Hegel und Haiti. Für eine neue Universalgeschichte

Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas

by Susan Buck-Morss

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a “new humanism,” one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Theory, Race, Politics, Anthropology

217 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Susan Buck-Morss is an American philosopher and intellectual historian. She is currently Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Reviews

[Dusty · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are substantial limitations to Susan Buck-Morss's claim, in this revered and controversial collection of essays, that German intellectual G.W.F. Hegel's master-slave dialectic is, in fact, a philosophical commentary on the Haitian Revolution. For one, although she is brilliant, she is not a trained scholar of the Caribbean; if she were, she probably would not find such parallels between European Freemasonry, African secret societies, and Haitian vodou, and she almost certainly would not classify the latter as a "cult." For another, as David Scott points out, she seems rather too eager to redeem Hegel (and, by extension, the school of European Enlightenment thinkers who lauded human freedom for white people at exactly the same time as their societies withheld it from black people). Limitations aside, however, the two primary essays are extremely readable and poignant, and Buck-Morss brings the Caribbean to European studies (and vice-versa) in illuminating ways. My recommendation: Follow the author's recommendation to read the first essay as an afterward, rather than an introduction, to "Hegel and Haiti." Although insightful, it is a tedious introduction to what is otherwise a profound and accessible book.

[Myriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This theoretical text was worth the read for Buck-Morss expansion on her earlier essay from which the book takes its name, "Hegel and Haiti." Here, Buck-Morss expands on her ideas that would place Haiti at the center of Hegel's ruminations on lord and bondsman/master-slave dialectics; she also attempts to think through what it might mean to philosophy to rethink Haiti's role in concepts of modernity and history. Here, however, Buck-Morss takes a step back from her more radical earlier essay to state that hers is not essentially a quarrel with Hegel but on the omissions with which he participated. She gets somewhat lost in her own argument while making the novice error of overrelying on a few key (though notable) outside sources (such as Trouillot and Dayan); much of Buck-Morss' arguments have been made before, by Haitian scholars, throughout the twentieth century. It's a sad commentary that Haiti's historical impact and contribution can only be taken seriously when more mainstream scholars decide to take these seriously, legitimizing in retrospect the efforts of dozens of well-regarded (primarily in Francophone and French studies) Haitianist scholars. The final essay of the collection should have been omitted or worked over at more length; Buck-Morss here gets lost in efforts to make connections between Islam and Haiti and US foreign policy which simply do not work...they may have sounded good in a lecture but don't hold up to scrutiny on the page. Still, worth the read for scholars of race relations, history, Hegel & Haiti.

[Marvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Der erste Teil zu "Hegel und Haiti" ist herausragend, der zweite zur "Universalgeschichte" leider ganz und gar nicht.

[Sohum · Rating 3 out of 5]

the argument isn't earth-shattering, but the bibliography was good, and the writing is exquisite.

[Jeune Fille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Explores the glaring discrepancy between thought (enlightenment) & practice (slavery) during the development of capitalism from its mercantile to its protoindustrial form.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

...a strict, positivist empiricism is not an option in historical cognition because facts without concepts are meaningless.

I picked up this book after watching a discussion of Grace Lee Boggs' legacy at the National Humanities Conference and learning that she pushed Hegel's writing on everyone she mentored. This book was brought up in the discussion (I can't remember whether it was said that GLB read the book, or just one of the speakers at the event). In any case, the thesis sounded interesting.

The book consists of two essays and introductions to each. The author is a philosopher, not a historian, and the result is that her essays speak more to the philosophy of history than history itself. It's not that I am new to the idea of silences in history, but I think the particular examples here opened my eyes (ears?) to new ways of seeing (hearing?) them.

Buck-Morss makes a solid case that Hegel followed news of the contemporaneous Haitian Revolution, and she makes a fair case that Hegel's master/slave dialectic was influenced by the events despite no explicit reference to them. She points out that she is not the first to identify this connection: the fact that Caribbean scholars have been writing about it without broader attention only serves to illustrate her questions about the construction of history and its omissions.

A lot of reviewers here suggest that the second essay ("Universal History") is weaker, and I'll admit that I don't feel I have a strong enough background in the underlying concepts to follow the thesis fully. One reviewer here asks how Buck-Morss is justified in "equating the ideas of 'universal history' and 'universal humanity'"... I don't know the difference, and I missed that argument in the text... So I feel poorly equipped to assess the essay as a whole. That being said, I almost didn't read the essay due to the copious strong critiques, and I'm glad I decided to read it anyway. The essay "Universal History" sparked the most insight for me as a non-Historian, non-Philosopher. Specifically, the section titled "The Politics of History Writing" helped me to see dynamics in the construction of history that had previously been invisible to me.

I loved her description of the differing views of the purpose of history between David Brion Davis (author of The Problem of Slavery series) and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (authors of The Many-Headed Hydra).

Facts, for Davis, are a politics, the goal of which is demythification... Linebaugh and Rediker want to go a step further, however, not only unsettling the dominant account but producing another, a counternarrative that does more than criticize the status-quo; it inspires action to change it... Countermyth is myth all the same, Davis would argue, and he is right to point out the dangers. But a strict, positivist empiricism is not an option in historical cognition because facts without concepts are meaningless. England is a concept not a fact, as are "Europe," "Enlightenment," "economy," "progress," and civilization." Whether or not such concepts are mythical is a collective, evaluative judgment that changes historically. This is the political issue precisely.

Maybe that kind of thought is old hat for people with more specialized backgrounds, but it's the kind of analysis that almost makes me want to drop everything and start a PhD. Alas, I'm already middle-aged and not quite ready to give up the life I've made for myself in Alaska. I'll probably stay an armchair intellectual the rest of my life.

I loved thinking about the idea that "Fifteenth-century Portugal... is a metaphor." I feel like this is exactly what has made reading about pre-modern history so confusing for me. The pre-modern organizing categories are different from mine, and I keep trying to apply mine to their context.

Generally speaking, I appreciate any book that inspires me add other books to my to-read pile. This one did that many times over.

[Mahdi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the first essay, but the second – "Universal History" – was bizarre, not at all consonant or consistent with itself, and lastly, its abrupt references to Islam, even if one is charitable, are problematic

[Santijou]

Read during Rick's The Palestine Sessions reading group

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 5 out of 5]

"HEGEL AND HAITI" was written as a mystery story.

I did not set out to write about Hegel or Haiti. In the 1990s, I was working on a different project. With the end of the Cold War, neo­liberalism rose to ideological dominance on a global scale.

By the time Marx studied economics two generations later, it was described as the "dismal science"; today's philosophers seldom show interest.

Hegel is in fact describing the deterritoralized, world market of the European colonial system, and he is the first philosopher to do so.

Compared with civil society in the old sense, bourgeois society is unpatriotic, driven to push beyond national limits in trade. Commerce is bor­derless; its place is the sea.

We are compelled to ask: what is the connection between the master-slave relationship and the new global economy?

The Haitian Revolution lies at the crossroads of multiple discourses as a defining moment in world history.

Scholars of modern philosophies of freedom are hobbled in attempt­ing to do their work in ignorance of Haitian history.

One caveat deserves consideration. If it is indisputable that Hegel knew about Haiti, as did indeed the entire European reading pub­lic, why is there not more explicit discussion in his texts?

To what degree is Hegel himself ac­countable for the effective silencing of the Haitian Revolution?

There are thus multiple, quite mundane reasons for Hegel's silence, from fear of political repercussions, to the impact of Napoleon's victory, to the hazards of moving and personal uproot­ings.

