A prior post asked whether liberal political philosophy can be “anti-racist”. Charles Mills addresses a related question in much more radical terms. He offers a fundamental critique of European/American liberal philosophy grounded in his view that the “social contract” tradition embodies a comprehensive “racial contract” that embodies racial hierarchy and white supremacy. Here is Mills’s critical overview of the social contract tradition from Hobbes to Rawls:
The social contract is, by definition, classically voluntaristic, modeling the polity on a basis of individualized consent. What justifies the authority of the state over us is that “we the people” agreed to give it that authority. (On the older, “feudal” patriarchal model, by contrast—the model of Sir Robert Filmer, Locke’s target in the Second Treatise—people were represented as being born into subordination.) The legitimacy of the state derives from the freely given consent of the signatories to transfer or delegate their rights to it, and its role in the mainstream moralized/constitutionalist version of the contract (Lockean/Kantian) is, correspondingly, to protect those rights and safeguard the welfare of its citizens. The liberal-democratic state is then an ethical state, whether in the minimalist, night-watchman Lockean version of enforcing noninterference with citizens’ rights or in the more expansive redistributivist version of actively promoting citizens’ welfare. In both cases the liberal state is neutral in the sense of not privileging some citizens over others. Correspondingly, the laws that are passed have as their rationale this juridical regulation of the polity for generally acceptable moral ends.
This idealized model of the liberal-democratic state has, of course, been challenged from various political directions over the past century or so: the recently revived Hegelian moral critique from the perspective of a competing, allegedly superior ideal, a communitarian state seeking actively to promote a common conception of the good; the degraded version of this in the fascist corporatist state; the anarchist challenge to all states as usurping bodies of legitimized violence; and what has been the most influential radical critique up till recently, the Marxist analysis of the state as an instrument of class power, so that the liberal-democratic state is supposedly unmasked as the bourgeois state, the state of the ruling class.
My claim is that the model of the Racial Contract shows us that we need another alternative, another way of theorizing about and critiquing the state: the racial, or white-supremacist, state, whose function inter alia is to safeguard the polity as a white or white-dominated polity, enforcing the terms of the Racial Contract by the appropriate means and, when necessary, facilitating its rewriting from one form to another. (Racial Contract, 111-112)
Mills is especially critical of the choice made by modern liberal social contract theorists like John Rawls to restrict their attention to “ideal theory of justice” without paying attention to the actual systemic injustices that US society embodied. In particular, he is highly critical of the fact that these liberal political philosophers have completely ignored the history and current realities of racial domination and oppression in the United States. He argues, along the lines of the main argument in Racial Contract, that this reflects the continued hegemony of the assumptions of White / European supremacy that he maintains were present within social contract theory from its beginnings.
The retreat of mainstream normative moral and political theory into an “ideal” theory that ignores race merely rescripts the Racial Contract as the invisible writing between the lines. So John Rawls, an American working in the late twentieth century, writes a book on justice widely credited with reviving postwar political philosophy in which not a single reference to American slavery and its legacy can be found, and Robert Nozick creates a theory of justice in holdings predicated on legitimate acquisition and transfer without more than two or three sentences acknowledging the utter divergence of U.S. history from this ideal. (Mills 1997, Racial Contract, 106)
And in Black Rights / White Wrongs (2017) he argues:
Rawls and Nozick may be in conflict over left-wing versus right-wing liberalism, but both offer us idealized views of the polity that ignore the racial subordination rationalized by racial liberalism. Rawls and Sandel may be in conflict over contractarian liberalism versus neo-Hegelian communitarianism, but neither confronts how the whiteness of the actual American contract and its conception of the right and of the actual American community and its conception of the good affects their views of justice and the self. Late Rawls may be in conflict with early Rawls about political versus comprehensive liberalism, but neither addresses the question of the ways in which both versions have been shaped by race , whether through an ” overlapping consensus ” (among whites) or a “reflective equilibrium” (of whites). (Mills 2017 : 32)
