Charles W. Mills

Charles Wade Mills , mostly abbreviated as Charles W. Mills , (* 1951 ; † September 20, 2021 ) was a Jamaican philosopher and professor at the CUNY Graduate Center .

Life

Mills was the son of Jamaican Nian parents in London born. The middle-class Jamaican family moved back to Jamaica the year he was born, where Mills grew up. He studied physics at the University of the West Indies before earning his Masters in Philosophy in 1976 and Ph.D. in 1985. from the University of Toronto . From 2004 he was a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago , from 2007 to 2016 he taught at Northwestern University and from 2016 he was a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2017/18 he was President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association. Mills held the Tanner Lecture on Human Values ​​in 2020 and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2017 .

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In his work, Mills dealt with questions of racism and justice, especially in philosophy and political theory, from the point of view of the Critical Philosophy of Race . He also dealt in depth with liberalism . He was a prominent critic of John Rawls ' political philosophy , which he found unsuitable for combating racial discrimination.

The Racial Contract

Mill's best known work is The Racial Contract . The work, published by Cornell University Press, has sold more than fifty thousand copies. It is used in many seminars, e.g. B. African American studies , read and discussed. It has also been discussed at a number of conferences and has received a Myers Outstanding Book Award . The American Political Science Association honored the book with the Benjamin E. Lippincott Award in 2021, praising it as an outstanding book that explores the role of race in contract theory in a groundbreaking way and combines analysis with a complex understanding of the diverse practical implications .

Inspired by the feminist appropriation of contract theory by Carole Pateman and in the tradition of Rousseau's treatise on the origins and foundations of inequality among people , Mills paints the picture of a “race contract” as a contract of power in the book. He distinguishes himself from liberal contract theorists such as John Rawls, who, from Mills' point of view, abstracted so far from the real world through their focus on ideal theory that they could not grasp historically developed racist discrimination. The “race contract” is therefore not a thought experiment , but is intended to explain the actual creation of a global racist system that Mills calls White Supremacy . The contract is not a union of all people, as implied in the classical contract theory, but a contract of a group of people who become whites through the contract and who the rest of the people as not-knows and thus as a "subperson" (p 11) declared. The purpose of the treaty is to secure privileges against non-whites and to exploit their resources. The “race treaty” has thus become visible and stabilized in the enslavement of non-white people, European colonialism and in laws that legally codify racist discrimination, and it still exists today.

Fonts (selection)

• The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1997, ISBN 0-8014-3454-8
• Contract and Domination. (with Carole Pateman), Polity Press, Cambridge et al. 2007, ISBN 978-0-7456-4003-7 .
• Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism , Oxford University Press, New York 2017. ISBN 978-0-19-024541-2

Web links

• Literature by and about Charles W. Mills in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ^ Justin Weinberg: Charles Mills (1951-2021). In: DailyNous. September 20, 2021, accessed September 21, 2021 (American English). 
2. ^ 'The Racial Contract': Interview with Philosopher Charles W. Mills. In: Harvard Political Review. October 29, 2020, accessed June 3, 2021 (American English). 
3. ^ Charles W. Mills: Red Shift: Politically Embodied / Embodied Politics . In: George Yancy (Ed.): The Philosophical I: Personal Reflections on Life in Philosophy . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, ISBN 978-1-4617-1490-3 , pp. 155–176 ( google.de [accessed on September 21, 2021]).
4. ^ Charles W. Mills: CV of Charles W. Mills on the CUNY website. Retrieved June 3, 2021 . 
5. ^ Claire Hao: Philosophy professor presents lecture on racial justice. In: The Michigan Daily. February 13, 2020, accessed June 3, 2021 (American English). 
6. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter M. (PDF; 1.1 MB) In: amacad.org. American Academy of Arts and Sciences , accessed June 3, 2021 . 
7. ^ Charles W. Mills: Black rights / white wrongs: the critique of racial liberalism . New York, NY 2017, ISBN 978-0-19-024541-2 .
8. ^ Charles W. Mills: Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy . In: New Political Science . tape 37 , no. 1 , January 2, 2015, ISSN  0739-3148 , p. 1-24 , doi : 10.1080 / 07393148.2014.995491 ( tandfonline.com [accessed September 21, 2021]).
9. ↑ Derrick Darby: Charles Mills's Liberal Redemption Song . In: Ethics . tape 129 , no. 2 , December 20, 2018, ISSN  0014-1704 , p. 370-397 , doi : 10.1086 / 700045 ( uchicago.edu [accessed September 21, 2021]).
10. ↑ ^{a b} Charles Mills receives the 2021 Benjamin E. Lippincott Award -. September 16, 2021, accessed September 21, 2021 (American English). 
11. ^ JLA Garcia: The Racial Contract Hypothesis . In: Philosophia Africana . tape 4 , no. 1 , 2001, ISSN  1539-8250 , p. 27-42 , doi : 10.5325 / philafri.4.1.0027 .
12. ^ Neil Roberts: The Critique of Racial Liberalism: An Interview with Charles W. Mills. In: AAIHS. Retrieved April 3, 2017, June 3, 2021 (American English). 
13. ^ Charles W. Mills: The racial contract . Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1997, ISBN 0-8014-3454-8 .