29 results on '"Charles W. Mills"'
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2. Dark Mores: Some Comments on Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform
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Charles W. Mills
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Philosophy ,Politics ,Mores ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Law ,Invocation ,Dissent ,Norm (social) ,Sociology ,Philosophy of law ,Injustice ,media_common - Abstract
Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform is a major contribution to black political thought and the theorization of racial justice more generally. In these brief comments, I begin by situating Shelby’s work both in the Anglo-American political tradition and the Afro-modern political tradition. While praising the accomplishment that Shelby’s book represents, I nonetheless go on to point out some obstacles to his project arising from the tensions between these traditions. Using the concept of “dark mores” (a racially differentiated ethic coming in both white and black versions), I argue that Shelby’s racially revisionist Rawlsianism is pre-empted by Rawls’s own restrictions on the scope of his theory, while Shelby’s invocation of “reciprocity” as a key norm is undermined by the structural asymmetries of a racist society.
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- 2019
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3. Ideology and Social Cognition: The Challenge of Theorizing ‘Speciesism’
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Charles W. Mills
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Animal rights ,Social cognition ,Argument ,media_common.quotation_subject ,General Earth and Planetary Sciences ,Speciesism ,Ideology ,Sociology ,General Environmental Science ,Epistemology ,media_common - Abstract
In this essay I explore whether Sally Haslanger’s model of ideology can handle ‘speciesism’ (assuming, for the sake of argument, that some version of the animal rights position is correct). The fir...
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- 2019
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4. Rethinking Propaganda and Ideology: Some Comments on Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works
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Charles W. Mills
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Philosophy ,History and Philosophy of Science ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Ideology ,Art ,Religious studies ,media_common - Published
- 2018
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5. Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos. By Juliet Hooker. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 296p. $53.00 cloth
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Charles W. Mills
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Race (biology) ,Anthropology ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Political Science and International Relations ,Art ,media_common - Published
- 2018
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6. The Racial Contractrevisited: still unbroken after all these years
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Charles W. Mills
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Intersectionality ,Social contract ,Metaphor ,Critical race theory ,media_common.quotation_subject ,General Engineering ,Subordination (finance) ,White supremacy ,Liberalism ,Law ,Normative ,Sociology ,media_common ,Law and economics - Abstract
In this reply to my four (very friendly) critics, I take the opportunity to clarify some points about how I meant the “racial contract” as a theoretical intervention to be understood, and to offer some suggestions about how the idea could be further developed. I begin with some familiar distressing points about the slowness or actual reversal of racial progress in recent years. I then argue that (a) this depressing reality vindicates a structural analysis of race (race as “white supremacy”) that (b) can be captured in a revised version of the social contract metaphor (the “domination contract”), which would then provide (c) a superior normative framework for challenging the whiteness of Rawlsian social justice theory, as part of (d) a general rethinking of liberalism and contractarianism to address social subordination in nominally liberal Western societies, especially (e) if intersectional concerns are incorporated into the apparatus.
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- 2015
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7. Stacy Clifford Simplican: The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pp. ix, 181.)
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Charles W. Mills
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Sociology and Political Science ,media_common.quotation_subject ,05 social sciences ,0507 social and economic geography ,Gender studies ,medicine.disease ,0506 political science ,Political economy ,Political Science and International Relations ,Intellectual disability ,050602 political science & public administration ,medicine ,Sociology ,050703 geography ,Citizenship ,media_common - Published
- 2016
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8. Notes from the resistance: some comments on Sally Haslanger’s Resisting Reality
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Charles W. Mills
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Philosophy of mind ,Philosophy of language ,Oppression ,Philosophy ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Strict constructionism ,Constructionism ,Metaphysics ,Social constructionism ,Resistance (creativity) ,Epistemology ,media_common - Abstract
After a brief summary of the 17 essays in Sally Haslanger’s (2012) collection, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, I raise questions in two areas, the defense of constructionism and the definition of gender and race in terms of social oppression. I cite Robin Andreasen’s and Philip Kitcher’s essays arguing (in different ways) that races are both biologically real and socially constructed, and also Joshua Glasgow’s claim that constructionist arguments ultimately fail. I then cite Jennifer Saul’s critique that “oppression” definitions of gender and race run into problematic counterexamples, and add some other points arising from the different histories of gender and racial categories and realities. As someone sympathetic to constructionism myself, my aim is not a critique of Haslanger but rather an inquiry as to how she thinks (we) constructionists should answer such challenges.
