Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Illuminations, 74)

I came to this book having vigorously debated within a Hegel reading group alternate approaches to reading the Phenomenology: either by decoding the abstract language for concrete historical references (with guides such as Kojeve's) or by allowing the language to remain formal and transcendental in character. Unfortunately Hegel's style invites readers inclined to remain in theoretical abstraction to overlook and lazily avoid the investigation of concrete history (which brings philosophy truly to life). Susan Buck-Morss here seems to share my view that Hegel was hedging for metaphysical appeal, while the substantial referents of his terms are a radical array of historical circumstances more numerous than has even been supposed so far.Buck-Morss puts forth a convincing argument that Hegel's master-slave dialectic was inspired and written not only by consideration of ancient Greek slavery (as is conventionally understood) but also by the contemporary event of the Haitian revolution, which Hegel understood to follow from colonial domination by early Western capitalism. Buck-Morss examines Hegel's critical reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations as particularly important for shaping his general critique of modernity in the modern economy's instrumentalizing of people.One might suspect that this too-conveniently pulls Hegel into Left post-colonial studies, but actually a reading in good faith will prove her right: Hegel studies heretofore (especially by philosophy specialists) have been woefully neglectful of a contemporary historical event - the Haitian revolution - whose significance Hegel couldn't (nor wouldn't) have overlooked as an avid reader of all the news being published and available to him.Also vital to the book is the author's argument aimed at Left post-colonial studies: that they should reconsider the value of a Universal History for progressive politics. The postmodernist rejection of Universal History has proven, over the last thirty years of conservative rule in the West, to be a great aid to neoconservative forces of division against progressive politics. Thus it is vital for anyone of a progressive persuasion to reconsider the value of a Universal History as argued for here by Buck-Morss.

Read this for my PhD historiography class. Excellent look at how the Haitian Revolution was overlooked and why. Always important to read an interpretation of the loss of the oppressed narrative in history. I think history teachers should read this book as a way to remember the significance of trying to include a multi-faceted narrative rather than just focusing on the textbook. Accessible to read for anyone who also just likes history, Hegel, or philosophy.

Susan Buck Morss is a hero. She has said some very confrontational and painful-to-hear truths about western imperialism and dynasty and its effects on Haiti and the rest of the world. This is a must read!

highly recommended for anyone interested in studying race history and its constructions in western thought and modernity. It is also accessible and engaging.

Placed the event into a new light by presenting relevant details and historical context.Dealt with complex subject matter in a precise but engaging manner.Quite something.

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.