Connecting domination contracts

In Black Rights/White Wrongs, Charles Mills continues his critique of contemporary American political philosophy for ignoring issues of racial oppression, and in particular for ignoring the way that liberal social contracts rest on underlying domination contracts. In this commentary, I will discuss some of the new research inspired by Mills’ account of domination contracts, including recent accounts of the “capability contract” and the “species contract”, and explore how they relate to Mills’ own work on the “racial contract”. While this new research on diverse domination contracts confirms the richness of Mills’ analysis of the social contract tradition, it may also require some revisions to his own preferred vision of how we theorize racial justice.