Mills, Charles W.,
1951–2021, philosopher and political theorist, b. London, Ph.D.
University of Toronto, 1985. Born in the U.K. and raised in Jamaica, Mills
was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, City
University of New York, where he taught since 2016. Prior to joining the
Graduate Center, he was the John Evans Professor of Moral Philosophy at
Northwestern University. His previous appointments include the University of
Illinois, Chicago, the University of Oklahoma, University of Toronto, and
the College of Arts and Sciences in Kingston, Jamaica.
A leading thinker in political philosophy, Mills spent his career
addressing issues of class, gender, and race. He is best known for his first
book, The Racial Contract, which won a Gustavus Myers
Outstanding Book Award. More than twenty years after its publication,
The Racial Contract remains a seminal text in the field
of philosophy. Mill served as the president of the Central Division of the
American Philosophical Association (APA), a fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen to give the 2020 Tanner Lecture on
Human Values at the University of Michigan. Mills wrote about the historical
foundations of white supremacy, the political practice and theory of
liberalism, and the metaphysics of race. Mills was also widely known for his
work on African American and Africana philosophy, social contract theory,
ethics, and
Marxism. Mills
died on September 20, 2021. According to NPR, Mills "upended the canon of
Western philosophy, calling out the whiteness in the discipline and adding
the dimension of race to dominant liberal frameworks."
His writings include The Racial Contract (1997),
Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race
(1998), From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black
Radicalism (2003), Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality:
Race, Class and Social Domination (2010), Contract and
Domination (co-authored with Carole Pateman, 2013); and
Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial
Liberalism (2017).
See P. DesAutels and M. U. Walker, eds., Moral Psychology: Feminist
Ethics and Social Theory (2004); V. Watson et al., ed.,
Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century: Global
Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions (2014); P. C.
Taylor et al., ed., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of
Race (2017); C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract
(anniversary ed. 2018); A. Weale, Modern Social Contract
Theory (2020).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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