Revisiting Charles Mills’s “The Racial Contract”

By Uditha Devapriya –OCTOBER 2, 2021

Uditha Devapriya

Charles Mills passed away last week. A prolific writer on African-American and Marxist philosophy, Mills was the author of six books, including the only one of his I read cover to cover, The Racial Contract. Though he never joined the academic mainstream like most of his colleagues and contemporaries, he was never outside it either. By the mid-2010s, when he became better established among intellectual circles, his work had gone beyond those circles. His reputation preceded him everywhere, so much so that it remains impossible to talk about black history and philosophy without summoning his name.

Though it was my interest in anthropology that took me to him years ago, his own interests spread far and wide. Very few thinkers deserved comparisons with him: an assessment one can come to with even a cursory perusal of his magnum opus, now considered a classic work of African-American and Marxist scholarship, The Racial Contract.

What is profoundly interesting, and unsettling, about The Racial Contract is that it reveals not a hidden truth, but a simple one. In its first few pages Mills asserted, not a little boldly, that “[p]hilosophy… is one of the ‘whitest’ of the humanities.” Yet to say this even in 1997, when the book came out, was not to make a revelation that had evaded interpretation over the better part of recorded history. Mills was not attempting to decode a Rosetta Stone of Western philosophy. His intentions were far more modest: he wanted to find out why that philosophy, lauded for its universal appeal, could gloss over “debates over multiculturalism, canon reform, and ethnic diversity” within and outside academic circuits. Or to put it simply, why there had not been “alternative conceptualisations” of moral and political theory which acknowledged the presence of non-white communities.

This was hardly the first such critique of Western philosophy, or even of Western liberalism. C. B. Macpherson had authored an erudite essay and book on liberal philosophy more than 30 years before Mills would. A more recent intervention, Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History, laid bare the hypocrisies and illusions of Western liberalism more candidly than did either Macpherson or Mills. Yet being very much a product of his background, Mills was better suited for the task of expounding on this subject; whereas Macpherson explored the class dynamics underlying post-16th century Western liberalism (he called it “possessive individualism”), Mills focused more on its racial dimensions.

Though Mills approaches his theme from a conceptual framework, there are times when he incorporates other perspectives in the interests of the wider aims of his text. He could have expected to do no less with a book that attempted to tear apart, and dissect, the intellectual foundations of Western civilisation. He himself put it best: his aim, he contends, was to build a bridge between the worlds of abstract philosophy and colonial subjugation.

What we can say without simplifying history is that these two worlds formed the epicentre of the milieu that sired the natural philosophers of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. If the Renaissance began with Petrarch and ended with Descartes, as Garrett Mattingly once put it, natural philosophy, which had its antecedents in Augustine and Aquinas, gained a second lease of life under Hobbes. Revived by Locke, it was radically reformulated by Rousseau. It is this trinity of social contractarians which Mills delves into in his essay. The title of his work is a simple, but symbolic, inversion of their moral philosophy, a point Mills clarifies early on: in contrast to the “Social Contract”, the “Racial Contract” is a reference to the “actual genesis” of the world that Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau inhabited.

What interests me most about Mills’s work is his claim that none of these issues can be separated from each other. Indeed, he cautions against separating them at all. For him, as for most other critics of Western philosophy, the Social Contract which Hobbes highlighted and Locke and Rousseau reformulated actually concealed a painful historical reality: white supremacy. Hence, in contrast to the distinction between “natural” and “civil/political” man it glosses over, the Racial Contract that underlies the Social Contract draws a line between “white” and “non-white” groups. As per its logic, the creation of political society calls for the subordination of all non-white groups to a white hegemony.

In Locke’s argument, “natural man” becomes “civilised” through participation in the political process. In Mills’s formulation, this thesis is qualified: “natural man” becomes part of society by way of not just participation, but exclusion. This is not quite as complex an argument as you may think: what Mills suggests here is that Locke’s general type of “natural men” is very much specific, signifying white, bourgeois, male populations. Indeed, as he argues, “whether by law or custom… the status of whites and non-whites is clearly demarcated” in the polity, state, and judicial system established by the Racial Contract. When you realise that blacks in the US won the right to vote 275 years after John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, you see how the most abstract ideals can camouflage the most insidious bigotry.

Mills next draws a distinction between what he calls the “moral contract” and the “political contract”, and suggests two ways of viewing relations between them. In the first, which is Lockean and Kantian, the moral contract represents a pre-existing objectivist morality and constraints the contents of the political contract. Hence, a country’s legal code is based on a system of moral ethics. In the second, which is Hobbesian, the political contract establishes the moral code: thus for Hobbes, morality is no more and no less than a code enabling us to pursue a set of rational interests which are in harmony with those of others.

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