C W Mills
Biographic Data
| ID | 31004 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C W Mills |
| GIVEN NAMES | C W |
| FAMILY NAME | Mills |
| SIGNATURE | MILLS C W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3867-1550 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 119 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1766 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 119 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1939 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Global White Ignorance
In this seminal chapter, Charles Mills considers the global significance of the concept of "white ignorance," defined as a type of an ignorance among whites—an absence of belief, a false belief, a set of false beliefs, a pervasively deforming outlook—that is not contingent but rather causally linked to their whiteness. As he explains in this work, Mills’ first formulation of the concept was focused mainly on the United States. This chapter explor…
The Wretched of Middle‐Earth
This previously‐unpublished essay by the late Charles W. Mills (1951–2021) seeks to demonstrate the racially‐structured character of the universe created by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Written long before the popular film series, the essay critically examines Tolkien's novels and comments on the nature of fictional creation. Mills argues that Tolkien designs a racial hierarchy in the novels that recapitulates the cen…
Black Counterpublic Philosophy? Some Comments on George Yancy's Across Black Spaces
The publication of George Yancy's latest book, Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher (2020), provides a welcome opportunity to reflect not just on the book itself but on ‘Black’ public philosophy and how it should be conceptualised. In the first part of the essay, I look at public philosophy as a recent self‐conscious exercise in the profession and then – citing Critical Theory's coinage from decades ago of the i…
Race, Liberalism, and Global Justice
Locke on slavery
This chapter looks at the contested issue of Locke and African slavery. In the Second Treatise, Locke stipulates that slavery is only legitimate as punishment for a serious transgression of natural law, such as launching a war of aggression, and even then precludes the enslavement of innocent parties, such as the wives and children of the aggressors. Yet Locke had investments in the African slave trade, and wrote, or at least had a major hand in …
The racial state
As with the concepts of a “bourgeois” or “patriarchal” state, the idea of a “racial” state challenges conventional political taxonomies, especially when applied critically to self-conceived liberal democratic states. In this chapter, I begin in the first section by offering a general conceptualization of the racial state as involving system-wide and unjust differential racial group advantage that is causally linked to racial group power. In the s…
The chronopolitics of racial time
This paper begins with a general discussion of chronopolitics and how I intend to apply the term in connection with Eviatar Zerubavel's "time maps," using familiar religious and secular examples to illustrate the concept. Then, drawing on recent philosophical and historical work on race and racism, I argue for political "racial" times, albeit of contested periodizations. The uncontroversially racialized time of white modernity then provides the p…
The Structure of Power in American Society
Power has to do with whatever decisions men make about the arrangements under which they live, and about the events which make up the history of their times. The history of modern society may readily be understood as the story of the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power—in economic, in political, and in military institutions. In some societies, the innumerable actions of innumerable men modify their milieux, and so gradually m…
The Racial Contract
The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory a…
Black Radical Kantianism
Non-Cartesian Sums Philosophy and the African-American Experience
Response to Juliet Hooker’s review of Black Rights/White Wrongs
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Rethinking Propaganda and Ideology
Black Rights/White Wrongs
Liberalism’s promise of equal rights has historically been denied to blacks and other people of color. Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism argues that rather than being irrelevant to the workings of self-conceived liberal polities today, this history of denial and its current legacy should be regarded as continuing to shape liberalism in fundamental ways. As feminists have conceptualized the dominant form of liberalism as…
Ideology
"Ideology" as a concept was a crucial tool for Western progressives in universities in the 1960s and 1970s seeking both to theorize the repressive dimension of ostensibly liberal capitalist states and to challenge their own disciplines as generally complicit with that repression. This chapter tries to relate the concept of "ideology" to some of the literature in social epistemology inspired by Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Insofar as "id…
Intersectional Meditations
In this article the author responds to the mini-symposium on his work provided by Kathryn Gines and Shannon Sullivan, both of whom focus on the issue of intersectionality. Gines's article looks at the treatment of race and gender in one of the chapters in Mills's book with Carole Pateman, Contract and Domination (2007). Her major criticism centers on what she sees as Mills's failure to recognize nonwhite men's patriarchal domination of nonwhite w…
Righting racial wrongs
Let me begin by expressing my appreciation that such prominent and senior figures as Howard Winant, Stephen Steinberg, and Will Kymlicka, and a prolific rising star like Matthew Hughey, should have
Critical Philosophy of Race
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…
An Illuminating Blackness
Kritik der Soziologischen Denkweise
The Puerto Rican journey
Die amerikanische Elite
Thomas Pogge and His Critics
Introduction Alison M. Jaggar 1.Philosophy, Social Science, Global Poverty Joshua Cohen 2.Rights, Harm, and Institutions Kok-Chor Tan 3.'How much is enough Mr Thomas? How much will ever be enough?' Neera Chandhoke 4.What Negative Duties? Which Moral Universalism? Jiwei Ci 5.Non-Egalitarian Global Fairness Erin I. Kelly and Lionel K. McPherson 6.Realistic Reform of International Trade in Resources Leif Wenar 7.Realizing (Through Racializing) Pogge…
Retrieving Rawls for Racial Justice?
