I want to state for the record, right here at the start, that there is quite simply no other LIVING philosopher who has been more influential on my own work or thinking than Charles Mills. (I emphasize “living” as a perfunctory caveat, only because both Derrida and Rawls died during my lifetime as a professional Philosopher.) Over the last decade, I’ve taught a ridiculously wide range of classes– from standard HOS (history of philosophy) courses to various courses that fall within the broader category of “value theory” (social and political philosophy, normative and applied ethics, feminism, gender studies, race theory, queer theory, humanism and human rights, contemporary moral problems, etc) to courses in critical aesthetics, both for liberal arts Philosophy undergrads and for graduate students. There have been no classes that I’ve taught, exactly zero, which have not included some implicit or explicit reference to Mills’ work. He is, in my estimation, one of the most original, imaginative, critically acute, conceptually fecund and important “maverick” philosophers of my generation. If you are one of the unfortunate souls who have never engaged Mills’ work, stop reading this right now and correct that deficiency. Post haste.
I also feel very lucky to have had the good fortune to know Charles Mills personally, and I can attest without any reservation whatsoever that he is every bit as committed to ameliorating and/or correcting the injustices he sees in the world IRL as he is in his scholarly work.
At the risk of stepping-over into fangirl territory (though, tbh, how can a one avoid such in professional Philosophy, FFS?!), I also should note that without Mills’ absolutely essential philosophical contributions to classical liberal, Marxist and critical race theory– specifically, the conceptual apparatuses that he invented, articulated and masterfully employed (i.e., “epistemology of ignorance,” “racial contract” “subperson” and “Herrenvolk ethics,” not to mention his exhaustive and illuminating taxonomy of positions vis-á-vis the “metaphysics of race“)– I could never have begun to understand, much less think and write about the philosophical topics nearest and dearest to me. I repeat, Charles Mills is the single most influential living philosopher to and for me.
That said, alas, I’ve been given reason to be concerned by my two most recent encounters with Mills’ work: first, his “Scholars session” at #SPEP14 (the most recent conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) and, second, his interview with George Yancy in this week’s New York Times Opinionator/The Stone column (read in full here: “Lost in Rawlsland”). I think I can more or less generally summarize my concerns in the form of the following questions that, if I were George Yancy, I would have asked Mills to explain about the evolution of his work in recent years.
1. Why haven’t your explanations of the distinction between “classical liberalism” (qua ideal theory) as-it-has-been-historically-executed (qua “racial contract”) and that same ideal theory as-it-has-been-poorly- (i.e., contrary to its own principles) executed inclined you to simply reject “classical” (European Enlightenment) liberal theory as “liberal theory”? Or, isn’t there a modified/corrected of “liberal ideal theory” that is still palatable to you?
Here’s the question, I think, for those of us (“incorrigible proceduralists,” as I sometimes refer to myself) who unreservedly buy Mills’ account of the deeply embedded, constitutive and deformative elements of classical liberalism as it was conceived and executed by the (modern, European) philosophical “architects” of classical liberalism: isn’t there a real difference between a bad idea and a good idea poorly executed? Aren’t most, if not all, of the reformists that you advocate and engage critiquing liberalism on fundamentally “liberal” grounds? This is not a rhetorical question. I genuinely struggle to find anywhere in your work something with which to object to the status quo that is essential (and not, in classical philosophical terms, “accidental”) to the core principles of liberalism. Don’t we need the fundamental articulations of “ideal” liberal theory– i.e., procedural fairness and regularity, the rule of law, the maximin principle, the broadest possible interpretation of “personhood,” the fundamental prioritization of the Right over the Good, and the democratic determination of universalizable rights over (if not also against) individual goods–in order to combat injustices? Isn’t classical liberalism, imperfectly executed as it has (historically) been, still the best “ideal theory” for correcting the imperfections of liberal theory as it as been historically executed? Everything in your work, including and especially your most recent disavowal of Marxism inlines me to believe that you are so disposed to exactly this sort of distinction.
2. Why don’t you just concede, explicitly, the following: Marx never reckoned with the (historically demonstrable) fact that the fundamentally exploitative nature of Capitalism has always depended as much on SLAVE-LABOR– i.e., the “unpaid/unrecognized labor” historically performed by women, racial minorities, queers, stateless peoples or other “subpersons” of various ilk– every bit as much as it depends upon the alienation of the so-called proletariat?
Your work, perhaps above any other’s in the last 20 years (when, to your credit, hardly anyone else has been brave enough to be a Marxist!), has established the critical framework necessary for correcting/amending a longstanding and regrettable shortsightedness on the part of Marx’s own 19thC-centric critique (and various 20th century malformations of that same critique) of Capitalism’s necessary dependence upon the alienation, objectification and exploitation of the most uniquely “human” endeavor, the endeavor of “the worker,” i.e., free, conscious activity Why not bypass the whole critique of ideal liberalism and just get to the work of the real, extant problem, namely, that so-called “classical” liberalism has been entirely co-opted by “late” Capitalism? That is to say, isn’t both your critique of Classical Liberalism (see: pt 1 above) and your (somewhat outdated) Marxist critique of Capitalism left ultimately unresolved by your unwillingness to reckon with their mutual contamination? What 21stC Marxist, or what 21stC “classical” Liberal for that matter, doesn’t see that both of their “ideal” theoretical projects are more or less rendered sterile by virtue of their constitutive inability/refusal to recognize the very real reality of Capitalism’s dependence on unpaid labor and, in what amounts to the same thing, democracy’s dependence on capitalism?
