utilitarian and historicist critiques, had long since fallen into disrepute since its heyday from 1650 to1800. But many of his critical remarks about liberalism in general are of particular applicability to contractarianism, and have often been repeated by progressives in the subsequent century and a half. Thus, from the perspective of a left and materialist Hegelianism, it would be pointed out to begin with that the idea of a literal contract is ahistorical, simply untrue to the anthropological facts of human evolution. There is never a ‘state of nature’, but always human beings in social groups of greater or lesser complexity. Correspondingly, the idea of a contract is misleadingly asocial, predicated on a methodological starting-point of ‘pre-social’ individuals whose putatively innate (but actually socially created) characteristics are taken to generate patterns of human interrelation which are then, reversing things, read back into the natural. Moreover, the atomic individualism characteristic of liberalism x8ends here its clearest statement, in that society is represented as being brought into existence by, and composed of, an aggregate of equi-powerful individual decision-makers. Finally, insofar as the contract classically emphasises the centrality of individual will and consent, it voluntarises and represents as the result of free and universal consensual agreement relations and structures of domination about which most people have no real choice, and which actually oppress the majority of the population. A lengthy indictment, then, and no surprise that as a depiction, even stylised and abstract, of the actual origins of society and government, contract theory is usually seen by the left as bourgeois mystix8ecation. However, the remarkable revival of contractarianism stimulated by John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) moved some progressives to rethink their aprioristic dismissal, especially since contemporary contractarianism is purely hypothetical in character, thereby seeming to render irrelevant or sidestep some of the standard criticisms of the past. No longer a literal representation of the origins of society, the state, or political obligation, the contract is now just a heuristic device, a thoughtexperiment for mobilising our intuitions about justice. As such, it has been found useful by at least some Marxists, who have argued that

Critical Race Theory: A reply to Mike Cole

Mike Cole’s critique of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a welcome contribution to what one hopes will be the start of an illuminating dialogue on the usefulness or not in the British context of this largely American import. Cole makes both general critical comments about CRT and specific critical comments about my own work, which he obviously takes to be representative of the field. He asserts that ‘CRT has two major tenets’, the conviction that ‘white supremacy’ is superior to ‘racism’ as a conceptual framework for understanding race-based oppression and the identification of race rather than social class as ‘the primary contradiction in society’. Having raised various objections that he thinks refutes these two tenets, he winds up with a call for a Marxist-informed pedagogy in education, using recent developments in Venezuela as an example of what is possible and desirable. While I do consider myself to be someone working in CRT, I certainly would not want to represent myself as speaking for everybody in the movement, especially since I view it as more heterogeneous than depicted by Cole. So I begin with some points about the relation of CRT to Marxism, both generally and in my own writing, and some clarifications of my claims. I then try to answer his objections to the ‘first tenet’, while suggesting that what he sees as the ‘second tenet’ is actually based on a misunderstanding. Since my own discipline is philosophy rather than education, though, I have little to say about the pedagogical issues he raises, interesting as they are.

Heart attack: A critique of jorge garcia's volitional conception of racism

Since its original 1996 publication,Jorge Garcias ``The Heart of Racism has beenwidely reprinted, a testimony to its importanceas a distinctive and original analysis ofracism. Garcia shifts the standard framework ofdiscussion from the socio-political to theethical, and analyzes racism as essentially avice. He represents his account asnon-revisionist (capturing everyday usage),non-doxastic (not relying on belief),volitional (requiring ill-will), and moralized(racism is always wrong). In this paper, Icritique Garcias analysis, arguing that hedoes in fact revise everyday usage, that hisaccount does tacitly rely on belief, thatill-will is not necessary for racism, and thata moralized account gets both the scope and thedynamic of racism wrong. While I do not offeran alternative positive account myself, Isuggest that traditional left-wing structuralanalyses are indeed superior.

Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy

The past few decades have seen a wave of decolonization in the Western academy. Across a wide array of disciplines—anthropology, cultural studies, education, geography, history, international relations, law, above all, perhaps, literature—we have witnessed the beginnings (and sometimes much more) of a self-conscious rethinking and reorientation of the subject in the light of its past complicity, direct or indirect, with the colonial project. But the rate of progress has not been uniform. I suggest that in Western political philosophy in particular, the decolonizing enterprise has a long way to go, indeed in some respects has barely begun. In this essay, I do a general critique of the tradition for its Eurocentrism, and then turn to a critique of the work of John Rawls specifically, given his centrality to current Anglo-American political philosophy.

WHITE TIME: The Chronic Injustice of Ideal Theory 1

The racialization of space is the subject of a huge body of literature, most recently in George Lipsitz’s ( 2011 ) How Racism Takes Place . But less has been done on the ways in which time could be racialized. Inspired by provocative treatments of the subject in writings by Michael Hanchard ( 1999 ) and Lawrie Balfour ( 2011 ), I suggest in this paper that we need to explore the workings of a “White temporal imaginary” analogous to Lipsitz’s “White spatial imaginary,” which likewise serves to protect White racial privilege from the threatening encroachments of racial justice. Using Eviatar Zerubavel’s ( 2003 ) Time Maps as a jumping-off point, I argue accordingly for the recognition of a “White time,” a “sociomental” representation of temporality shaped by the interests and experience of the White “mnemonic community.” The concept is obviously one of potentially very general usefulness, but in this essay I seek to apply it specifically to the dominant discourse on justice in political philosophy, as framed for the past forty years by John Rawls’ ([1971] 1999c) “ideal theory.” The relevance to the postracial theme of this issue is that, because of the peculiarity of philosophy as a discipline, it can claim it was always, or always-already, postracial, dealing as it ostensibly does with the (timeless) human condition as such. By making ideal theory—the normative theory of a perfectly just society—central to the conceptualization of social justice, by never exploring how radically different actual societies are from the ideal of society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” an exclusionary sociohistorical framework is established that makes the Euro-time of the West—abstracted out of the West’s relations of domination over people of color—the Greenwich Mean Time of normativity, while the alternative non-White temporality of structurally unjust societies requiring rectificatory racial justice remains a subject permanently untimely.