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- 2013
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9. Philosophy and the Racial Contract
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Charles W. Mills
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Social contract ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Political science ,Public administration ,Racism ,Law and economics ,media_common - Abstract
The racial contract is both racist reality and, as “the racial contract,” it is a concept that should be thought of as a “device of representation” for theorizing racial oppression within a social contract framework. Mills here looks at the influence of the racial contract (disquotationally, as a racist reality) on the views of white political philosophers and on the formation of modern white-dominated racial polities, as well as the possible use of the “racial contract” to theorize corrective racial justice. Finally, he discusses the reception of his book, The Racial Contract, in the twenty years since its publication.
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- 2017
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10. Responses to James Tully’s 'Deparochializing Political Theory and Beyond'
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Garrick Cooper, Sudipta Kaviraj, Charles W. Mills, and Sor-hoon Tan
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Postcolonialism ,Parrhesia ,History ,Anthropology ,lcsh:Philosophy (General) ,media_common.quotation_subject ,postcolonialism ,Gender studies ,indigenous thought ,Democracy ,Philosophy ,Parochialism ,Atlantic slavery ,parrhesia ,Political philosophy ,lcsh:B1-5802 ,Afro-modern political thought ,media_common - Abstract
In their responses to James Tully’s article “Deparochializing Political Theory and Beyond,” Garrick Cooper, Charles W. Mills, Sudipta Kaviraj and Sor-hoon Tan engage with different aspects of Tully’s “genuine dialogue.” While they seem to concur with Tully on the urgency of deparochializing political theory, their responses bring to light salient issues which would have to be thought through in taking this project forward.
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- 2017
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11. The professional ideology of social pathologists / Transl. and intr. by A.M. Korbut
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Charles W. Mills
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lcsh:Sociology (General) ,Social pathology ,media_common.quotation_subject ,lcsh:HM401-1281 ,General Social Sciences ,Social environment ,Ignorance ,Sociology ,Ideology ,Social science ,Social structure ,media_common ,Epistemology - Abstract
In his classical paper, published in 1943, famous American sociologist C. Wright Mills analyses a tradition of social pathologies studies that was popular in American sociology in 1920–30s. Author argues that a low level of abstraction, ignorance of wider social structures, orientation to the «organic» ideals of stability and adaptation are characteristic for this approach. Mills connects these features of the ideology of social pathologists to the social context of the functioning of sociological knowledge: professional careers of social pathologists, their origins, channels of the distribution of sociological texts, potential readers .
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- 2013
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12. Critical Philosophy of Race
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Charles W. Mills
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Race (biology) ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Gender studies ,Sociology ,History of philosophy ,Critical philosophy ,Racism ,media_common - Abstract
This article tries to provide a genealogy for, and a characterization of, “critical philosophy of race,” which has only recently begun to gain formal recognition as a subject within the discipline. After discussing the contested periodization of race and racism, the author turns to the related question of whether they have affected the history of Western philosophy from the classical epoch to modernity. Then he reviews contemporary scholarship in critical philosophy of race, looking at standard divisions of the field: metaphysics (the metaphysics of race); epistemology (social epistemology, standpoint theory, and “whiteness”); aesthetics (race and structures of feeling, racism and anti-racism in works of art); ethics (the moral challenges of slavery, white supremacy, and their ongoing legacy); social and political philosophy (competing analyses of racism as a concept, competing etiologies of racism as a reality, racial domination and racial justice); and existentialism, phenomenology, and pragmatism (the lived experience of race).
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- 2016
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13. Breaking the Racial Contract
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Charles W. Mills
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Race (biology) ,White supremacy ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Law ,Public policy ,General Medicine ,Sociology ,Racism ,media_common - Abstract
In recent decades, the debate about race within the American left has been torn between two seemingly conflicting imperatives: veracity and electability. One can be “principled” and tell the truth about American white supremacy and the need to address structural racism in our policies and institutions—and be guaranteed the also-ran slot. Or one can downplay race as an issue—by remaining silent, vaguely deferring it, or making putatively “universalist” public policy promises—and then hope, once elected, to smuggle in a progressive, albeit disguised, racial agenda.