But there is no doubt that Hegel and Haiti belong together.

By The Eighteenth Century, slavery had become the root metaphor of Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations.

This glaring discrepancy between thought and practice marked the period of the transformation of global capitalism from its mer­cantile to its protoindustrial form.

One would think that, surely, no rational, "enlightened" thinker could have failed to notice. But such was not the case.

My apologies, but this apparent detour is the argument itself.

Hobbes accepted slavery as "an inevitable part of the logic of power.'' Even the inhabitants of "civil and flour­ishing nations" could revert again to this state. Hobbes was honest and unconflicted about slavery- John Locke less so.

The Enlightenment philosopher ...declared all men equal and saw private property as the source of inequality, but he never put two and two together to discuss French slavery for economic profit as central to arguments of both equality and property.

In evoking the liberties of natural rights theory, the American colonists as slave owners were led to "a monstrous inconsistency."

the new nation, conceived in liberty, tolerated the "monstrous inconsistency," writing slavery into the United States Constitution.

These events, leading to the complete freedom of the slaves and the colony, were unprecedented. "

Events in Saint-Domingue were central to contemporary attempts to make sense out of the reality of the French Revolution and its aftermath. We need to be aware of the facts from this perspective .

This was a revo­lution against, not merely the tyranny of a particular ruler, but of all past traditions that violated the general principles of human lib­erty.

Mulattoes owned an estimated one-third of the cultivated land in Saint-Domingue. Ought not they to be in­cluded, and not only they, but the free blacks as well?

The unfolding of the logic of freedom in the colonies threatened to unravel the total institutional framework of the slave economy that supported such a substantial part of the French bourgeoisie, whose political revolution, of course, this was .

And yet only the logic of freedom gave legitimacy to their revolution in the universal terms in which the French saw themselves.

The Haitian Revolution was the crucible, the trial by fire for the ideals of the French Enlightenment. And every European who was part of the bourgeois reading public knew it.

And­ need I keep it from you any longer? -another regular reader of Minerva, as we know from his published letters, was the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Marcus Rainsford wrote in 1805 that the cause of the Haitian Revolution was the "spirit of liberty."

Hegel understands the position of the master in both political and economic terms.

But as the dialectic develops, the apparent dominance of the master re­verses itself with his awareness that he is in fact totally dependent on the slave.

The goal of this liberation, out of slavery, cannot be subjugation of the mas­ter in turn, which would be merely to repeat the master's "existential impasse," but, rather, elimination of the institution of slavery
altogether.

Given the facility with which this dialectic of lordship and bondage lends itself to such a reading, one wonders why the topic Hegel and Haiti has for so long been ignored. Not only have Hegel scholars failed to answer this question; they have failed, for the past two hundred years, even to ask it.

Surely a major reason for this omission is the Marxist appropriation of a social interpretation of Hegel's dialectic.

In the twentieth century, this Hegelian-Marxist interpretation had powerful propo­nents, including Georg Lukacs and Herbert Marcuse, as well as Alexandre Kojeve, whose lectures on The Phenomenology of Mind were a brilliant rereading of Hegel's texts through Marxian glasses.

It is clear that Hegel is speaking here of modern slavery, and clear that con­sciousness of one's freedom demands that one become free, not only in thought, but in the world.

We would not share the perplexity of the editor of these lectures, who noted in 1983 that Hegel "spoke surprisingly frequently of slaves."

And we would consider it confirmation (whereas others have hardly noticed) that Hegel in his late work The Philosophy of Subjective Spirit mentions the Haitian Revolution by name.

Freemasonry was a crucial factor in the uprisings in Saint-Domingue.

But at least in regard to the abolition of slavery, Hegel's retreat from revolutionary radicalism was clear.

Haiti was once again in the news in the teens and twenties, hotly debated by abolitionists and their opponents in the British press, including in the Edinburgh Review, which we know for certain Hegel was then reading.

We have no record as to whether these debates caused Hegel, as well, to reconsider Haiti's "great experiment." What is clear is that in an effort to become more erudite in African
studies during the 1820s, Hegel was in fact becoming dumber.

It is sadly ironic that the more faithfully his lectures reflected Europe's conventional scholarly wisdom on African society, the less enlightened and more bigoted they became.

Why is ending the silence on Hegel and Haiti important?

Hegel's moment of clarity of thought would need to be juxtaposed to that of others at the time...
For all his bru­tality and revenge against whites, Dessalines saw the realities of European racism most clearly.

Even more, Hegel's moment would need to be juxtaposed to the moments of clarity in action: the French soldiers sent by Napoleon to the colony who , upon hearing these former slaves singing the "Marseillaise," wondered aloud if theywere not fighting on the wrong side; the Polish regiment under Leclerc's command who disobeyed orders and refused to drown six hundred captured Saint-Domiguans.

There are many examples of such clarity, and they belong to no side, no one group exclusively.

TODAY'S NEOLIBERAL HEGEMONY sets the stage for "Universal History" that continues in the spirit of "Hegel and Haiti" to un­earth certain repressions surrounding the historical origins of modernity. Present realities demand such historical remappings as an alternative to the fantasies of clashing civilizations and exclusion­ ary redemptions.

Political guilt has its own ambivalence, because refusing to do your socially prescribed duty in order to do right entails being a traitor ... and risking the loss of the collective's protection as a consequence.

The critical writing of history is a continuous struggle to liberate the past from within the unconscious of a collective that forgets the conditions of its own existence.

"Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery," wrote Eric Williams in 1944, and recent scholarship confirms it.

The emergence of racial distinctions guaranteed the property rights of masters, while policing the boundary between slaves and liberty.

Within a decade, the very success of the Haitian Revolution intensified racism as a means of segregating Europe from the impact of global events. But the story is not one-sided.

In the Americas, social stratification became integrated into the ideology of colonial independence. So history is not only about Haiti's virtue and Europe's sin. There is a "darker side" within both experiences of modernity.

Davis discerns in British antislavery writings "an almost obsessive concern with ide­alizing hierarchical order," describing one of their number, the Reverend James Ramsay, as making "no attempt to disguise his admiration for the discipline of the sugar plantation."

By imagining modernity as syn­onymous with Europe, we have misunderstood how much modern capitalism was a product of the colonial system, which was in many ways ahead of European developments.

Ship mutinies were political acts. Pirate crews became multiracial, multiethnic "hydrarchies," self-governing counter regimes that administered justice, shared wealth, and waged war.

In the Age of Revolution, such proponents of "universalism from below" spoke of one race, the human race, an idea articulated far more broadly than the later course of history would have it appear.

Linebaugh and Rediker, contemporary cosmopolitans and champions of the newest victims of global exploitation, express regret at the failure of this "conspiracy for the human race": "What was left behind was national and partial: the English working class, the black Haitian, the Irish diaspora."

He is wary of writing that politicizes history as a morality story of good and evil that misses the contingencies and complexities of events, the imperfect knowledge and unintended effects of human actors, and turns history into a romanticized struggle between heroes and villains.

Countermyth is myth all the same, Davis would argue, and he is right to point out the dangers. But a strict, positivist empiricism is not an option in historical cognition, because facts without concepts are meaningless.

Whether or not such concepts are mythical is a collective, evaluative judgment that changes historically. This is the political issue precisely.

Paradoxically, even when collective actors proclaim themselves as the standard-bearers for universal history­ indeed, especially when they make this avant-gardist claim- they establish their identity in contrast to others, to outsiders.

