Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History

A provocative book and one that will be of interest to scholars in the field of race AND philosophy.

A revelation, on both scholarly and performative levels. . . . Among the most innovative and stimulating critical assessments of the Haitian Revolution.

Buck-Morss makes a powerful case for the debt Hegel's theoretical formulations on spectulative knowledge owe to the Haitian Revolution.

Buck-Morss provides a decisive reframing of Hegel in this wonderful book. The supposed idealist becomes a hard-headed realist whose concepts are formed while reading the morning newspapers. The idea of emancipation from slavery is itself emancipated from a model of noblesse oblige to one of struggle, risk, and sacrifice on the part of the slave. This is a thoroughly brilliant scholarly work that turns Hegel upside down in a new way, revealing this time that he was always already standing on his head.

Few books . . . contain as much fascinating material, new interpretations, intriguing possibilities and intellectual stimulation.

In a tour-de-force of de-colonial thinking, Susan Buck-Morss shows at once Hegel's denial of the Haitian Revolution and its consequences in Marx's and Marxism's reproduction of Hegel's denial: the silence around the role of race as racism in the foundation of the modern/colonial (and capitalist) world. Buck-Morss's argument shows that Hegel's spirit is tainted with the blood and suffering of enslaved Africans in the European colonies and that his dialectic of the master and the slave is performed on Western memories of Greek society and Western oblivions of slave trade and Western colonies.

This brief review cannot do justice to the many ways [Buck-Morss'] provocative and beautifully written book forces us to reexamine our academic labors. Buck-Morss also deserves praise for placing the Haitian Revolution firmly at the center of modernity—and insisting that scholars in many fields contemplate its lessons.