The Racial Contract
Cornell University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8014-8463-6 (ISBN)
A very important book.... The Racial Contract has the potential to radically challenge many of us to reevaluate how we think about social contract theory. As well, to take the arguments that Mills makes is to be prepared to rethink about the concept of race and the structure of our political systems. This is a very important book indeed, and should be a welcome addition to the ongoing discussions surrounding social contract theory.―Teaching Philosophy
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.
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.
Introduction1. Overview
The Racial Contract is political, moral, and epistemological
The Racial Contract is a historical actuality
The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract2. Details
The Racial Contract norms (and races) space
The Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual
The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social contract
The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and ideological conditioning3. "Naturalized" Merits
The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/political consciousness of (most) white moral agents
The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged
The "Racial Contract" as a theory is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contractNotes
Index
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 25.6.1999 |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | Ithaca |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 140 x 216 mm |
| Gewicht | 454 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-8014-8463-4 / 0801484634 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-8014-8463-6 / 9780801484636 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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