1st Edition

Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract

Edited By Elvira Basevich Copyright 2025
108 Pages
by Routledge

108 Pages
by Routledge

This book features emerging and established philosophers revisiting Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract twenty-five years after its publication. Each contribution reassesses the singular book’s bold critique of liberalism and social contract theory, advancing and interrogating Mills’s philosophical legacy. Notably lines of inquiry include the ideal/nonideal distinction, the merits of the social... Read more

Introduction: A paradigm shift in normative political theory: grappling with Mills’s The Racial Contract 25 Years Later
Elvira Basevich

1. The roots (and routes) of the epistemology of ignorance
Linda Martín Alcoff

2. Do agent-neutral & agent-relative reasons have a place in The Racial Contract?
Frank M. Kirkland

3. Mills, The Racial Contract, and ideal theory
D. C. Matthew

4. Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract at 25: Reconsiderations
Lucius T. Outlaw Jr.

5. Strategic ignorance, is it appropriate for indigenous resistance?
Andrea Sullivan-Clarke   

Biography

Elvira Basevich is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, USA. Her research focuses on how historical experiences should inform philosophical methods for defining normative concepts, such as freedom and justice.