Can collective sub­jectivity be imagined as inclusive as humanity itself? Is there a way
to universal history today?

The first step would be to recognize not only the contingency of historical events, but also the indeterminacy of the historical cate­gories by which we grasp them.

Napoleon's "French" army sent to restore slavery in Haiti included Germans and Poles.

Trade societies connected cities rather than land masses; territo­rial borders were routinely ignored, and smuggling was ordinary business.

The concept of porosity, exposing ungovernable connections, is relevant to feminist issues.

Porosity characterized the ex­istential boundaries of what was for all participants indeed a New World. Its reorganization would be the consequence of violence.

That such enthusiasm characterized the young Hegel's recep­tion of the Saint-Domingue Revolution, is the claim of "Hegel and Haiti."

Concept took precedence over content, and atten­tion to historical facts was overwhelmed by Hegel's enthusiasm for the philosophical system itself.

The origin of slaves sold in the Americas was ascertained through their recollections of the positions of the stars during their land journeys to the African coast. Astrological signs figured centrally in New World spatial reck­oning.

All were champions of cosmopolitanism, enthusiastically embracing the idea of global brotherhood. Some were radically inclusive in their membership. But only a minority were racially mixed, others exclusively black.

The millions of slaves brought to the New World, often por­trayed as an undifferentiated mass, were as varied in language, re­ligion, customs, and political institutions as European populations m the colonies.

It was the shared trauma of defeat, slavery, banishment, and the horrors of the Atlantic crossing and plantation labor that Vodou, in a burst of cultural creation, transformed into a community of trust.

Vodou was public religion as well as a secret society. Like Free­masonry, given the need to communicate visually when common language was lacking, emblems, secret signs, mimetic performance, and ritual were fundamental.

Emblems are silent signs, meaningful only when interpreted, and here the mode of interpretation is decisive. Vodou was constructed out of the allegorical mode of seeing that experiences history as catastrophe.

For those who have been defeated by history, whose so­cial relations have been severed, who live in exile, meaning drains out of the objects of a world that has been impoverished by physical distance and personal loss.

In Vodou, the collective life of not one but multiple cultures has been shattered, surviving as debris and in decay. Emblems are hollowed out; their meanings have become ar­bitrary.

What does it mean to call the North Kongo secret societies of Lembo the "rightful source" of the Haitian Vodou practices of the same name, when the former was an organization of slave traders, and Vodou practices were performed by the very individuals they sold?

Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person's nonidentity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to uni­versal, moral sentiment,the source today of enthusiasm and hope. It is not through culture, but through the threat of culture's betrayal that consciousness of a common humanity comes to be.

Universality is in the moment of the slaves' self-awareness that the situation was not humanly tolerable, that it marked the betrayal of civilization and the limits of cultural understanding, the nonrational, and nonrationalizable course of human history that outstrips in its inhumanity anything that a cultural outlaw could devise.

These fragments: a conspiracy; a mass meeting at night at Bois Caiman ; slaves assembled in the forest; a fiery speech by a huge black man called Boukman; a blood oath of brotherhood; a sacred ceremony led by a black priestess called Fatiman; the slaugh­ter of a black pig; ritual singing and dance. Days later, the violence begins.

All of these interpretations have been put forward of an event that may not even have happened.

In its early experience of impoverished dependence on the global economy, in its early struggle against Western policies of genocide, and in its postcolonial, hierarchical articulation of social elites, Haiti indeed stands at the vanguard of the history of modernity.

The Haitian experience was not a modern phenomenon too, but first. Haiti's founding fathers used a discourse of nationalist unity ideologically to push the freed slaves back into conditions of plantation labor and production for export, a specifically modern political strategy that is hardly outdated. Haitian elites were the first in history to embrace the word "black" as their political identity, a position totally compatible then (and now) with social hierarchies based on the color of one's skin.

To narrate Haiti's history as good versus evil stunts our capacity for moral judgment. Past suffer­ing does not guarantee future virtue. Only a distorted history is morally pure.


Critical thought is empowered by the facts only by being pushed over the brink of the discursive worlds that contain those facts.

There is a second option. We can accept Boukman as a preacher of jihad. But if we take this path, then the time-honored critical narrative of radical liberty is exposed to a precarious extension.

In the name of universal humanity, the vanguard justifies its own violence as higher truth . At this crossroad Osama bin Laden meets Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Vladimir Lenin meets George W. Bush. If we do not wish to go that route-and I do not- then our tools of historical mapping are in need of radical refashioning.

The Haitian Revolution is a triumph for universal history only in our imaginations. That is not insignificant. Empathic imagination may well be our best hope for humanity. The problem is that we never seem to imagine this humanity inclusively enough, but only by excluding an antithetical other, a collective enemy beyond hu­manity's pale.

Let us allow that the events of the Haitian Revolution cannot be contained within a tale of historical redemption- Hegelian, Marx­ist, Muslim, or otherwise. Indeed, viewed from the midst of the slave uprising, no clear historical narrative emerges of any kind.

The Haitian Revolution experienced all the existential uncertainties and moral ambiguities of a struggle for lib­eration under conditions of civil war and foreign occupation.

Moreover, as ideology, Haiti's black identity functioned as a national myth that was in tension with the idea of universal emancipation to which the had given birth .

Haitians saw themselves as "a symbol of black dignity and black power" in terms that were "unambiguously ethno-national."

Its absolutely new extension of both freedom and citizenship transracially and transnationally, does not lend itself to political appropriation as a definition of national identity.

Radical antislavery is a human in­vention that belongs to no one, because it belongs to everyone. Such ideas are the residues of events, rather than the possession of a par­ticular collective, and even if they fail, they can never be forgotten.

Universal history engages in a double liberation, of the histor­ical phenomena and of our own imagination: by liberating the past we liberate ourselves.

Liberation from the exclusionary loyalties of collective identities is precisely what makes progress possible in history, which is not to say that global trade fosters understanding, peace, or universality (it con­nects directly with the sale of arms, the initiation of wars, and the degradation and displacement of laboring people).

Truth is singular, but it is a con­tinuous process of inquiry because it builds on a present that is moving ground. History keeps running away from us, going places we, mere humans , cannot predict.

The politics of scholarship that I am suggesting is neutrality, but not ofthe nonpartisan, "truth lies in the middle" sort; rather, it is a radical neutrality that insists on the porosity of the space between enemy sides , a space contested and precarious, to be sure, but free enough for the idea of human­ity to remain in view.

Between uniformity and indeterminacy of historical meaning, there is a dialectical encounter with the past. In extending the bound­aries of our moral imagination, we need to see a historical space be­fore we can explore it.

There is no end to this project, only an infinity of connecting links. And if these are to be connected without domination, then the links will be lateral, additive, syncretic rather than synthetic. The project of universal history does not come to an end. It begins again, somewhere else.

[Matias · Rating 4 out of 5]

La filosofía, como la estudiamos, es el producto explícito del pensamiento de generaciones de filósofos. La filosofía moderna como se la organiza académicamente se inaugura con Descartes y sus "Meditaciones metafísicas". Y se podría decir concluye con Nietzsche, Marx y Freud como maestros de la sospecha que descolocan al sujeto de la modernidad como centro de referencia. Pero aún para el estudioso que busca el contexto y los diálogos que establecieron los diversos autores es fácil perder de vista que toda filosofía es un fenómeno localizado. Algo que Nietzsche insistía en "Más allá del bien y del mal" con su prosa incendiaria.

