First, I want to share a substantial part of a review essay from The Nation several years ago by way of introducing the work of Charles Mills, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York). Then we read a snippet from Mills’ recent interview in The Nation which further reveals his unflagging belief in the necessity and value of Liberalism as a political philosophy for democracy, despite its myriad and well-documented historical shortcomings, biases, prejudices and so on. As J.S. Mill, John Dewey, and most recently, the late John Rawls argued in their own distinctive ways, liberalism, democracy, and socialism are capable of complementing and reinforcing each other. In other words, and at the very least, there need be no inherent contradictions between these political, social and economic ideals and ideas. Finally, I leave you with a link to my updated bibliography for Liberalism as a political philosophy.
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Up From Rawls: Charles Mills’s effort to save liberal political philosophy from itself.
By Christopher Lebron for The Nation July 18, 2018
“Charles Mills’s Black Rights/White Wrongs represents the culmination of more than two decades of work on the philosophy of race and social justice. Mills received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1985, working with the left-wing philosophers Frank Cunningham and Daniel Goldstick on the concept of ideology in Marx and Engels. In the following years, liberal political philosophy would be strongly challenged. A growing number of feminists argued that liberal normative theorists were engaged in a form of selective historical imagination, erasing everyone but white males from the story of political society’s origins.
Already fluent in Marxist thought and politics, Mills was strongly influenced by these arguments, particularly as they were delivered in Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract; and in his first book, The Racial Contract, Mills initiated a searing critique of modern liberal theory. Despite its progressive intonations, he argued, the tradition had consistently obscured the history of racism and white supremacy in liberal societies, thereby turning a blind eye to racial inequality while embracing Enlightenment values without qualification.
Mills followed The Racial Contract with two collections that continued this critique: From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism and Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. In the former, he examined how Marxism also fell prey to masking certain forms of inequality, especially when it came to race; in the latter, he explored the often overlooked sociological assumptions in liberal moral and political philosophy that resulted in the erasure of black people and their political history and experiences during colonialism and postcolonialism. In 2007, Mills and Pateman partnered to write Contract and Domination, a condensed discussion of the main arguments in their critiques of liberal normative theory. But dedicated readers of Mills’s corpus also noticed that he was in the process of rethinking his own criticisms. His essays suggested a pivot toward a systemic theory of his own that would give readers a picture of liberalism’s ills and a way to remedy them. [emphasis added]
Black Rights/White Wrongs, Mills’s latest book, is that long-awaited result: his most thorough account yet of why and how liberal political theory has gone wrong. He returns to his criticism that liberal theory has mainly been attentive to and representative of the sociohistorical demands of white people (men in particular), but he also argues for a refreshed liberalism that retains its core political commitments while offering a fuller reckoning with the racial hierarchies and inequalities of America’s past and present. His argument is best understood as progressing in two phases. The first finds Mills placing liberal theory’s history alongside that of race and empire in the West; the second confronts John Rawls’s foundational work, A Theory of Justice, as well as the social-contract tradition that he helped to revive.
Mills’s first line of criticism indicts the core tradition of liberal theory for persistently sidelining the moral and political questions around race and empire. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, when Socrates wandered the streets of Athens peppering young and old with questions about the nature of justice, political philosophy has been guided by an overarching preoccupation: What is the good society, and what is the role of the citizen in helping both to realize and sustain it? The Enlightenment, Mills continues, developed new ideas to answer these questions. Denouncing the reliance on religious authority that had characterized the preceding centuries, Enlightenment thinkers insisted that human agency, coupled with knowledge, could replace divine revelation as the orienting principle of social and personal change. Thus arose the modern conception of liberty, which depended on free will and human rationality. All that was needed now was an attendant form of political organization that could embody, secure, and promote these ideas and their relations to each other: something that we have come to call ‘liberal democracy.’ Kant, an adherent of Enlightenment thinking and the modern era’s reigning moral theorist, brought the tools of moral philosophy to the aid of democratic theory by emphasizing the notion that every individual was to be treated as an end in themselves, and never as the means to someone else’s ends. This was a perfect ethical complement to the mantra of ‘one man, one vote’ that came to characterize Western democracy.
Thinkers working in the modern tradition came to embrace the Enlightenment ideals of personal agency and sovereignty as checks on government power. Yet, as Mills observes, at the same time that Europe was offering its white male inhabitants liberalism as a way to make good on the ideal of equality among persons, those same newly enlightened nations were in a furious race around the globe to colonize and dominate nonwhite peoples in faraway lands in an effort to establish economic and military might. The triumphant narrative of Western modernity occluded the barbarity of rape, murder, pillage, and the exploitation of millions of persons of African descent as well as Native Americans in the service of a vision of liberal progress. What the writer James Baldwin once called the ‘bloody catalogue of oppression’ effectively subsidized white freedom and the ability to think about white property rights, legislative design, and free markets. And all of this happened in a liberal society because racism, for Mills, is ‘a normative system in its own right that makes whiteness a prerequisite for full personhood and generally…limits nonwhites to ‘sub-person’ status.’
