Charles W. Mills

Charles W. Mills (1951–2021) was a Jamaican-American political philosopher whose work reshaped philosophical discussions of race, justice, and the social order. Born in London to Jamaican parents, he grew up in Kingston and first studied physics at the University of the West Indies before earning master’s and doctoral degrees in philosophy at the University of Toronto. His doctoral thesis examined ideology in the thought of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Mills taught philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Illinois Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His six books and more than 100 articles established him as a leading theorist of racial injustice and non-ideal political philosophy. In The Racial Contract (1997), he applied social-contract theory to argue that modern political orders were structured by racial domination; later works, including Contract and Domination and Black Rights/White Wrongs, continued his critique of the racial assumptions embedded in liberal philosophy. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, delivered the American Philosophical Association’s 2016 John Dewey Lecture, and served as president of the APA’s Central Division in 2017–2018. Mills died on September 20, 2021, at age 70.