Localizada en el espacio y en el tiempo, la filosofía exige una metafilosofía, una historía de la filosofía y una geofilosofía. La Modernidad política se nos enseña en todo Occidente empieza con la Revolución Francesa y la filosofía política moderna es la ideología de la clase que se opuso al modelo feudal para plantear una nueva estructura social, económica y política. Esta es la filosofía que subyace a nuestros valores sociales y políticos. Otras sociedades, descansan sobre otras filosofías.

Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel son los pensadores de Europa y para Europa (si, incluso USA que abrazó el pensamiento lockeano es Europa): libertad, igualdad, fraternidad, república, soberanía, propiedad. Son conceptos modernos pero que aún en las dos naciones que definieron la modernidad: USA y Francia venían con sesgos capaces de escapar a la obviedad que una nación prosperaba con la esclavitud del algodón y la otra con una colonia con medio millón de esclavos que proveía de azúcar a Europa: Santo Domingo.

La autora patea la mesa al alimentar la tesis de que Hegel a través de su conocida afición a la prensa conoció los eventos en Santo Domingo y que la dialéctica del amo y el esclavo que presentó en "Fenomenología del Espíritu" estaba inspirada en esos hechos. Pero su tesis es más que otro ensayo sobre el contexto de tal o cual autor o tema. Es una tesis sobre el eurocentrismo que condiciona el pensamiento político, filosófico e histórico que se pone al servicio de la ideología actual, el capitalismo, otro, sino el quid mismo de nuestra modernidad.

La conclusión más importante, más crucial para entender este libro es que la esclavitud no surgió del racismo, el racismo surgió de la esclavitud. Sin Haiti, Hegel no podría haber comprendido la importancia del reconocimiento como esencial en las relaciones humanas, pero Hegel no podría haberlo admitido como tampoco Locke o Rousseau que obviaron la clara contradicción entre lo que escribían (y lo que omitían) al escribir sobre la libertad y la esclavitud.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The revolutionary struggle of slaves, who overthrew their own servitude and establish a constitutional state, provides the theoretical hinge that takes Hegel's analysis out of the limitlessly epxanding colonial economy and onto the plane of world history, which he defines as the realization of freedom - a theoreteical solution that was taking place in the practice in Haiti at that very moment. The connection seems obvious, so obvious that the burden of proof would seem to fall on those who wish to argue otherwise." Why hasn't this been recognized? (12)

"'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' So writes Jean-Jacques Roussea in the opening lines of _On the Social Contract, first published in 1762. No human condition appears more offensive to his heart or to his reason than slavery. And yet even Rousseau, patron saint of the French Revolution, represses from consciousness the millions of really existing, European-owned slaves, as he relentlessly condemns the institution." (32). Louis Sala-Molins examines the history of the Enlightenment in light of the Code Noir, which legalizes slavery, branding and torture. It applied to all slaves - and while Enlightenment thinkers expressed "indignation regarding slavery in theory while 'superbly' ignoring slavery in practice'" (32)

"Although abolition of slavery was the only possible logical outcome of the ideal of universal freedom, it did not come about through revolutionary ideas or even the revolutionary actions of the French; it came about through the actions of the slaves themselves." In 1791, slaves of St. Domingue revolted -- 500,000 in the richest colony in the world.

Quotes Rolph Trouillot in _Silencing the Past_ that the Haitian revolution "entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened." . . . For if men and women in the eighteenth century did not think in nonracial terms of the 'fundamental equality of humanity,' as 'some of us do today,' at least they knew what was happening; today, when the Haitian slave revolution might be more thinkable, it is more invisible, due to the construction of disciplinary discourses through which knowledge of the past has been inherited" (50).

Element of racism in Marxist evident from (white) Marxists resisted the Marx-inspired thesis of the Jamaican-born Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) seconded by the Marxist historian, Trinidad-born C.L.R. James in _The Black Jacobins_ - that plantation slavery was quintessentially modern institution of capitalism exploitation (58).

In 1664 Spinoza had a vision of "a certain black and mangy Brazilian" . . . "Who is this Brazilian, Warren Montag asks, if not a condensation of all those whom Spinoza would legally deny any given society: women, slaves, wage labourers, foreigners? They are the multitude whose real power no laws, no constitutions can make disappear and whose very existence political philosophy seeks precisely in its most liberal forms actively to deny" (85).

"The critical writing of history is a continuous struggle to liberate the past from within the unconscious of a collective that forgets the conditions of its own existence." (85).

Adam Smith considered slavery an obstacle to human progress, yet sucking sugar cubes was a habit with him (85)

Slavery continued in Europe after the Middle Ages in the form of penal slavery "beginning with galley slavery and continuing with penal slavery in public works" (88, quoting Slavery and Social Death).

More frequent slave revolts led to more thinking by white Europeans that Africans were well suited to slavery (89). Eric Williams showed that racism is a consequence of slavery, not its cause (90). African slaves in Europe constantly used its laws to argue the legality of their enslavement: "love of liberty would require discrimination on the basis of race" (90). Sometimes those African slaves won in order "to prevent slavery from entering the metropolis, not to increase the numbers of freedmen in the colonies. The emergence of racial distinctions guaranteed the property rights of masters, while policing the boundary between slaves and liberty" (91).

Haiti's constitution made the principle of Liberty apply to all who stepped on its shores regardless of race (94). However, there were still hierarchies of skin color and class.

"The success of the abolitionists, ending British slave trade in 1807, coincided with the birth of the idea of 'free' labor, destined to become its own form of labor discipline, as earlier legislation protecting British workers was systematically eliminated" (97). And in 1834, the year that Britain abolished slavery in the colonies, "the Poor Law amendment liberated English workers from public welfare and offered the unemployed a choice between starvation and the humiliating workhouse" (97).

The first factories in Manchester as colonial systems invading the mother country - and with "no sense of what constituted a 'fair' gain" AND Davis in _The Problem of Slavery_ notes that "the humanitarian triumph of 1807 coincided, roughly, with the removal of much of the legislation that had protected the traditional customs of trade and the restrictive practices of English workers. By 1809, according to EP Thompson, 'all the protective legislation in the woolen industry - covering apprenticeship, the gig-mill, and the number of looms - was repealed. The road was now open for the factory, the gig-mill, the shearing-frame, the employment of unskilled and juvenile labour" (Problem of Slavery, 452). Similarly, writes Davis with sarcasm, in the year (1834) that slavery itself was abolished "nominally ' in the colonies, "the Poor Law Amendment liberated the English workers from public welfare and offered the unemployed a choice between starvation and the humiliating workhouse" (102, 97).

Cites _The Many-Headed Hydra_ by Linebaugh and Rediker as the metaphor for the motley crew of revolutionaries from below: impressed seamen, multiracial, "multiethnic 'hydrarchies,' self-governing counterregimes that administered justice, shared wealth , and waged war. In cities along the colonial coasts, runaway slaves joined with European immigrants as self-organizing cells of waterfront rebels, who formed the radical wing of the New York City insurrection of 1741 as well as the American War for Independence . . . linking seventeenth century witch hunts, the exile of religious dissenters, enclosures of the commons, and harsh punishment for property crimes as acts of repression by power hierarchies that spanned both sides of the Atlantic. . . they "made the inexorable link between colonial slavery and slavelike labor conditions of domestic English workers, and spoke out for the abolition of them both. The Irishman and proletarian theorist Edward Despard, who met his African-American wife Catherine when he was a soldier in the American colonies, was convicted and hanged as a traitor in the 1790s for plotting a London conspiracy to promote, in the judge's words, 'the wild and Levelling principle of Universal Equality." (105-106).

