Charles W. Mills

Charles Wade Mills was born in London on the third of January 1951 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, the son of a University of the West Indies professor. He took his first degree at UWI Mona in physics and taught it for a time — the physicist's habit of asking what a system actually does never left him — before philosophy claimed him at the University of Toronto, where his 1985 doctorate examined the concept of ideology in Marx and Engels.

He taught at Oklahoma, then at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he rose to Distinguished Professor. In 1997 came the book: The Racial Contract (Cornell) — the argument that white supremacy is not an aberration in the liberal order but a political system in its own right, an unwritten contract underwriting the social-contract tradition the academy taught as neutral; and that philosophy's "ideal theory" was a way of not seeing it. Cornell's press counts more than sixty-six thousand copies across a generation of classrooms, and the book is credited with opening political philosophy's canon to the critique it had refused.

The work deepened across Blackness Visible (1998), From Class to Race (2003), The Contract and Domination (2007, with Carole Pateman), and Black Rights/White Wrongs (2017), while the posts gathered: the John Evans Professorship at Northwestern from 2007, Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center from 2016, the presidency of the American Philosophical Association's Central Division, the Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Tanner Lecture. His late project he called black radical liberalism — holding liberalism to its own promises, with the receipts.

Cancer took him quickly; he died at Evanston, Illinois, on the twentieth of September 2021, at seventy, mourned by a discipline he had permanently enlarged. Honored be Charles W. Mills, who read the fine print of the social contract and published it.