ABSTRACTCharles Mills both severely criticizes and reluctantly accepts liberal political theory’s approach to race and racism. In this new book, he develops contract theory’s understanding of race and racism in the effort to resuscitate liberalism from the racist deathbed on which it lies. To do this he must wrestle with political forms of black resistance that comport uneasily with liberalism, at best: nationalism notably, but also other types of racially oriented collective subjectivity, for example, identity politics. The book represents a major advance in Mills’s thought, but his work remains uneasy about the instability of race and the flexibility of racism.