Argues that Many-Headed Hydra is contra Marxism in positing "a conception of the proletariat as preindustrial and Atlantic in scope" (107). Argues that Davis's critique of Hydra misses the point that Hydra's goal was to "connect today's global resistance to an earlier one 'retrieving the proletarian body from its monster articulation (the hydra). . . facts without concepts are meaningless. England is a concept, not a fact, as are "Europe," "Enlightenment," "economy,' progress, and civilization." (110).

"Napoleon ordered Leclerc to expel from Saint-Domingue all white women who had slept with blacks. Such fears were not merely psychic fantasies, but rooted in the actual, boundary-disrupting potential of womens' sexual agency that was economically powerful and escaped political control. The figure of the free, mulatto woman looms large here, brilliantly interrogated by Joan Dayan in her history of Haiti (Haiti, History and the Gods).

Hegel's portrayal of Africa as isolated and backward cannot be attributed to his sources, which he cherry-picked and exaggerated (116-117).

I just loved these sentences, "To be a Mason is an ontological category empty of defining qualities for which it could be held causally responsible (just as to be a Christian does not make one virtuous, to be a Marxist does not make one a revolutionary, to be a Muslim does not make one a terrorist). Freemasonry is the paranoid's empty signifier" (121).

Another amazing sentence, about Vodou and a critique of Hegel's treatment of it: "Vodou was constructed out of the allegorical mode of seeing that experiences history as catastrophe. For those who have been defeated by history, whose social relations have been severed, who live in exile, meaning drains out of the objects of a world that has been impoverished by physical distance and personal loss. In Vodou, the collective life of not one but multiple cultures has been shattered, surviving as debris and in decay." (127)

"Herskovits has traced the Haitian zombi, phantasm of the living dead, to Dahomean legend (Dahomey). But Dayan is surely right to argue that this figure, 'a soulless husk deprived of freedom' and 'the ultimate sign of loss and dispossession,' takes on unprecedented meaning in response to colonial slavery's 'peculiar brand of sensuous domination,' and the conditions of forced, free labor that followed Haitian independence" (129) . .. "As 'the most powerful emblem of apathy, anonymity and loss,' the zombi 'tells the story o fcolonization' - as well as 'the twentieth-century history of forced labor and denigration that became particularly acute during the American occupation of Haiti' (Hait, Histoyr and the Gods, 37)" (note 119).

"In its early experience of impoverished dependence on the global economy, in its early struggle against Western policies of genocide, and in its postcolonial, hierarchical articulation of social elites, Haiti indeed stands at the vanguard of the history of modernity. The Haitian experience was not a modern phenomenon too, but first. Haiti's founding fathers used a discourse of nationalist unity ideologically to push the freed slaves back into conditions of plantation labor and production for export, a specifically modern political strategy that is hardly outdated. Hattian elites were the first in history to embrace the word 'black' as their political identity, a position totally compatible then (and now) with social hierarchies base don the color of one's skin. If radically cosmopolitan Freemasons once championed the cause of slave liberation, Hattian national Freemasonry, like the movement worldwide, has long been at peace with the status quo of power. Haitian political leaders persecuted Vodou priests even before impendence. (Under Toussaint's orders, Dessalines slaughtered over fifty Vodou practitioners, whose own definition of the insurrection threatened their monopoly of power . . . To narrate Haiti's history as good versus evil stunts our capacity for moral judgment. Past suffering does not guarantee future virtue. Only a distorted history is morally pure."

Argues that we can't simply see the slaves as good (ethnic rivalries continued, they sold each other to the Spanish for arms, their vision was "complete with (masculinist) military prowess, (export-oriented) commerce, (plantation) agriculture, and a monumental, royal palace (built by forced, 'free' labor)" that "allowed the contribution to the cause of universal humanity that emerged in this event to slip from view" (147). Suggests we see the "experience of historical rupter as a _moment_ of clarity, temporary by definition, we will not be in danger o flosing the world-historical contribution of the Saint-Domingue slaves, the idea of an end to relations of slavery that went far beyond existing European Enlightenmnet thought - and is, indeed, far from realized under today's conditions of a global economy, where sex-slavery is rampant and the bonded labor of immgrants is employed by all of the so-called civilizations, and where the myth of 'free labor' that Marx called wage-slavery is the reality for millions of members of the working class." (148).

"This approach to human universality values precisely the 'unhistorical histories' dismissed by Hegel, including the collective actions that appear ou tof order within coherent narratives of Western progress or cultural continuity, class struggle or dominant civilizations. Historical anomalies now take on central importance -- for example, the fact that not only did the free dslaves resist under Toussaint' snew system of 'militaryagrarianism' when told to resume plantation labor as before, but owmen made the unprecedented demand of equial pay for equal work . . . arguing that their tasks, hours, and conditions were the same as those of men. . . . If . . . the anomaliesof the Haitian experience are seen as its progressive moments, the brualities of slavery prove to be more historically routine" (149).

"Universal history engages in a double liberation, of the historical phenomena and of our own imagination: by liberating the past we liberate ourselves . . The limits to our imagination need to be taken down brick by brick, chipping away at the cultural embeddedness that predetermines the meaning of the past in ways that hold us captive in the present" (149).

[Doctor Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Haitian revolution has always felt like a kind of sidebar to the revolutions of the time ��� the American Revolution, the French Revolution. It’s a slave rebellion after all, and that makes it different. But is it, or is it not part of the broader rebellions of the time in the name of freedom and popular sovereignty?

And how does Hegel fit into this picture? Why talk about Hegel?

The revolution began in 1791 and culminated in formal Haitian independence in 1804. Hegel, born in 1770, was certainly aware of the rebellion and its progress. Buck-Morss particularly calls out the European journal Minerva for its reporting and commentary on the rebellion, and cites evidence for Hegel’s reading and being a close follower of the journal.

Hegel’s first “mature” work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, containing his landmark “master slave dialectic,” appeared in 1807, just a few years after Haitian independence.

The master/slave discussion in The Phenomenology is a turning point in that work for two reasons. One is that, within the larger project of the book, it marks a transition between the individual’s knowledge of the (objective) world around him (or her) to the socially situated person’s knowledge of and involvement in a social system, a world that contains others like himself.

The other important aspect of the discussion is the one that most directly bears on the Haitian revolution. That transition between the individual considered solely in himself to the socially situated person is a turning point in Hegel’s notion of freedom. When the individual confronts others such as himself, he enters a world of potential intersubjectivity.

But that world has to be earned. And the beginning is mutual recognition. At first, individuals encounter one another as limits, even as obstacles. One subdues the other, or is subdued by the other. Mutual recognition only happens, as Hegel says, in a life and death struggle in which the subdued (the “slave”) asserts himself as against the subduer (the “master”).

Although I read The Phenomenology as primarily a work in theory of knowledge, in Hegel’s thought, epistemology is not separate from social existence and the realization of freedom and rationality in the political world.

Okay that’s a horribly brief depiction of the master/slave discussion and its importance in Hegel.

What was especially distinctive about the Haitian revolution of course was that it was a slave rebellion, not an abolitionist movement. Just as Hegel would have it, the slave asserts himself. He frees himself, he is not freed by others.

Buck-Morss suggests, although she can’t “prove” it, that Hegel’s inspiration for the master/slave discussion came at least in part from his knowledge of the events in Haiti. Of course Hegel never mentions Haiti or its revolution in The Phenomenology, but that’s not remarkable — his world is one of concepts in logical/rational motion, realized through events and persons but, at the philosophical level, best understood through those concepts and their dynamic relationships.