An important manifestation of the importance of features of “imperfect justice” is the fact that a current generation of society may embody ways of thinking, stereotypes, and prejudices that serve to reproduce racist, sexist, or religious discrimination in the next generation. Is there any doubt that cultures of discrimination, disparagement, and bias continue to exist in American society? Of course not; the persistence of these attitudes and behaviors are all too evident, even when expressed in indirect and “socially acceptable” ways. And these attitudes and emotions have consequences for the freedoms of the men and women who are the object of these prejudices. Mills writes in The Racial Contract:
Similarly, a study of how “American apart-heid” is maintained points out that whereas in the past realtors would have simply refused to sell to blacks, now blacks “are met by a realtor with a smiling face who, through a series of ruses, lies, and deceptions, makes it hard for them to learn about, inspect, rent, or purchase homes in white neighborhoods. . . . Because the discrimination is latent, however, it is usually unobservable, even to the person experiencing it. One never knows for sure.” (Mills 1997 [quoting Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 84, 97-98]
This is one concrete mechanism of cross-generational racial domination. A few minutes of reflection can allow us to identify numerous other mechanisms through which current racialized thinking leads to future racial domination and disparity. For example, health disparities often derive from assumptions made by caregivers based on racial or gender stereotypes — sometimes entirely unconsciously. Employment decisions are influenced by stereotyped assumptions about a person based on gender, race, or ethnicity. The racial assumptions and attitudes of police officers often lead to differential treatment of members of the public, including increased likelihood of excessive force and firearms against one group as compared to another. And there are many other examples as well.
Failing to consider “non-ideal justice” is crippling for political philosophy, because it leaves completely unspoken the moral fact that discrimination, oppression, and violence are morally and socially unacceptable and that these evils are pervasive in contemporary society; and it leaves no place for focused thinking about how to move from a non-ideal society to a more just society.
So far Mills offers a damning view of the social contract tradition. However, in Black Rights / White Wrongs he suggests that Rousseau does a better job of bringing “domination” into the discussion of justice and the state. Here he draws extensively from Rousseau’s discussion in the First and Second Discourses:
Rousseau can be seen as initiating an alternative, radical democratic strain in contract theory, one that seeks to expose the realities of domination behind the façade and ideology of liberal consensuality. He retains the two key insights captured by the contract metaphor, the constructed nature of the polity and the recognition of human moral equality, but he incorporates them into a more realistic narrative that shows how they are perverted. Some human beings come to dominate others, denying them the equality they enjoyed in the state of nature. (Mills 2017: 36)
Rousseau, then, is at least open to the idea that “non-ideal” features of social life demand philosophical attention. This view creates an entrance for a more fully anti-racist political philosophy within the social contract tradition. It aligns with the political philosophy of republicanism and Philip Pettit’s views in Republicanism : a theory of freedom and government (link), in that Mills’s remarks here emphasize “freedom as non-domination”. If freedom means a set of social arrangements in which no individual or group has the power to dominate others, then a constitution guaranteeing freedom is one that authorizes appropriate steps for recognizing and ending past and present forms of domination.
Mills’s criticisms of the social contract tradition are highly negative. Mills seems to suggest that the tradition is entirely useless as a basis for thinking about justice. However, a more nuanced view would allow that this tradition has largely ignored racial domination, a gaping blindspot that demands correction; but that the abstract philosophical principles through which Rawls, Locke, or Rousseau reasoned about freedom, equality, and consent are indeed appropriate principles for thinking about the just society. Suitably embedded in a philosophy that acknowledges categorical inequality and racism, these principles can in fact be quite radical in their implications for needed reform. And it is worth noting that Rawls does not ignore racial discrimination completely; rather, he looks at its injustice as being obvious and beyond debate. His restatement of this point in Justice as Fairness emphasizes the topic of domination and subservience in language that converges with that of Pettit:
Significant political and economic inequalities are often associated with inequalities of social status that encourage those of lower status to be viewed both by themselves and by others as inferior. This may arouse widespread attitudes of deference and servility, on one side, and a will to dominate and arrogance on the other. These effects of social and economic inequalities can be serious evils and the attitudes they engender great vices… Fixed status ascribed by birth, or by gender or race, is particularly odious (Justice as Fairness, 131).
Particularly odious … that doesn’t sound like a silent endorsement of racial discrimination and domination.