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- 2015
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14. Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls
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Charles W. Mills
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Philosophy ,Contemporary philosophy ,Politics ,Liberalism ,White supremacy ,Analytic philosophy ,Law ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Justice (virtue) ,Political philosophy ,Injustice ,media_common - Abstract
John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) is widely credited with having revived post–World War II Anglo American political philosophy. This book together with his later writings are routinely judged to constitute the most important body of work in that field. Indeed, with the collapse of Second World and Third World socialist ideologico-political alternatives, liberalism in one form or another has become globally hegemonic, so that for many commentators, the qualifiers “postwar” and “Anglo American” should just be dropped. Thus the blurb on the jacket of The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Freeman 2003a) simply asserts without qualification: “John Rawls is the most significant and influential political and moral philosopher of the 20th century.” Translated (as of 2003) into twenty-seven languages (Freeman 2003b, 1), the subject of a vast body of secondary literature numbering literally thousands of articles, A Theory of Justice has long since become a canonical text. Yet for those interested in issues of racial justice, philosophers of color in particular, it has also long been a very frustrating text.1 We face a paradox: Rawls, the celebrated American philosopher of justice, had next to nothing to say in his work about what has arguably historically been the most blatant American variety of injustice, racial oppression. The postwar struggle for racial justice in practice and in theory and the Rawlsian corpus on justice are almost completely separate and nonintersecting universes. The remediation of the legacy of white supremacy is apparently not of the slightest interest or concern for Rawls and most of his commentators and critics, as manifested in the marginality of this subject in his own work, and its virtual nonappearance in the secondary literature. Samuel Freeman’s edited Cambridge Companion to Rawls (2003a), for example, which provides a synoptic overview of key themes in the literature, has not a single subsection of any chapter, let alone any chapter, on race, while the 2006 Perspectives on Politics special symposium on Rawls barely has two paragraphs on the subject (Ackerley et al. 2006). So, particularly for people of color in the United States, but also for those elsewhere, for example in the former colonizing powers and in the former colonial world, a weird feeling of inconRawls on Race/Race in Rawls
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- 2009
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15. Schwartzman vs. Okin: Some Comments on Challenging Liberalism
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Charles W. Mills
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Gender Studies ,Philosophy ,Reciprocity (social and political philosophy) ,Liberalism ,Human rights ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Sociology ,Political philosophy ,Religious studies ,Socioeconomics ,media_common ,Wonder - Abstract
Tobin, Theresa W. 2008. Using rights to counter "gender-specific" wrongs. Human Rights Review. http://www.springerlink.com/content/h44vl8375p8uq721/ (accessed May 12, 2009). Forth coming in print, vol. 10 (4), Fall 2009. Walker, Margaret Urban. 2007. Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1997. Assymetrical reciprocity: On moral respect, wonder, and enlarged thought. In Intersecting voices: Dilemmas of gender, political philosophy, and policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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- 2009
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16. Global white ignorance
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Charles W. Mills
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Race (biology) ,White (horse) ,Periodization ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Ignorance ,Sociology ,Key features ,Spatialization ,media_common ,Epistemology ,Skepticism - Abstract
This chapter sets out—necessarily very schematically, but as a possible stimulus for research on the key features of a white ignorance conceived of as global. Obviously white ignorance is not best theorized as an aggregate of individual mistaken white beliefs (though a sampling of such beliefs can be dramatically enlightening for bringing home the extent of white miscognition). If there is a periodization and spatialization of whiteness, there also needs to be a periodization and spatialization of ignorance. The nature of white ignorance—what whites characteristically get wrong—changes over time and place. If classic white ignorance justified white advantage as the legitimate entitlements of the superior race, contemporary white ignorance generally either denies such advantage altogether or attributes it to differential white effort. White ignorance is achieved and perpetuated through varieties working in tandem: a general skepticism about nonwhite cognition and an exclusion from accepted discourse of nonwhite categories and frameworks of analysis.
