CHARLES MILLS, ONCE AGAIN

I have now finished my rereading of The Racial Contract, and I am more than ever convinced of its brilliance. It is, I genuinely believe, the most important (and yes, that does mean the best) work of political philosophy in the English language in the past century. It has one great virtue that is very rare in political philosophy or indeed in any philosophy: it is true. For obvious professional reasons, philosophers tend not to treat truth as an important criterion of excellence but I am old enough and crotchety enough to think that it matters.

And yes, S. Wallerstein to the contrary notwithstanding, it is a book principally about European and American political theory of the past four centuries, not a book especially about America.  I will be very curious to see how it is received by my students at UNC Chapel Hill next semester.

By the way, I learned that UNC professors are not only not permitted to require that students be vaccinated, they are not even permitted to ask whether they have been vaccinated.  The recent much reported breakthrough infections of prominent people who have been spending time around the unvaccinated have given me pause about the wisdom of teaching in person. I suspect I will be permitted to teach virtually by zoom if I wish, but I really did not enjoy the five sessions of my seminar that I did on zoom in 2020 after the pandemic hit and I am hesitant to take that step.

WHAT'S UP?

Thanks to Google's various blogging functionalities, I can keep track of how many people visit this site each day – or more precisely, how many visits there are, which is of course not the same thing. I average somewhere between 1100 and 1500 a day. For the last several days I have been pressing 10,000.

What 's up?

RESPONSE TO A COMMENT

 Unknown asks, "In your lectures of the Critique you didn't seem too keen on Hegel, what gives?"

It is quite simple. I have spent my entire life trying as hard as I could to take complex and difficult ideas and clarify them in my mind until I was able to explain them simply and clearly, so that my readers or students could see their beauty and power. Hegel, it seems to me, takes relatively simple ideas and does everything in his power to make them as obscure and difficult as possible.

I hate that.

While I am at it, let me note that I did not say The Racial Contract was the most widely read book or the most influential book or the book with the biggest reputation or the most frequently translated book on political philosophy of the last century. I simply said that I thought it was the best. That, I trust everyone will agree, is quite different.

GOOD NEWS

Well, Columbia did not want my graduate course called Marx, Freud, Marcuse: Thesis, Anthithesis, Synthesis.  But UNC does, so I will be teaching it in spring of 2022. It should be a blast.

What is more, I did a trial run to Caldwell Hall this morning and made it up the steep stairs to the second floor where I will be teaching starting January. I will not say it was easy, but I made it all the way up and all the way down.

One of the odd side effects of Parkinson's disease is that my voice is now rather soft and wearing a mask, I was concerned whether students would be able to hear me, so I am getting a headset that connects without a cord to a speaker.  When I went looking for it on Amazon it popped right up, advertised as useful for teachers during the pandemic. I do not like Jeff Bezos but  you have to admit he has made life a great deal easier.

MILLS CONTINUES TO DELIGHT

I continue to find every page of Charles Mills's book brilliant. By the way, S. Wallerstein is quite wrong about the book. Mills says relatively little about America in it – his focus is mostly on European thought. It is a great sadness to me that I am unable to tell Charles how much I am enjoying re-reading his book and how important I believe it is.  Students who stay with me through this course are in for a treat.

THINGS TO COME

I have now reread about 1/3 of The Racial Contract by Charles Mills, the last major work to be assigned in my course next semester, and my long standing impression is confirmed that it is the most important work of political theory to appear in English in more than a century – and yes that includes A Theory of Justice and even (hem, hem) my own In Defense of Anarchism. It is an extraordinary book and, remarkable in the literature of political theory, true.

 

This exercise in rereading has been a delight for me and I am looking forward with great enthusiasm to the opportunity to teach the course next semester (assuming that I can climb the steep flight of stairs to the second floor of Caldwell Hall where it meets.) I am going to have to warn the students that it will be an extremely difficult course but I make no apologies for that. This course would do well in any graduate program in America.

THE SUNDAY TIMES CROSSWORD PUZZLE

Spoiler alert: this is about today’s New York Times crossword puzzle so if you like doing it and have not tackled it yet do not read this blog post.

 

I solved it today but I got stuck in one part of it for some while. There was a clue for a three word space that read something like “word that can be used either before or after pack.”  I thought about that for a bit and said to myself, “pack rat, rat pack” and filled in “rat.”  Well, it turns out the correct answer is “ice,” as in” pack ice, ice pack.”  I could not think of a third three – letter possibility. Can anybody?

 

On another matter entirely, I have been plugging ahead with my rereading of the books I will assign next semester in my course at UNC on political philosophy. One third of the course will be devoted to A Theory of Justice. I am going to ask the students also to read the book I wrote about Rawls as part of that segment of the course. I published it 44 years ago and have not looked at since. Yesterday I finished reading it for the first time since it appeared and I was appalled to discover how technical it is. I am afraid I am going to have to warn the students that this will be a very hard course. On the other hand, once they get finished with that we will move on to The Racial Contract by the late Charles Mills and that will be a really boffo way to wrap up the course. What a wonderful book that is and what a great loss for Mills to die so young.

 

But then all death is a great loss. Emily Dickinson somewhere wrote a poem asking why God requires us to die in order to see Him. Since He is omnipotent, He could have arrange things differently, after all.