Mills: the social contract had a racial contract hiding inside it

Charles Mills argued that the famous 'social contract' of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau was never truly universal: it was really an agreement among white people to treat non-white people as its objects, not its parties. Formal talk of equal citizens sat on top of an unspoken racial hierarchy deciding who really counted as a person. He called this hidden agreement the Racial Contract.

— Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract — Cornell University Press, 1997
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