Hegel does, as Buck-Morss includes in a footnote (p. 67), mention Haiti in a much later work, in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (vol. 3 of his Encyclopedia), but that mention does not confirm Haiti’s revolution as an inspiration.

Only the first half of Buck-Morss’s book is specifically about Hegel and how his master/slave discussion relates to the Haitian revolution. She goes on to talk a bit about Hegel’s turn to a more ignorant, arguably racist treatment of the non-European world, especially in his Philosophy of History.

That discussion leads nicely into a larger theme of Eurocentricism. Why is Haiti’s revolution such a sidebar to the revolutions of its time? What does it have in common with those revolutions? What makes it unique? Why was slavery itself ignored, and sometimes even embraced, in the revolutionary rhetoric and energies of the French and American revolutions?

The ideological fathers and activist thinkers of the French and American revolutions actually employed, as Buck-Morss demonstrated, the term “slavery” in a broad sense as an absence of liberty, complete with metaphorical chains, side by side with what seems almost a criminal obliviousness to “slavery” in its narrow, non-metaphorical, all-too-concrete sense, as experienced by black Africans in the colonies.

It’s as if the revolutionaries of France and America were asserting and denying a continuity between the European experience of subjection and the slave’s experience at the same time.

Buck-Morss also notes a continuum between slave labor and wage labor under capitalism. After all, the wage laborer doesn’t own the product of his labor either. And the relationship between the laborer and his employer is not one of “mutual recognition” — or to say so would be a stretch, given the the asymmetric power relationship between them.

Is the laborer free under European/American capitalism? She is free to quit her job and find a new employer, or to attempt self-employment. Her employer is free to fire her and replace her. Are those equivalent positions of power?

These points, the all-but-explicitly claimed continuity between political subjection as a whole and slavery, and the continuity between slave labor and wage labor, suggest a way to bring the Haitian revolution under the same historical themes as the revolutions in America and France.

But historians don’t do that. Why?

One obvious answer is that the over-ruling discontinuity is race, given that, in “modern” times, we tend to identify slavery with race. That can’t be ignored.

What would it mean, as Buck-Morss asks, to, in the instance of the Haitian revolution, write a “universal history?”

To bring the Haitian revolution into “universal history” would be to take it off the sidelines and place it properly within the central stream of history itself, to find the universal in that otherwise skewish event.

Hegel did offer such a potential placement — the Haitian revolution was exactly a struggle of life and death for recognition. There it takes a place seemingly beside the other great political revolutions of the time in America and France.

That suggestion remains, despite Hegel’s later thought, in which he adopts a thoroughly Eurocentric perspective, denigrating non-white, non-European history as something like dead-ends in the course of history, reason, and freedom. Haiti retreats back to the sidelines, maybe even confirmed in its peripheral status by the course of events since the revolution that render Haiti “underdeveloped” economically and politically.

But would that Hegelianish treatment, were we to pick it up and carry it from Hegel, be true to the Haitian revolution, or would it amount to a Eurocentrising of it?

One point on which I think Buck-Morss is right is in relating both the sidelining of the revolution and its placement back in the central stream to Eurocentricism. After all, had Hegel explicitly cited the Haitian revolution as inspiration for his discussion in the Phenomenology, and had he finished the job with the act of revolution itself, he would have been placing that revolution within the conceptual flow that contains peculiarly European eras and influences, e.g., the Enlightenment.

Suppose instead, a third alternative, not sidelining and not Eurocentrising. That would be to revise the central stream to incorporate the Haitian revolution and its own influences, probably ones relating to slave culture and African culture. A new, broader, more “universal” central stream of history.

That hasn’t been done. But that is the project that I think Buck-Morss’s analysis provokes.

Writing history is an action, and, as such, is motivated by interests, insights, concepts, concerns, . . . There’s no such thing as a neutral history in that you can’t write about EVERYTHING — your selections and emphases are actions motivated by interests, insights, concepts, concerns. But broader inclusion, in this case, inclusion of the Haitian revolution into the era of the French and American revolutions, might increase our understanding of all the revolutions of that area, as well as maybe breaking down race-inspired historical narrow mindedness.

[Justine Cheng · Rating 2 out of 5]

I admire how easy this is to read. Putting most of the quotations in the footnotes is smart and something I'll be thinking about as I write. The first argument that Hegel knew and was influenced by the Haitian revolution is fine. the second part which launches with a weird critique of psychoanalysis (total mischaracterization of Lacan) is reductive in a way that makes me deeply suspicious of her reading of Hegel and that the ease of reading elsewhere is a product of similar reductions. The continual dismissal of psychoanalysis in favor of 'social reality' is crude work. It's ok to not understand Lacan and just leave him be (not even a lacanian, but understand enough to know that what she describes as lacanian is totally unrecognizable). Thinking of Lacan's critique of the Master Slave dialectic: for Hegel, the slave is a slave until the end of time. The argument that guilt is not psychological but a product of social inequality is just as arbitrary and perhaps even more speculative than Freud's primal guilt over the murder of the father. Who is to say that the oppressor has any guilt over his violence? Why is this assumed? Certainly Christianity is a religion of guilt, but not over its crusades, or colonies, or slaves.

The real issues begin with the section on universal history. Making the Haitian revolution into an argument for nonviolence and comparing Dessaline to Osama bin Laden to Lenin to George W. Bush is some twisted work. Of course 'empathic imagination' comes in as a vague strategy without any theoretical grounds. This weird liberal humanist both sideism is symptomatic of the very historical flattening she claims to critique. She acknowledges that the difference between free masonry and voodoo as essentially modern epistemologies is that one is overdetermined by a world shattering violence. Why does she fail to see a difference, then, between a decolonial violence and American imperial violence??? I understand that she argues that it's the post revolutionary killing of white farmers that condemns the universality of the Haitian revolution, but come on... that's clearly not why the Haitian revolution failed practically or morally. Thinking of Wilderson and how freedom is a ruse for contingency in humanist discourse, at the heart a rendering of violence as contingent in relation to the non black subject.
It's become even more obvious how useless this kind of argument is in the present moment. 'end the cycle of violence' is not an equal responsibility of the oppressor and oppressed. If responsibility for 'ending the cycle' (the very possibility of which I would contend is problematic and self-serving) falls upon the oppressed it can only be thought of, per Moten, as a cosmic injustice.

[Colin Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is all too common to hear champions of education, that is to say, teachers, professors, and bookish folk, repeat the following mantra or something like it: Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world. But what if this is incorrect (apologies to Nelson Mandela, I think)? Is it possible that education blinds or inculcates us as much as, or even more than, it enlightens, inspires, and reveals? As counter-intuitive as it sounds, what are the consequences of too much education? These are some of the questions Susan Buck-Morss explores in her revelatory book, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History.

Formally, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History comprises two essays. The first essay, "Hegel and Haiti," Buck-Morss published in the summer 2000 edition of Critical Inquiry. The second essay, "Universal History," according to Buck-Morss, "appears here in response to the critics of the first [essay]" (ix). As Buck-Morss describes in the "Preface" to Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, "These essays are situated at the border between history and philosophy. The understanding of universal history they propose is distinct from Hegel's systematized comprehension of the past...Universal history refers more to method than content. It is an orientation, a philosophical reflection grounded in concrete material, the conceptual ordering of which shed light on the political present. The image of truth thereby revealed is time-sensitive. It is not that truth changes; we do" (x). Buck-Morss clarifies these ideas in the new introduction to "Hegel and Haiti" by writing, "'Hegel and Haiti' supports a shift in knowledge away from traditional hierarchies of significance. It insists that facts are important not as data with fixed meanings, but as connective pathways that can continue to surprise us" (13). Lines like this should cause anyone to pause and ask for clarification.

