The lamentable death of the philosopher Charles W. Mills, on 20 September 2021, has not only stunned us but left us all the poorer intellectually, the more so, I believe, for the want of an adequate framework for appreciating the real scope of his contribution. Easily, Charles was one of the most formidable Jamaican intellectuals of his generation, a thinker whose body of work—including six published books: The Racial Contract; Blackness Visible; From Class to Race; Contract and Domination (with Carole Pateman); Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality; and Black Rights / White Wrongs—will have a lasting impact on a number of overlapping intellectual traditions.1
I didn’t know Charles very well. When I arrived in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago in August 1992, he had already been in the philosophy department at the University of Illinois, Chicago, for two years. For a time,...
