I spent more than an hour this morning watching the Tanner lecture given a year ago at the University of Michigan by Charles Mills. It turned out an absolutely perfect complement to the course I will be teaching at UNC Chapel Hill in the spring semester. Here is the course description:
Course description
for Philosophy 370
Spring, 2022 Instructor: Robert Paul Wolff
The defining feature of the modern state is de facto legitimacy,
the claim made by the state to have the right to issue laws and compel
obedience to them. The most important argument supporting this claim to have
been put forward in the last 350 years is the theory of the Social Contract.
This course will be devoted to an in-depth examination of that theoretical
justification for the authority of the state. The course will be divided into
three roughly equal segments. In the first segment, we will look at two classic
texts that set forth different versions of the theory of the social contract: John
Locke’s Second Treatise C6oncerning
Civil Government and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract. In the second segment, we will examine an
extremely influential modern revision of the theory put forward by the famous
American philosopher John Rawls in his book
A Theory of Justice. In the third segment, we will examine a powerful
racial and ideological critique of the tradition of the social contract by the
important Jamaican philosopher Charles Mills, set out in his book The Racial Contract. Each segment will
be concluded in an unusual manner to be revealed at the first meeting of the
course.
9 comments:
I wonder how many you'll hook with that last comment? :)
-Tyler
Why do you skip Hobbes?
In my undergrad political philosophy course we read Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract, the title of which is clearly inspired by Mills' book. (If memory serves Pateman was a grad student of Mills.)
Pateman's Sexual Contract is a fantastic book, and I had always assumed that the title was the inspiration for Mills' book.
-- Jim
DudeDiogenes - if anything, you've got the order of influence backwards. Pateman's _The Sexual Contract_ was published in 1988, while Mills's _The Racial Contract_ was published in 1997. Mills mentions the influence of Pateman (who is about 10 years older than Mills and never worked at the same university as him, let alone be one of his students) along with encouragement and support from Bob in the introduction to his book.
The famous Rawls and the important Mills - that gives it away a bit, doesn't it?
What is the nature of the legitimate state? I remember you teaching that at UNASS. Great subject. I am dusting off my old class notes.
Will this course be available online?
I am teaching a similar (?) course online at UPEI in January 2022, using audio podcasts and a Moodle web site system for course materials. My course outline last time:
Social Philosophy 2210:
The goal of this course is to explore the legitimacy of governments as social contracts and
the origin of moral norms such as liberty and equality. We will begin with a focus on Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690). Then, we will read nine essays in John Rawls' Collected Papers, in order to develop a systematic understanding of the recent renewal of contractarian thought and analytical political philosophy. We will learn about Rawls’ influential ideas concerning the burdens of reason, justice as fairness, political liberalism, the critique of metaphysics and the rationally limited role of religious thinking in liberal democracies, overlapping consensus and the ideal of public reason. Finally, we will study major criticisms of Rawls and liberalism in the last 6 classes in order to raise our engagement with social philosophy to the level of authentic dialectic. The "critics" I add on are C.B. Macpherson, R.P. Wolff (The Abstractness of Rawls' Theory), D. Gauthier. Mills (Racial Contract, Rawls on Race, Whiteness of Political Philosophy, The Domination Contract), Martha Nussbaum, Carole Pateman (Sexual Contract, The Settler Contract), Iris Marion Young, Katrina Forrester, and John Kekes (Against Liberalism). The Collected Papers of Rawls works better with students than A Theory of Justice, as taught to me by Kai Nielsen. This is an undergrad course for majors so it is tough reading.
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