Here, Buck-Morss argues that facts operating independently of context are facts masquerading as "fixed" or "concrete." Facts are deeply interconnected and knotted in moments of time, thus, facts are deeply interconnected and knotted with people situated in moments of time. It would be foolish to conclude, as figures like Newt Gingrich have, that we all have "our facts." This hypocritical relativism is not Buck-Morss' point.

But history, thought, and philosophy have more to them than historicism. More than anything, Buck-Morss wants to understand what we hide or fail to disclose even when we think we behave like good historicists. Take, for example, Hegelian dialectics, which is to say, Hegelian universal thought. What would a historical reading of Hegel uncover about his sources of inspiration? Well, one might investigate German idealism and figures like Emmanuel Kant. One might study religious texts, considering Christianity's outsized influence on Hegel's thought. But what about the Haitian revolution? After unpacking one of the more famous moments from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the master-slave dialectic, Buck-Morss writes, "The goal of this liberation, out of slavery, cannot be subjugation of the master in turn, which would be merely to repeat the master's 'existential impasse,' but, rather, elimination of the institution of slavery altogether. Given the facility with which this dialectic of lordship and bondage lends itself to such a reading, one wonders why the topic of Hegel in Haiti has for so long been ignored. Not only have Hegel scholars failed to answer this question; they have failed, for the past two hundred years, even to ask it" (56).

Before this moment in the essay, Buck-Morss needs only a few short pages to persuasively connect the development of Hegel's master-slave dialectic to newspapers and journals Hegel read in the early 19th century, newspapers and journals that described, in detail, the Haitian Revolution. This leads Buck-Morss to wonder: "Either Hegel was the blindest of all the blind philosophers of freedom...or Hegel knew...and he elaborated his dialectic of lordship and bondage deliberately within the contemporary context" (50).

However, why does Hegel fail to mention the Haitian Revolution, and why does Hegel, at times, write in such a racist way about people of color? Buck-Morss has a response to that too, and her response drips with irony: education. She writes, "What is clear is that in an effort to become more erudite in African studies during the 1820s, Hegel was in fact becoming dumber...It is sadly ironic that the more faithfully his lectures reflected Europe's conventional scholarly wisdom on African society, the less enlightened and more bigoted they became" (73-74). This is a wonderful example, one inflected with psychoanalysis, of how thought can exceed the thinker. That is to say, Hegel retreated from the radicality of his universalism, or as Buck-Morss writes, "why is it of more than arcane interest to retrieve from oblivion this fragment of history [Hegel and Haiti], the truth of which has managed to slip away from us? There are many possible answers, but one is surely the potential for rescuing the idea of universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it" (74).

The second essay in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History explores how to "reconfigure the enlightenment project of universal history in the context of our too-soon and not-yet global public sphere" (79). Better said, according to Buck-Morss, "The critical writing of history is a continuous struggle to liberate the past from within the unconscious of a collective that forgets the conditions of its own experience" (85). This suggests that disavowal is an important theoretical concept for Buck-Morss. Like Hegel and Haiti, we, too, repeat this impulse to disavowal not only sources of inspiration but truths unlearned by ideology.

Like any psychoanalyst worth their salt, Buck-Morss wants to reveal the moments of discontinuity that ideology marks as continuity. This is a move that any ideology makes, but it is a move that civilizations of particular clout often make as well. Buck-Morss is clear about this point: "The greater the power a civilization wields in the world, the less capable its thinkers may be to recognize the naivete of their own beliefs" (119). This is because history is far from a stable thing despite what we want to think. Buck-Morss suggests, "History keeps running away from us, going places we, mere humans, cannot predict" (150). This is why, for example, the narrative about the 2021 capitol attack is so contentious. The "truth" of that day is, borrowing from Buck-Morss, "singular," but history is different because "it builds on a present that is moving ground" (150).

As I hope this essay suggests, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History is one of the most important books I have read this year. Of course, this book is endlessly interesting for anyone curious about Hegel. Yet, Buck-Morss' larger point about history and how we make history is necessary for anyone interested in making sense of this (2022 as I write this essay) particular moment in time. With that said, I agree with many of the critical comments about the second essay. The second essay lacks the radicality and coherency of the first essay.

[Luke Echo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The connection between Haiti and Hegel's Phenomenology is quite interesting and I found the historical aspects of the book quite interesting and informative.

However, it seemed unclear how Buck-Morrs was justified in so freely equating the ideas of "universal history" and "universal humanity" are these basically equivalent? In the second essay it seems assumed but I don't recall a case being presented for the close association.

Secondly, "What's with all the footnotes?"
- seriously was it a kind of intentional violence to be performed to the text? Were they added later and intended to leave the original text intact? They were quite distracting and disruptive, and in general seemed to add little of importance or necessity.

[Petwo · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was reading Hegel's Letters I thought about Toussaint Louverture the same way Hegel thought about Napoleon riding through Jena...a World Spirit...according to Buck-Morss no one ever thought about that before her. I'm gonna give her a call.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Finished this book just over a week ago and now this pathetic
proclamation from Pat Robertson...Everything is upside down
again...I got ta' hating again...

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book, a little heavy on the footnotes. Tries to provide a materialist basis most specifically for Hegel's master-slave dialectic in the Haitian revolution, providing some interesting arguments.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book, with its orthodoxy-queering combination of anti-Eurocentrism and insistent universalism. Important right now

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this work Buck-Morss situates Hegel's master-slave dialectic as being deeply influenced by the Haitian revolution, which was occurring at the time he came up with the idea. Though she readily admits her hypothesis is speculation, and even gives, along with her critics, some salient reasons to doubt it: he never made such a connection in any of his known writings, he was deeply Eurocentric, and he was a well-known racist. However, with this argument she brings out a greater point about universalism in general:

"Hegel and Haiti" supports a shift in knowledge away from traditional hierarchies of significance. It insists that facts are important not as data with fixed meanings, but as connective pathways that can continue to surprise us. Facts should inspire imagination rather than tying it down. The less they are subsumed under the fiction of secure knowledge, marshaled as proof of a predetermined and authoritative thesis, the more truth they are capable of revealing. Instead of defending a notion of intellectual turf, the point of scholarly debate should be to extend the horizon of historical imagination.

Or, to be more explicit:

Why is ending the silence on Hegel and Haiti important? Given Hegel's ultimate concession to slavery's continuance—moreover, given the fact that Hegel's philosophy of history has provided for two centuries a justification for the most complacent forms of Eurocentrism (Hegel was perhaps always a cultural racist if not a biological one)—why is it of more than arcane interest to retrieve from oblivion this fragment of history, the truth of which has managed to slip away from us?

There are many possible answers, but one is surely the potential for rescuing the idea of universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it. If the historical facts about freedom can be ripped out of the narratives told by the victors and salvaged for our own time, then the project of universal freedom does not need to be discarded but, rather, redeemed and reconstituted on a different basis.

In other words, I think her negation of the negation has worked out quite well. Human universality is a biological fact, but as a project of the Enlightenment is has never been finished; there was always exceptions. Since rejection of universalism has at best brought us nothing, our best course of action is pushing on its boundaries and cracking it where we are hemmed in until there are no exceptions. Overall I find Buck-Morss's forceful argument quite convincing.