The problem, according to Mills, is that the very foundations of liberalism’s moral and political theory ‘would all then have to be rethought in the light of this category’s existence,’ because liberal philosophers had provided cover for much of this brutal history. This was true in the 17th and 18th centuries, when Locke could be found offering advice on what Carolina colony ought to do with its black population (spoiler alert: It wasn’t giving them the vote) and Kant could be found saying, ‘The Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery.’ And it was true in the 20th century as well: Even in an era in which Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr. urged white and black Americans alike to come to grips with the fact of racial violence and domination in American democracy, few liberal philosophers did. [….]
Despite all of the problems that beset them, Mills wants to retain the best parts of both liberalism and liberal philosophy, as they provide ‘the most developed body of normative theory for understanding the rights of persons.’ Coupled with a perspective that makes the black diasporic experience central to its thinking, this body of rights can, Mills asserts, produce a politics radical in its distribution of social and political power as well as in its redistribution of economic power.” [emphasis added] [….]
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“Charles Mills Thinks Liberalism Still Has a Chance”
A wide-ranging conversation with the philosopher on the white supremacist roots of liberal thought, Biden’s victory, and Trumpism without Trump.
By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins for The Nation, January 28, 2021
[….] “Liberalism is attractive on both principled and strategic grounds. You’re completely right, of course, about the failures of actual historical liberalism, which are manifest, indeed ubiquitous, all around us. But what is the source of these failures? If liberalism has never lived up to its ostensible principles and values, that goes no way in proving that the principles and values are themselves unattractive ones. The illuminating way to understand these violations of (ideal) liberal norms, I suggest in the book, is not as the consequence of an intrinsically self-undermining ‘illiberalizing’ dynamic within liberalism but rather as a manifestation of the corrupting results of group power, whether of the privileged classes, men, or the dominant race, for liberal theory and practice. Hence the creation of a bourgeois, patriarchal, or racial liberalism (usually all three combined, of course).
But we can appeal to the idealized, non-group-restricted versions of liberal principles and values to critique the exclusionary versions—indeed, that is precisely what most American progressive social movements have historically done. Particularly at the present time of authoritarian ethno-nationalism’s attack on liberal norms, it is all the more reason to affirm them. Moreover, liberalism as I understand it is certainly not committed to an opposition to socialism in the social democratic sense—arguably, that’s just left-liberalism. And any other variety of hypothetical socialism—market socialism, workers’ democracy—would presumably strive to sell itself by promising a deeper and more extensive realization of liberal values, not their abandonment [as we see among such Liberal political philosophers as J.S. Mill, John Dewey, and the later John Rawls as well explained in William A. Edmundson’s book, John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (Cambridge University Press, 2017)]. So I would claim that the socialist case can indeed be made within a liberal framework. It’s noteworthy that Rawls—surely a respectable liberal!—says explicitly in A Theory of Justice that his theory ‘includes no natural right of private property in the means of production.’
As for the strategic reasons: Liberalism (in the broad-spectrum sense that includes right-wing ‘classical’ liberals) has uncontroversially been the dominant political ideology in US history, albeit in the restrictive incarnations just delineated. So in trying to win over a broad political audience rather than preach to the choir, as I presume progressives want to do, one immediately has the immense advantage of invoking the political ideology nominally endorsed by the majority. You don’t have to require them to first convert to Marxism or Foucauldian-ism or whatever; you can just say, ‘If you’re a good liberal, you should support this.’ That doesn’t mean that you can’t get valuable insights from Marx or Foucault, of course, but they are ultimately going to have to be ‘translated’ into a liberal framework.
And insofar as legal change will be crucial for progressive structural reform—necessary if not sufficient—need I make the obvious point that the American and broader Western juridical systems are founded on liberal principles and assumptions? The ‘Black radical liberalism’ I am advocating will thus be able to engage directly with its conservative juristic opponents in a way that nonliberal political ideologies will not. The Republicans generally, and the Federalist Society specifically, are certainly in no doubt themselves about the importance of fighting for particular interpretations of the Constitution and the law, which is precisely why they set out years ago to gain control of the courts. Black rights, and nonwhite rights in general, will have to be advanced by liberal arguments and liberal jurisprudence in this liberal (in the broad sense) arena.” [….] — Charles W. Mills (interview in The Nation)
A bibliography on The Political Philosophy of Liberalism.