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- 2015
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17. Reconceptualizing Race and Racism? A Critique of J. Angelo Corlett
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Charles W. Mills
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Philosophy ,Race (biology) ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Gender studies ,Sociology ,Racism ,media_common - Published
- 2005
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18. 'Ideal Theory' as Ideology
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Charles W. Mills
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Oppression ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Redress ,Gender neutrality ,Criminology ,Logical consequence ,Ideal theory ,Epistemology ,Gender Studies ,Philosophy ,Idealism ,Normative ,Sociology ,Ideology ,media_common - Abstract
individual subsume the workers, women, and nonwhites who are also persons-even if, admittedly, they were not historically recognized as such? I think the problem here is a failure to appreciate the nature and magnitude of the obstacles to the cognitive rethinking required, and the mistaken moveespecially easy for analytic philosophers, used to the effortless manipulation of variables, the shifting about of p's and q's, in the frictionless plane (redux!) of symbolic logic-from the ease of logical implication to the actual inferential patterns of human cognizers who have been socialized by these systems of domination. (This failure is itself, reflexively, a manifestation of the idealism of ideal theory.) To begin with the obvious empirical objection: if it were as easy as all that, just a matter of modus ponens or some other simple logical rule, then why was it so hard to do? If it were obvious that women were equal moral persons, meant to be fully included in the variable "men," then why was it not obvious to virtually every male political philosopher and ethicist up to a few decades ago? Why has liberalism, supposedly committed to normative equality and a foundational opposition to ascriptive hierarchy, found it so easy to exclude women and nonwhites from its egalitarian promise? The actual working of human cognitive processes, as manifested in the sexism and sometimes racism of such leading figures in the canon as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and the rest, itself constitutes the simplest illustration of the mistakenness of such an analysis. Moreover, it is another familiar criticism from feminism that the inclusion of women cannot be a merely terminological gender neutrality, just adding and stirring, but requires a rethinking of what, say, equal rights and freedoms will require in the context of female subordination. Susan Moller Okin argued years ago that once one examines the real-life family, it becomes obvious that women's exit options from marriage are far more restricted than men's, because of the handicaps of sacrificing one's career to childrearing (Okin 1989). So a commitment to fairness, equal rights, and justice in the family arguably requires special measures to compensate for these burdens, and reform social structures accordingly. But such measures cannot be spun out, a priori, from the concept of equality as such (and certainly they cannot be generated on the basis of assuming the ideal family, as Rawls did in A Theory of Justice). Rather, they require empirical input and an awareness of how the real-life, nonideal family actually works. But insofar as such input is crucial and guides theory (which is why it's incorrect to see this as just "applied" ethics), the theory ceases to be ideal. So either ideal theory includes the previously excluded in a purely nominal way, which would be a purely formal rather than substantive inclusion, or-to the extent that it does make the dynamic of oppression central and theory-guiding-it is doing nonideal theory without calling it such. (Compare the conservative appeal to a superficially fair "color-blindness" in the treatment of people of color, whose practical effect is to guarantee a blindness to the distinctive measures required to redress and overcome the legacy of white supremacy.) 178 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.56 on Tue, 18 Oct 2016 04:58:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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- 2005
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19. [Untitled]
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Charles W. Mills
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Philosophy ,biology ,Scope (project management) ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Garcia ,Sociology ,Political philosophy ,Voluntarism (action) ,Morality ,biology.organism_classification ,Racism ,media_common ,Epistemology - Abstract
Since its original 1996 publication,Jorge Garcia's ``The Heart of Racism'' has beenwidely reprinted, a testimony to its importanceas a distinctive and original analysis ofracism. Garcia shifts the standard framework ofdiscussion from the socio-political to theethical, and analyzes racism as essentially avice. He represents his account asnon-revisionist (capturing everyday usage),non-doxastic (not relying on belief),volitional (requiring ill-will), and moralized(racism is always wrong). In this paper, Icritique Garcia's analysis, arguing that hedoes in fact revise everyday usage, that hisaccount does tacitly rely on belief, thatill-will is not necessary for racism, and thata moralized account gets both the scope and thedynamic of racism wrong. While I do not offeran alternative positive account myself, Isuggest that traditional left-wing structuralanalyses are indeed superior.