Black Rights/White Wrongs
The Sociological Imagination
Journal Article The Sociological Imagination. By C. Wright Mills. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. 234 pp. Index. $6.00.) Get access Journal of American History, Volume 46, Issue 2, September 1959, Pages 355–356, https://doi.org/10.2307/1891592 Published: 01 September 1959
The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists
This essay in the sociology of knowledge relates the typical concepts used in the field of social disorganization to the structure of American society and thebackgrounds and careers of social pathologists. It does not explicitly evaluate the worth of these concepts but characterizes the perspectives which are implied by the type and scope of problems usually considered in the literature of pathology
White Time
The racialization of space is the subject of a huge body of literature, most recently in George Lipsitz's (2011)How Racism Takes Place. But less has been done on the ways in which time could be racialized. Inspired by provocative treatments of the subject in writings by Michael Hanchard (1999) and Lawrie Balfour (2011), I suggest in this paper that we need to explore the workings of a "White temporal imaginary" analogous to Lipsitz's "White spati…
Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy
The past few decades have seen a wave of decolonization in the Western academy. Across a wide array of disciplines-anthropology, cultural studies, education, geography, history, international relations, law, above all, perhaps, literature-we have witnessed the beginnings (and sometimes much more) of a self-conscious rethinking and reorientation of the subject in the light of its past complicity, direct or indirect, with the colonial project. But …
Language, Logic, and Culture
Ideal Theory” as Ideology
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White Collar
Journal Article White Collar: The American Middle Classes Get access White Collar: The American Middle Classes. By C. Wright Mills. (New York : Oxford University Press (London : Geoffrey Cumberlege), 1951. Pp. xx + 378. 30s.) F. Thistlethwaite F. Thistlethwaite St. John’s College, Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 64, Issue 253, 1 March 1954, Pages 178–180, https://doi.…
The chronopolitics of racial time
This paper begins with a general discussion of chronopolitics and how I intend to apply the term in connection with Eviatar Zerubavel's "time maps," using familiar religious and secular examples to illustrate the concept. Then, drawing on recent philosophical and historical work on race and racism, I argue for political "racial" times, albeit of contested periodizations. The uncontroversially racialized time of white modernity then provides the p…
Methodological Consequences of the Sociology of Knowledge
An epistemological haziness has prevented a fruitful grasp of those junctures of actual thinking that are open to social-historical influences. The mooted problem of the logical consequences of sociology of knowledge has not been adequately instituted. One of the implications of the American pragmatism of Peirce, Dewey, and Mead for a sociology of knowledge is a fresch definition and solution of this issue. This article derives and elaborates thi…
The Puerto Rican Journey
The New Men of Power
Critical Race Theory
What Reading Does to People
C. Wright Mills
The American Business Elite
The Dictionary of American Biography contains 1,464 biographies of eminent American businessmen. Among them are most of the wellknown financial and business figures, as well as many others never widely known or else long forgotten. The announced criterion for inclusion in the D.A.B. is that the person “did something notable in some field of American life.” Over 100 “consulting specialists” handled the various lists of candidates for inclusion; th…
Retrieving Rawls for Racial Justice
Ideal Theory? as Ideology
Images of Man
The Sociological Imagination
The Middle Classes in Middle-Sized Cities
T HE PROBLEMS which the middle classes pose for the social scientist are typically metropolitan in character and nation-wide in scope. White-collar workers in particular, are thought of in connection with big cities, and most recent discussions of the Middle classes as a whole focus either upon the nation or upon the metropolis. The sociology and politics of these strata in middle-sized' cities may nevertheless be worthy of study. Such cities are…
Kant and Race, Redux
Race and the Social Contract Tradition
