Racial Contracts

Whereas John Rawls and others, in the 20th-century revival of contractualism, took the hypothetical contracts of John Locke and Immanuel Kant as models and sought to justify norms as the output of imagined choices made in designed situations of deliberation, Charles Mills seeks to recover a different, secondary strand of contractualist theory, one centering on the explanatory potential of non-ideal agreements. Such non-ideal contract theory, of which Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “Second Discourse on Inequality” is locus classicus ...