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- 2003
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20. Defending the Radical Enlightenment
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Charles W. Mills
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media_common.quotation_subject ,Enlightenment ,Sociology ,Theology ,media_common - Published
- 2002
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21. Race and Racism in International Relations
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Randolph B. Persaud, David R. Roediger, Robert Knox, Robbie Shilliam, Branwen Gruffydd-Jones, Charles W. Mills, Nivi Manchanda, Alexander Anievas, John M. Hobson, Errol Anthony Henderson, Debra Thompson, Richard Seymour, Srdjan Vucetic, and Sankaran Krishna
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International relations ,Good governance ,Race (biology) ,State (polity) ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Gender studies ,Sociology ,Colonialism ,Racism ,International relations theory ,Rivalry ,media_common - Abstract
Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam - Confronting the Global Colour Line: an Introduction, PART 1: CONCEPTUALISING THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF RACE AND RACISM, 2. Errol Henderson - Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism in International Relations Theory, 3. Debra Thompson - Through, Against, and Beyond the Racial State: The Transnational Stratum of Race, 4. Branwen Gruffydd-Jones - "Good Governance' and 'State Failure': the Pseudo-Science of Statesmen in Our Times, 5. John M. Hobson - Re-Embedding the Global Colour Line within Post-1945 International Theory, 6. Srdjan Vucetic - Against Race Taboos: The Global Colour Line in Philosophical Discourse, PART 2: INTERNATIONAL PRACTICES OF RACE AND RACISM, 7. Randolph B. Persaud - Colonial Violence: Race and Gender on the Sugar Plantations of British Guiana, 8. Sankaran Krishna - A Postcolonial Racial/Spatial Order: Gandhi, Ambedkar and the Construction of the International, 9. Richard Seymour - The Cold War, American Anticommunism and the Global 'Colour Line', 10. Robert Knox - Race, Racialisation and Rivalry in the International Legal Order, PART 3: REFLECTIONS ON THE GLOBAL COLOUR LINE, 11. David Roediger - What Would It Mean to Transform International Relations?, 12. Charles W. Mills - Unwriting and Unwhitening the World
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- 2014
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22. Marxism, ‘Ideology,’ and Moral Objectivism1
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Charles W. Mills
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media_common.quotation_subject ,Interpretation (philosophy) ,Philosophy ,05 social sciences ,06 humanities and the arts ,050905 science studies ,0603 philosophy, ethics and religion ,Morality ,Causality ,Epistemology ,Objectivism ,Idealism ,060302 philosophy ,Ethnology ,Ideology ,0509 other social sciences ,Objectivity (philosophy) ,Relativism ,media_common - Abstract
For most of this century, it has been taken for granted that the theoretical commitments of Marxism are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with any kind of objectivism in ethics, whether realist or constructivist. Commentators in the analytic tradition who have argued for this antiobjectivist interpretation have categorized Marx variously as a noncognitivist (moral judgments are not actually propositional, and so are neither true nor false) a sort of 'error theorist' (moral judgments are all false), or an ethical relativist (moral judgments are true/false relative to class or the mode of production). Other commentators, less charitable in their assessment, have found Marx to be irredeemably confused and inconsistent in his moral pronouncements, espousing not a consistent anti-objectivism, but rather simultaneously proclaiming the class-relativity and the objectivity of morality.
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- 1994
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23. Under Class Under StandingsRethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass.Christopher JencksThe Underclass Question.Bill E. Lawson
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Charles W. Mills
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Silence ,Policy studies ,Philosophy ,Politics ,Symbol ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Underclass ,Mythology ,Ideology ,Sociology ,Religious studies ,Disadvantaged ,media_common - Abstract
t Support for writing this review essay was provided by the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago. I would like to thank John Deigh for his useful suggestions for restructuring an earlier draft. 1. William Julius Wilson's book The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) legitimized the term, giving it the irreproachable imprimatur of a black liberal (or self-described "social democrat"), and it is Wilson's work which has been at the center of most recent discussion. But there are many earlier appearances, e.g., Douglas Glasgow, The Black Underclass: Poverty, Unemployment, and the Entrapment of Ghetto Youth (New York: Random House, 1980); and Ken Auletta, The Underclass (New York: Random House, 1982). (Credit for the modern coinage is sometimes attributed to Gunnar Myrdal's The Challenge to Affluence [New York: Pantheon, 1962].) Discussions in the mass media have, of course, been more important in shaping public discourse, usually with a conservative slant, e.g., Nicholas Lemann, "The Origins of the Underclass," Atlantic (June 1986), pp. 31-55 (July 1986), pp. 54-68; Pete Hamill, "Breaking the Silence," Esquire (March 1988), pp. 91-102; Charles Murray, "Here's the Bad News on the Underclass," Wall