(2000). Race and the Social Contract Tradition. Social Identities: Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 441-462
The Racial Contract revisited
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…
Two Styles of Research in Current Social Studies
When in the course of our work we are uncertain, we sometimes become more concerned with our methods than with the content of our problems. We then try to clarify our conceptions and tighten our procedures. And as we re-examine studies that we feel have turned out well, we create conscious models of inquiry with which we try to guide our own work-in-progress
Race in a "Postracial" Epoch
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Language, Logic, and Culture
Methodological Consequences of the Sociology of Knowledge
An epistemological haziness has prevented a fruitful grasp of those junctures of actual thinking that are open to social-historical influences. The mooted problem of the logical consequences of sociology of knowledge has not been adequately instituted. One of the implications of the American pragmatism of Peirce, Dewey, and Mead for a sociology of knowledge is a fresch definition and solution of this issue. This article derives and elaborates thi…
A Marx for the Managers
What Reading Does to People
The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists
This essay in the sociology of knowledge relates the typical concepts used in the field of social disorganization to the structure of American society and thebackgrounds and careers of social pathologists. It does not explicitly evaluate the worth of these concepts but characterizes the perspectives which are implied by the type and scope of problems usually considered in the literature of pathology
Society and Nature
Symposium on the Significance of Max Scheler for Philosophy and Social Science. Marvin Farber
The American Business Elite
The Dictionary of American Biography contains 1,464 biographies of eminent American businessmen. Among them are most of the wellknown financial and business figures, as well as many others never widely known or else long forgotten. The announced criterion for inclusion in the D.A.B. is that the person “did something notable in some field of American life.” Over 100 “consulting specialists” handled the various lists of candidates for inclusion; th…
The Trade Union Leader
OF ALL THE conspicuous types in the United State, probably the least accurately known is the trade union leader. What, really, is his class origin, his place of birth, his religion, his educational equipment, his politics, his road to power in the union? In this article, for the first time, these questions are answered, and answered on the basis of emotionless statistics
Foundations of the Social Sciences.Otto Neurath
From Max Weber
From Max Weber
The Middle Classes in Middle-Sized Cities
T HE PROBLEMS which the middle classes pose for the social scientist are typically metropolitan in character and nation-wide in scope. White-collar workers in particular, are thought of in connection with big cities, and most recent discussions of the Middle classes as a whole focus either upon the nation or upon the metropolis. The sociology and politics of these strata in middle-sized' cities may nevertheless be worthy of study. Such cities are…
From Max Weber
Essays in Sociology
International Relations and Sociology
The New Men of Power
The New Men of Power -- America's Labor Leaders
Trade Union Wage Policy
The Puerto Rican Journey
The New Middle Class, II
Ever since the new middle class began numerically to displace the old, its political role has been an object of query and debate. The political question has been closely linked with another—that of the position of new middle-class occupations in modern stratification.
The Puerto Rican Journey, New York's Newest Migrants
White Collar
In print for fifty years, White Collar by C. Wright Mills is considered a standard on the subject of the new middle class in twentieth-century America. This landmark volume demonstrates how the conditions and styles of middle class life-originating from elements of both the newer lower and upper classes-represent modern society as a whole. By examining white-collar life, Mills aimed to learn something about what was becoming more typically Americ…
The Lonely Crowd
Men in Business
Sociology (85 works) · Political science (65 works) · Law (57 works) · Philosophy (55 works) · Epistemology (45 works) · Politics (38 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (22 works) · Computer Science (21 works)