[A YOGAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wie ich bereits in meiner Besprechung von Alfred Adlers „Hegel et l’Afrique“ angemerkt habe, ist es intellektuell unredlich, dass Hegel seine berühmte Dialektik entwarf, während die Haitianische Revolution ihre vollendete Verkörperung in der Wirklichkeit darbot – und er dieses welthistorische Ereignis geflissentlich verschwieg. Susan Buck-Morss greift in „Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History“ genau diesen blinden Fleck auf und macht ihn zum Ausgangspunkt einer radikalen Neubestimmung des philosophischen Universalismus. Sie zeigt, dass Hegels Schweigen kein zufälliges Versäumnis war, sondern Ausdruck einer systemischen Ausblendung: Die siegreiche Erhebung versklavter Afrikanerinnen und Afrikaner passte nicht in das europäische Selbstbild der Vernunftgeschichte, das Freiheit als Produkt des europäischen Geistes verstand.
Buck-Morss entfaltet diese These mit beeindruckender historischer und philologischer Genauigkeit. Im ersten Teil rekonstruiert sie Hegels intellektuelle Umwelt und die Verfügbarkeit zeitgenössischer Berichte über den haitianischen Aufstand – Hinweise genug, dass Hegel das Geschehen kannte und bewusst in Schweigen hüllte. Im zweiten Teil, „Universal History“, geht es ihr nicht um moralische Anklage, sondern um theoretische Revision: Sie fordert eine universale Geschichtsschreibung, die nicht länger vom europäischen Zentrum aus denkt, sondern von den historischen Erfahrungen der Kolonisierten, Versklavten und Entrechteten. Damit wird die haitianische Revolution nicht als Randnotiz, sondern als Prüfstein einer Philosophie ernst genommen, die beansprucht, das Allgemeine zu denken.
Buck-Morss gelingt es, Hegels Universalismus nicht einfach zu verwerfen, sondern ihn gegen seine eigene Blindheit zu wenden. Ihr Buch ist zugleich historische Rekonstruktion, ideologiekritische Intervention und philosophischer Weckruf: Wer von Freiheit spricht, ohne Haiti zu denken, reproduziert jene europäische Selbsttäuschung, die bis heute fortwirkt. „Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History“ führt so das fort, was Adler in „Hegel et l’Afrique“ anstieß – es öffnet den Diskurs über die Dialektik von Herrschaft und Knechtschaft für jene, die Hegel verdrängte. Ein knappes, aber geistig weites Buch, das zeigt, dass der Universalismus nur dann seinen Namen verdient, wenn er das Schweigen über die Geschichte der Versklavten bricht.

[Noé Hernández · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hegel, Haití y la historia universal es tanto un libro filosófico como historiográfico, a partes, el alcance y las tangentes parecen problemáticas y conspirativas pero finalmente la resolución nos lleva desde el paradigma económico del esclavismo (como única alternativa viable construida, no necesaria del expansionismo europeo) hasta la alegoría y el símbolo como consecuencias de una vivencia histórica quebrada (Buck-Morss, o su traductor, en algún momento usa el término "pulverizada").

Ciertamente el libro abarca muchas ideas sin concluirlas todas, intuyendo más bien caminos viables y disponibles para ser explorados (p. ej.: los paralelismos entre el vodou como amalgama trans-africana y la fraternidad cosmopolita masónica; la influencia de Hegel en el pensamiento de "cultura como ruina" en Walter Benjamin; la hermenéutica de los símbolos en la Historia cultural/social, e incluso en Historia del arte, como una tarea sin fin; la pervivencia del racismo en las sociedades contemporáneas como consecuencia ineludible de nuestro sistema económico; los antecedentes ideológicos de legislaciones racistas, etc. etc.).

Claramente ambos ensayos merece ser leídos como la exploración de ideas aparentemente ya pensadas y trabajadas, más que como trabajos concluidos sobre Haití en el pensamiento de Hegel y el pensamiento hegeliano.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick read, essentially two journal article length essays, one on Hegel's master-slave dialectic, Hegel's concept of the intersubjective struggle for recognition and freedom, which originated more or less simultaneously around the time of the Haitian Revolution, and the follow-up essay which Buck-Morss essentially calls for a reappraisal of the legacy of the Haitian Revolution and an impassioned defense for the Enlightenment ideal of transforming the world into a place that is hospitable to the emancipation of all of humanity, inviting us to reclaim the cause of universal freedom and reason, in which the will and autonomy of can be realized

In other words, we must create the material conditions in which the master-slave dialectic can be overcome, where the disalienation of all people is the horizon.

That said, one critique I have of both of these essays is Buck-Morss' readings on Hegel's philosophy is a bit thin, but the historicizing of Hegel is a welcome intervention.

[Ebony · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.3⭐️ I enjoyed the first essay a lot but I found the second one insubstantial. I think it is easier to argue for a universalist approach to history when you are…of Buck-Morss background. I find dismissing non “concrete”(who is defining this exactly?) evidence in historical study, as worthy of disregard in favor of concrete (western) philosophy/universal perspectives to be a bit dismissive and potentially naive.
Secondly, I’ve only briefly studied Muslim history in the new world, but her understanding of “jihad” (and the ppl she associated with it—dear god) seemed to me to be an extremely shallow understanding of the concept.
I also found myself wondering if Buck-Morss stretched before she wrote that the killing of slavers ordered by Dessalines in Haiti was nearly as bad as the killing/enslaving of the ppl of Haiti. An impressive reach.

[Cioran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosophy is a thing. It takes up space. This is very easy to forget when reading these often extremely abstract work. In this book Buck-Morss reminds us of this fact by showing that Hegel was reading a lot of journalism about the Haitian revolution when writing his hard to read philosophy tomes. Buck-Morss presents a fresh reading of Hagel based on this real life circumstances outside of his books and through this a fresh reading of the Haiti revolution and the course of human history and how we write history and understand change itself.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A long time since I really liked a book on the philosophy of history.

This is very far from the most important points in the book, but my favorite single phrase was “a quasi-neurotic compulsion for accuracy is an occupational necessity for history writers”.

Really impressive how much actual history she has mastered, since I assume that as a philosopher, she has her hands full reading philosophy.

I didn’t see what her point was about freemasonry; please explain if you are reading this review and can.

[Nikos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wurde während dem Lesen gewarnt und es hat sich bewahrheitet. Der erste Teil Hegel und Haiti ist wirklich interessant und gut geschrieben. Der zweite Teil des Buches schafft es imo partout nicht einen klaren roten Faden zu stricken und verliert sich in gefühlt unendlich Nebensächlichkeiten die mit dem eigentlichen Vorhaben des Werks oft nur schwer zusammengebracht werden können. Vielleicht bin ich aber auch einfach nur zu blöd dafür, keine Ahnung.

[Michael Greer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most advanced country in the world, Haiti carried out the final realization of the dream of emancipation for all men and women. We often consider Haiti a troubled, deeply impoverished country. This is clearly refuted by even a cursory glance at the nation's constitution.

[Priscilla Previl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the idea of the book was loftier than the execution effectively covered. It seems to be a bit hasty in its writing, and unclear what the author is wanting to say.

[Camilo Ruiz Tassinari · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decepcionante.

[Peera Songkünnatham · Rating 3 out of 5]

first essay gave me some key historical insights. lost steam in the second essay.