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$29.59The Story
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 PhilosophyThe 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 nonwhites, full persons and subpersons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on nonwhites 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 twentiethcentury United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against nonwhites, from David Humes and Immanuel Kants 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 philosophys invisible white male bias, Millss explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.
Description
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 PhilosophyThe 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 nonwhites, full persons and subpersons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on nonwhites 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 twentiethcentury United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against nonwhites, from David Humes and Immanuel Kants 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 philosophys invisible white male bias, Millss explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.
