Abstract
Toward the end of his classic study The Racial Contract, Charles Mills describes his project as “really in the spirit of a racially informed Ideologiekritik” (1997, p. 129). The concept of ideology, as Mills knows (1985, 1989, 1994), is vigorously contested not only in terms of its legitimacy but also in terms of its meaning (both within and without the Marxist tradition). Is “the Racial Contract” in the spirit of ideology critique as understood by Althusser? By Mannheim? By Lenin? While he does not offer much by way of elaboration in that text, he does elaborate his understanding of ideology in a recent essay: “Ideologies are illusions, but illusions whose power and resistance to elimination are based in material conditions” (2017c, p. 104). This eliminates certain interpretations, but leaves other divergent options open. The most famous concept to emerge from The Racial Contract, the epistemology of ignorance, suggests a strong correlation between such “illusions” and group status. The “Ideology” essay confirms this: “[ideology involves] a misrepresentation…motivated by group interests and phenomenologically supported by…group experience” (p. 105). This raises a host of follow-up questions, some which Mills approaches and some which he does not: are the “material conditions” that produce illusions reducible to the domination of one group by another? Does the oppressed group also suffer from these illusions, or only the oppressing? What is the precise relation between “group interests” and the illusions in question?