The Racial Contract

Introduction

Charles W. Mills published this short book with Cornell University Press in 1997. It makes three claims: that white supremacy, local and global, has existed for centuries; that it is itself a political system; and that it can be theorised as a “contract” among whites. Mills rereads Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant: the actual contract behind European expansion, colonialism and slavery gave full personhood to whites and treated others as savages or “subpersons”. This contract also required an “inverted epistemology”, an epistemology of ignorance, in which whites systematically fail to understand the world they themselves have made. Mills took the model of a hidden contract from Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988); the two later wrote Contract and Domination (2007). The book became a standard text in the philosophy of race and in the critique of Rawlsian ideal theory.

Connections

Builds on

• The Sexual Contract1988 · Carole Pateman

Criticizes

• Leviathan1651 · Thomas Hobbes
• Two Treatises of Government1689 · John Locke
• The Social Contract1762 · Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• A Theory of Justice1971 · John Rawls