Street Journal (March 8, 1990). Critical replies from the Left include Norman Fainstein, "The Underclass/Mismatch Hypothesis as an Explanation for Black Economic Deprivation," Politics and Society 15 (1986-87): 403 -5 1; Charles V. Willie, review of The Truly Disadvantaged, by William Julius Wilson, Policy Studies Review 7 (1988): 865-74; Leslie Inniss and Joe R. Feagin, "The Black 'Underclass' Ideology in Race Relations Analysis," Social Justice 16 (Winter 1989): 13-34; HerbertJ. Gans, "Deconstructing the Underclass: The Term's Dangers as a Planning Concept,"Journal of the American Planning Association 56 (1990): 271-77; Adolph Reed, Jr., "The Underclass as Myth and Symbol: The Poverty of Discourse about Poverty," Radical America 24 (January-March 1990): 21 -40; David Theo Goldberg, "Critical Notes on the Underclass," APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 91 (1992): 15-19; "Special Issue: Theory or Fact? The Black Underclass," Black Scholar, vol. 19 (May/June 1988); and Adolph Reed, Jr., and Julian Bond, eds., "Special Issue: The Assault on Equality," Nation (December 9, 1991).
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- 1994
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24. Vice’s Vicious Virtues: The Supererogatory as Obligatory
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Charles W. Mills
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Oppression ,Philosophy ,Excellence ,media_common.quotation_subject ,White privilege ,Shame ,Sociology ,media_common ,Epistemology ,Moral disengagement - Abstract
Samantha Vice’s essay, ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’, is a sensitive and subtle exploration of the difficult moral terrain of the issues of white responsibility and white moral self-reform in a South Africa that is formally post-apartheid, but still profoundly shaped by the legacy of white domination, both in its enduring socio-economic structures and in its citizens’ typical moral psychologies. Vice’s conclusion is that shame is the moral emotion most appropriate for whites unable to free themselves from white privilege and live up to what she sees as the required standards of moral excellence. In response, I argue that she is in effect making the supererogatory obligatory, and constructing an unrealistic schedule of virtues. Drawing on various recent writings on non-ideal theory, I suggest that standard moral distinctions need to be relocated to take systemic social oppression into account, thereby yielding a more forgiving moral taxonomy than Vice’s own over-demanding mapping.
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- 2011
25. RACIAL EXPLOITATION AND THE WAGES OF WHITENESS
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Charles W. Mills
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Oppression ,Liberalism ,White supremacy ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Subject (philosophy) ,Mainstream ,Political philosophy ,Sociology ,Economic Justice ,Injustice ,media_common ,Law and economics - Abstract
DISCUSSIONS in the academy in general, and in philosophy in particular, of racial injustice have come a long way over the past decade or two.1 African-American philosophers such as Bernard Boxill and Howard McGary can testify far better than I concerning how little interest there was in these matters only a few years ago, and how the torch was kept burning by a few figures, mostly blacks such as themselves, but with a scattering of white progressives.2 From being a strictly fringe concern, the issue of reparations has become sufficiently mainstream for city councils across the country to take a position on the question, and for “white” universities to debate the matter. Unfortunately, very little of the credit for this development can go to mainstream white philosophy, despite the fact that philosophers are by their calling supposed to be the group professionally concerned about justice as a concept and an ideal; indeed, the book regarded by many as the fountainhead of the Western tradition, Plato’s Republic, is focused singlemindedly on that very subject. Instead, it is black intellectuals, black activists such as Randall Robinson, and community groups such as the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) who deserve the credit. Yet there is certainly enough blame to go around-one would not want to pick just on one’s own profession. The indictment for (relative) historic silence on the question of racial justice can be extended to American social and political theory in general, not merely social and political philosophy, but mainstreamAmerican sociology and mainstream American political science. (Depending on how one defines “mainstream”—and from the racial margins, pretty much everything else looks mainstream-this judgment also holds true for a lot of orthodox left theory in these fields, not just liberalism, since Marxists have tended to dissolve the specificities of these racial problems into the general oppression of capital, with socialism then being plugged as the universal panacea.)How do we correct this situation? In this chapter, extrapolating the line of argument I have articulated elsewhere in my work,3 I want to make some suggestions toward the development of a possible longterm theoretical strategy for remedying this deficiency. My recommendation is that we (1) retrieve and elaborate, as an alternative, a more accurate global sociopolitical paradigm, the concept of white supremacy; (2) develop an analysis of a specifically racial form of exploitation, in its manifold dimensions; (3) uncover and follow the trail of what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the “wages of whiteness”; and then (4) locate normative demands for racial justice within this improved descriptive conceptual framework.