Vice’s Vicious Virtues: The Supererogatory as Obligatory

Abstract Samantha Vice’s essay, ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’, is a sensitive and subtle exploration of the difficult moral terrain of the issues of white responsibility and white moral self-reform in a South Africa that is formally post-apartheid, but still profoundly shaped by the legacy of white domination, both in its enduring socio-economic structures and in its citizens’ typical moral psychologies. Vice’s conclusion is that shame is the moral emotion most appropriate for whites unable to free themselves from white privilege and live up to what she sees as the required standards of moral excellence. In response, I argue that she is in effect making the supererogatory obligatory, and constructing an unrealistic schedule of virtues. Drawing on various recent writings on non-ideal theory, I suggest that standard moral distinctions need to be relocated to take systemic social oppression into account, thereby yielding a more forgiving moral taxonomy than Vice’s own over-demanding mapping.

Under Class Under Standings

t Support for writing this review essay was provided by the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago. I would like to thank John Deigh for his useful suggestions for restructuring an earlier draft. 1. William Julius Wilsons book The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) legitimized the term, giving it the irreproachable imprimatur of a black liberal (or self-described social democrat), and it is Wilsons work which has been at the center of most recent discussion. But there are many earlier appearances, e.g., Douglas Glasgow, The Black Underclass: Poverty, Unemployment, and the Entrapment of Ghetto Youth (New York: Random House, 1980); and Ken Auletta, The Underclass (New York: Random House, 1982). (Credit for the modern coinage is sometimes attributed to Gunnar Myrdals The Challenge to Affluence [New York: Pantheon, 1962].) Discussions in the mass media have, of course, been more important in shaping public discourse, usually with a conservative slant, e.g., Nicholas Lemann, The Origins of the Underclass, Atlantic (June 1986), pp. 31-55 (July 1986), pp. 54-68; Pete Hamill, Breaking the Silence, Esquire (March 1988), pp. 91-102; Charles Murray, Heres the Bad News on the Underclass, Wall Street Journal (March 8, 1990). Critical replies from the Left include Norman Fainstein, The Underclass/Mismatch Hypothesis as an Explanation for Black Economic Deprivation, Politics and Society 15 (1986-87): 403 -5 1; Charles V. Willie, review of The Truly Disadvantaged, by William Julius Wilson, Policy Studies Review 7 (1988): 865-74; Leslie Inniss and Joe R. Feagin, The Black Underclass Ideology in Race Relations Analysis, Social Justice 16 (Winter 1989): 13-34; HerbertJ. Gans, Deconstructing the Underclass: The Terms Dangers as a Planning Concept,Journal of the American Planning Association 56 (1990): 271-77; Adolph Reed, Jr., The Underclass as Myth and Symbol: The Poverty of Discourse about Poverty, Radical America 24 (January-March 1990): 21 -40; David Theo Goldberg, Critical Notes on the Underclass, APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 91 (1992): 15-19; Special Issue: Theory or Fact? The Black Underclass, Black Scholar, vol. 19 (May/June 1988); and Adolph Reed, Jr., and Julian Bond, eds., Special Issue: The Assault on Equality, Nation (December 9, 1991).

Is it immaterial that there’s a ‘material’ in ‘historical materialism’?

G. A. Cohens influential ‘technological determinist’ reading of Marxs theory of history rests in part on an interpretation of Marxs use of ‘material’ whose idiosyncrasy has been insufficiently noticed. Cohen takes historical materialism to be asserting the determination of the social by the material/asocial, viz. ‘socio‐neutral’ facts about human nature and human rationality which manifest themselves in a historical tendency for the forces of production to develop. This paper reviews Marxs writings to demonstrate the extensive textual evidence in favour of the traditional interpretation ‐ that for Marx, the ‘material’ includes the economic, and is thus ineluctably social in character. Thus those critics of Cohen who have urged the inclusion of the relations of production in historical materialisms explanans do seem to have Marxs terminological and conceptual backing.

An Englishman Abroad: Robert Bernasconi’s Work on Race

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the contribution Robert Bernasconi has made to the critical philosophy of race. I look at some representative samples of his work under four categories: (i) his racially informed critiques of canonical Western philosophical figures; (ii) his expositions/reconstructions/recuperations of racially informed theory from canonical (and some non-canonical) Western philosophical figures; (iii) his reflections on race/whiteness/imperialism and their implications; and (iv) his views on race as it has shaped the historic and current realities of philosophy as a discipline.

The Racial Contract revisited: still unbroken after all these years

In this reply to my four (very friendly) critics, I take the opportunity to clarify some points about how I meant the “racial contract” as a theoretical intervention to be understood, and to offer some suggestions about how the idea could be further developed. I begin with some familiar distressing points about the slowness or actual reversal of racial progress in recent years. I then argue that (a) this depressing reality vindicates a structural analysis of race (race as “white supremacy”) that (b) can be captured in a revised version of the social contract metaphor (the “domination contract”), which would then provide (c) a superior normative framework for challenging the whiteness of Rawlsian social justice theory, as part of (d) a general rethinking of liberalism and contractarianism to address social subordination in nominally liberal Western societies, especially (e) if intersectional concerns are incorporated into the apparatus.