Rawls also addresses the religious arguments used by the abolitionists and by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the context of the issue of public reason versus “comprehensive reason” (arguments based on a particular comprehensive conception of the good). From the point of view of justice, only public reasons have force, since there is no politically relevant comprehensive conception of the good.
On this account the abolitionists and the leaders of the civil rights movement did not go against the ideal of public reason; or rather, they did not provided they thought, or on reflection would have thought (as they certainly could have thought), that the comprehensive reasons they appealed to were required to give sufficient strength to the political conception to be subsequently realized. To be sure, people do not normally distinguish between comprehensive and public reasons; nor do they normally affirm the ideal of public reason, as we have expressed it. Yet people can be brought to recognize these distinctions in particular cases. The abolitionists could say, for example, that they supported political values of freedom and equality for all, but that given the comprehensive doctrines they held and the doctrines current in their day, it was necessary to invoke the comprehensive grounds on which those values were widely seen to rest.289 Given those historical conditions, it was not unreasonable of them to act as they did for the sake of the ideal of public reason itself. In this case, the ideal of public reason allows the inclusive view. (Political Liberalism, 251)
His view is that both the 19th-century abolitionists and civil rights activists like MLK made compelling arguments because their “comprehensive” (religious) arguments are entirely supported by public arguments based on equality and equal freedom. Here again, it seems clear that Rawls’s underlying view is one that regards racial inequalities as fundamentally unjust, within the terms of justice as fairness. Though Rawls did not explicitly put this point forward, it is a strong endorsement of the justice of the demands for equality being advanced by the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Tommie Shelby has done substantial work in attempting to help thread the way between the ideal theory offered by Rawls and the concrete, sociological and historical realities of racial oppression that Mills believes must be incorporated into theories of the just society. Shelby’s 2017 book Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform offers an extensive and nuanced reformulation of “justice as fairness” in terms that do take racial oppression into account. Here is a key paragraph:
Rawls has suggested that if we were to conceive of society as a system of social cooperation over time and took an impartial view of what the distribution of benefi ts and burdens of participating in this scheme ought to be, we could arrive at conclusions about what social justice requires that warrant our rational assent. The idea of society as a fair system of cooperation is a moral notion to be used in the evaluation of institutional arrangements. Social justice is constituted by the legitimate claims and responsibilities individuals have within a fair overall social arrangement. Thought about in this way, justice is a matter of reciprocity between persons who regard each other as equals. Taking this approach to questions of social justice is particularly apt when considering criticisms often made against the ghetto poor. It provides a framework for settling whether the urban poor are doing their fair share in upholding the system of cooperation and whether they are receiving the fair share due them as equal participants in this system. Reciprocity, as a central value in liberal political morality, is the primary normative standpoint from which I reflect on family structure, joblessness, and crime in ghetto neighborhoods. (Dark Ghettos, 20)
Mills in turn expresses his own disagreement with Shelby’s approach to Rawls in “Dark Mores: Some Comments on Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform“. Shelby offers a concise summary of his own position in “Racial realities and corrective justice: A reply to Charles Mills” (Critical Philosophy of Race 1:2 (2013)):
In all these interventions, the main thrust of Mills’s critique is to emphasize the need to attend carefully to the realities of racial domination and to deny the value of a normative theory that abstracts away from the actual history of racial injustice. However, this critique has been mainly negative, telling us how not to derive principles of racial justice. Apart from vague suggestions that reparations are due for past racial injustices (e.g., for slavery and land expropriation), the positive normative analysis remains undeveloped. What we get instead is an emphasis on the necessity of getting the historical facts right about white supremacy. Mills does not offer his own positive normative principles for condemning or responding to the history of racial domination that he so forcefully describes. By contrast, Rawls does offer a specific set of normative principles of justice that, I argue, can be usefully applied to racial subordination. Mills, so far as I am aware, does not argue that if we were to follow his methodological approach we would arrive at principles that conflict with the ones that Rawls defends. Nor does he specifically attack or attempt to reformulate Rawls’s principles. So our dispute does not turn on the content of those two principles. (link)
Both Mills and Shelby offer deep and valuable new lines of thought to political philosophy, and their debate is a sign of healthy engagement within a field of philosophy that has sometimes come down to disagreements about the third decimal point. Bringing structures of race and domination into the dialogue within political philosophy is profoundly important.
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