3. What, exactly, do you mean by “black radical liberalism”? How do you distinguish that substantively from what we might call “Liberalism, properly-so-called”? Or, how do you distinguish that substantively from what we might call “Marxism, properly-so-called”?
I assume for the sake of argument– and I may be wrong in assuming this, please correct me if I am–that you intend your philosophical work, first and foremost, to make explicit the nature, constitution and operations of implicit structures of oppression that produce those phenomena in our world that we call “injustices.” In all fairness, your interview with George Yancy in the NYT Opinionator/The Stone piece this week was illuminating on this point… but, to be honest, it was illuminating in a kind of apophatic sort of way. Black radical liberalism is not classical liberalism, it’s not Marxism, it’s not perfectly absorbable into anything we might recognize as 20thC postcolonialism nor is it isomorphic with what 21stC hipsters might call “progressivism” For those who haven’t (like I have) been following your work for the past 20ish years, or for those who didn’t (like I did) attend your session at #SPEP14, I suspect the NYT piece clarified to some degree the difference between the aims of classical liberalism, Marxism and Critical Race Theory, demonstrating at least the manner in which (1) those three conceptual frameworks depend upon and are contaminated by several of the same objectionable first principles, (2) the way in which they may be strategically divorced from one another both in terms of their critical force and (in Aristotelian terms) their for-the-sake-of-which, and (3) the manner in which they each rely heavily upon an ultimately unsustainable work of philosophical fiction, i,e,, Rawls’ “original position” and his constitution of the agents in that position “behind a veil of ignorance.” So, on behalf of those who know your work and would willingly concede points 1-3 above, I’ll just ask again (as I asked you in your #SPEP14 panel): how do you substantiate these distinctions that have distinguished your career– between “racial liberalism,” “racial Marxism,” “racial radical Marxism” and (now) “black radical liberalism”?
I think the successful uptaake of your work has generated a new problem for you. You’ve done such an incredible job of articulating the taxonomy of racist prejudices, and subsequently (alongside Carol Pateman) reiterating the structurally-determined nature of that taxonomy, that you’ve inadvertently produced/discovered a phenomenon for which your structural account cannot account. Namely, intersectionality identity… and all of the messy, variant and, by definition, non-universalizable prejudices that intersectional identity both generates and is incapable, via structural analyses, to combat.
In sum, here is the problem that “intersectionality” presents for a dispositionally-inclined “structural” analyst like yourself (and, for the record, like me): how do you/we account for particular identities that resist not only categorization but, by virtue of that fundamental resistance to and refusal of categorization, any constitution of an idealized or idealizable structural critique at all? In your #SPEP14 Scholar session, you offered what seemed (to me, at least) an incredibly reductive example as a rejoinder to an “intersectionality” question posed to you. Your example, which posited as a thought-experiment something like the Kristallnacht scenario– in which, you claimed, there are instances in which some particular constitutive-identity-differences (in your example, racial differences) are clearly more “primary” than other differences– failed to address the “intersectionality” question at all. As someone who almost always counts herself, by default, on your side, I found myself a bit unmoored by your choice of examples, and also by what appeared to be, if not an intentional complicity with, at least an unreflective complicity with something that anyone familiar with your work (or you) might call an “epistemology of ignorance.”
In your NYT interview with Yancy, you claim: “..a majority of white Americans believe that whites are the race most likely to be the victims of racial discrimination. If that’s not an epistemology of ignorance, I don’t know what is!”
I agree, of course, that white Americans’ delusional belief in what is erroneously (and often criminally) called “reverse racism” is clear evidence of an epistemology ignorance. As a white American, I have you to thank for making that clear to me, and also for giving me the conceptual tools to make that insight clear to many of my white American students over the last decade. But thanks to you, and perhaps maybe in spite of you, I’m inclined to think that a certain reductive commitment to the narrative of the Racial Contract (however “radicalized”) is no longer philosophically sustainable, not only because it necessarily elides the lived-experiences of those living at/on/in-the-midst-of the border of our haphazardly- and collectively-established identity categories, identities that are non-universalizable and that we so consistently fail to recognize (a failing, as you rightly note, particularly and egregiously endemic to “Living in Rawlsland”), but also because what you are now calling “black radical liberalism” evidences its own kind of ignorances: of blackness, of radicalism and of liberalism.
In the end, I suppose I’m surprised to see your most recent “turn” (such that it is, and perhaps it isn’t at all) away from Marxism and more resolutely towards liberalism. I’d have gambled, if I were betting on such things, that you’d have turned in exactly the opposite direction. I consider myself a “classical liberal” (with a very bad conscience), by which I mean only that I remain convinced that the fundamental principles of democracy– human rights, the separation of powers, free and fair elections, due process, the rule of law, etc.– provide the best options for progressive change that we have available to us in the world right now, as it is. The Derridean in me believes that democracy isn’t necessarily the best, it’s just the Good that we have now, but it’s the Good that allows for the greatest possibility of a “better” à venir.
Still, give me a choice between classical liberalism and a classless society and I’ll take the latter every time. There are a lot of philosophers that inclined me toward that choice. Charles Mills is but one of them. So strange, then, to this bad-faith liberal who wants to turn her back on liberalism in favor of some iteration of Marxism to see Mills turn his back on Marxism in favor of liberalism.