查尔斯·W. 米尔斯

Agora

查尔斯·W. 米尔斯

1951–2021

初步了解有意简化——人物介绍讲得更多

现代政治哲学的社会契约在实践中是白人之间的“种族契约”——正义理论必须直面这段历史，而不是视而不见。

定位

政治哲学与伦理学（20—21世纪） · 北欧 · 政治与法, 社会与历史, 认识论

在牙买加长大的哲学家，任教于西北大学和纽约市立大学：现代政治哲学的社会契约，实际上是白人之间的“种族契约”——而正义理论必须正视白人至上主义和“白人的无知”。

核心思想

《种族契约》
白人的无知
对理想理论的批判
黑人激进自由主义

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影响

受影响于 4

弗雷德里克·道格拉斯

受其影响
Mills read Douglass’s Fourth of July speech (1852), with its antislavery reading of the Constitution, as a test of America’s liberal ideals (‘Whose Fourth of July?’, 1998). C. W. Mills, “Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass and ‘Original Intent’”, in Blackness Visible (1998); F. Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852)
依据: AI 草稿
弗雷德里克·道格拉斯 › 1818–1895
卡尔·马克思

受其影响
Mills wrote his doctorate on ideology in Marx and Engels (1985) and adapted historical materialism to race as a system of domination (From Class to Race, 2003). C. W. Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003); The Racial Contract (1997)
依据: AI 草稿
卡尔·马克思 › 1818–1883
W. E. B. 杜波依斯

受其影响
Mills took up Du Bois’s ‘color line’ as a global structure of white supremacy (The Racial Contract, 1997) and later read him as a ‘Black radical liberal’ (2018). C. W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997); “W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Liberal”, in N. Bromell (ed.), A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois (2018)
依据: AI 草稿
W. E. B. 杜波依斯 › 1868–1963
卡罗尔·佩特曼

受其影响
Mills modelled The Racial Contract (1997) on Pateman’s The Sexual Contract, which he called its inspiration, and later wrote Contract and Domination with her (2007). C. W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997); C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (1988); C. Pateman and C. W. Mills, Contract and Domination (2007)
依据: AI 草稿
卡罗尔·佩特曼 › 1940年生

批评

批评了 5

托马斯·霍布斯

批评了
Mills noted that Hobbes, denying that the state of nature ever generally existed, located it among ‘the savage people in many places of America’ (The Racial Contract, 1997). C. W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997); T. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. 13
依据: AI 草稿
托马斯·霍布斯 › 1588–1679
约翰·洛克

批评了
Mills argued that Locke’s theory of property through labour let Native American land appear as vacant waste – part of a ‘racial contract’ (The Racial Contract, 1997). C. W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997); J. Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), ch. V
依据: AI 草稿
约翰·洛克 › 1632–1704
让-雅克·卢梭

批评了
Mills argued that Rousseau’s ‘savages’ are always non-Europeans, and that his account of Europe’s lead through metallurgy and agriculture is historically inaccurate (The Racial Contract, 1997). C. W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997); J.-J. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité (1755), part II
依据: AI 草稿
让-雅克·卢梭 › 1712–1778
伊曼努尔·康德

批评了
Mills argued that Kant’s theory of personhood, read together with his racial theory, in practice treated non-whites as ‘sub-persons’ (‘Kant’s Untermenschen’, 2005). C. W. Mills, “Kant’s Untermenschen”, in A. Valls (ed.), Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy (2005); Black Rights/White Wrongs (2017)
依据: AI 草稿
伊曼努尔·康德 › 1724–1804
约翰·罗尔斯

批评了
Mills objected that Rawls’s ideal theory, assuming a well-ordered society, has little to say about racial injustice and its correction (Black Rights/White Wrongs, 2017). C. W. Mills, “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology”, Hypatia 20 (2005); “Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls”, Southern Journal of Philosophy 47 (2009); Black Rights/White Wrongs (2017)
依据: AI 草稿
约翰·罗尔斯 › 1921–2002

作品

1997种族契约
按其实际运作方式来解读现代政治哲学的社会契约：它是白人之间的一项协议，使非白人成为不完整的人——并由一种“无知的认识论”维系。

立场

“The Racial Contract” turned social-contract theory against itself. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant described a contract among free and equal persons; Mills argues that the real contract underlying modern European expansion was a “racial contract” among whites, which classified non-whites as less than full persons and legitimised conquest, slavery and segregation. The contract is not a metaphor for prejudice but a political system, “global white supremacy”, which mainstream political philosophy has passed over in silence. Part of it is an inverted “epistemology of ignorance”: a “white ignorance” that leaves those who benefit from domination unable to see it. In later work Mills criticised Rawls and his successors for their “ideal theory”, which assumes a well-ordered society and therefore has little to say about correcting historical injustice. His answer was not to abandon liberalism but to transform it into a “Black radical liberalism” that puts race and the legacy of racial domination at the centre of the question of justice.

生平与背景

Charles W. Mills (1951–2021) was born in London and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. He studied physics at the University of the West Indies and taught it in Jamaica before turning to philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he completed a doctorate on the concept of ideology in Marx and Engels in 1985. He taught at the University of Oklahoma and for seventeen years at the University of Illinois at Chicago, then at Northwestern University as John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy and, from 2016, as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and died of cancer in 2021.