Charles Mills Quotes on Politics
Charles W. Mills's The Racial Contract (1997) gave late-twentieth-century political philosophy its most influential analytical critique of the silence of the modern social-contract tradition on race. The framework treats the actual political settlement under which modern liberal-democratic states have operated as a non-ideal contract among the racially privileged that excludes the racially subordinated from full personhood, with the consequent diagnosis that the abstract universal categories of canonical political philosophy (persons, citizens, contracting parties) have consistently functioned as cover for a much more specific and discriminatory institutional reality. The framework supplies a programme for the reconstruction of contractarian political theory under explicitly non-ideal conditions.
Quotes
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Attributed to Charles Mills:
“The social contract has always been a racial contract.”
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Attributed to Charles Mills:
“Liberal political philosophy is a moral apartheid kept in place by the abstraction from history.”
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Attributed to Charles Mills:
“Whiteness is not a color but a political settlement.”
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Attributed to Charles Mills:
“Justice begins in the recognition of the actual injustices of the actual world.”
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Attributed to Charles Mills:
“Political philosophy must be reconciled with political reality, or it ceases to be political.”
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“Used by schools including Brigham Young University, Delaware State University, Tennessee State University, Keene State College, and Oakland City College. [ 5 ]”
Enter to grow in wisdom. / Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.