- Published
- 2004
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26. The Color of Freedom: Race and Contemporary American Liberalism. By David Carroll Cochran. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. ix+207. $17.95 (paper)
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Charles W. Mills
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Race (biology) ,Liberalism ,Sociology and Political Science ,State (polity) ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Economic history ,Sociology ,Law and economics ,media_common - Published
- 2001
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27. Is it immaterial that there's a ‘material’ in ‘historical materialism'?
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Charles W. Mills
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Inclusion (disability rights) ,Health Policy ,Interpretation (philosophy) ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Relations of production ,Philosophy ,Historical materialism ,Character (symbol) ,Rationality ,Determinism ,Epistemology ,Reading (process) ,media_common - Abstract
G. A. Cohen's influential ‘technological determinist’ reading of Marx's theory of history rests in part on an interpretation of Marx's use of ‘material’ whose idiosyncrasy has been insufficiently noticed. Cohen takes historical materialism to be asserting the determination of the social by the material/asocial, viz. ‘socio‐neutral’ facts about human nature and human rationality which manifest themselves in a historical tendency for the forces of production to develop. This paper reviews Marx's writings to demonstrate the extensive textual evidence in favour of the traditional interpretation ‐ that for Marx, the ‘material’ includes the economic, and is thus ineluctably social in character. Thus those critics of Cohen who have urged the inclusion of the relations of production in historical materialism's explanans do seem to have Marx's terminological and conceptual backing.
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- 1989
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28. A New Old Meaning of 'Ideology'
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Charles W. Mills and Danny Goldstick
- Subjects
Philosophy ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Meaning (existential) ,Ideology ,Social science ,media_common ,Epistemology - Abstract
If there were a list of subjects about which it seems that there is definitely no more to be said—or that even if there were, nobody would want to hear it anyway—then surely the topics of ideology, in general, and ideology in Marxist theory, in particular, would have to rank very near the top. Diffusing outwards from Western Marxism's postwar preoccupation with the mechanisms of capitalist hegemony, the concept has now become virtually ubiquitous in the humanities and social sciences. Yet we feel reluctantly impelled to add one more paper to this already overflowing pile, hoping to catch readers' attention even as reflexive ennui glazes over their eyes. For a (though not, we trust, the only) virtue of the thesis we are going to propose is its originality in relation to the contemporary spectrum of opinion. If we are right, then, in one of Marx and Engels' main uses of the expression “ideology” they were not referring to ideas at all, but to the social superstructure itself. Even on purely scholarly grounds, it would be of some interest that so many commentators could have missed this meaning of “ideology” in texts as thoroughly scrutinized as these have been. But more importantly, if our analysis is correct, then certain very famous passages in the Marxist corpus (such as the 1859 “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and parts of the Critique of the Gotha Programme) have been misinterpreted for decades.
- Published
- 1989
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
29. Determination and Consciousness in Marx
- Author
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Charles W. Mills
- Subjects
Analytical Marxism ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Philosophy ,05 social sciences ,Historical materialism ,Character (symbol) ,0506 political science ,Epistemology ,050903 gender studies ,050602 political science & public administration ,Normative ,Ideology ,Political philosophy ,0509 other social sciences ,Consciousness ,media_common - Abstract
There has been a dramatic increase over the past decade in the volume of Anglo-American philosophical writing on Marxism, with the 1978 publication of G.A. Cohen’s trail-blazing Karl Marx’s Theory of History being a convenient landmark. What has come to be called ‘analytical Marxism’ is now well-established, and valuable clarificatory work has been done on such traditionally murky subjects as the theory of historical materialism, the nature of ideology, Marx’s views on ethics, the character of Marx’s epistemology, the ‘scientific’ status of Marxism, and the problematic interface between Marxism and normative liberal political theory.
- Published
- 1989
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
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