Hegel Haiti And Universal History

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.

Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation through a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Historicizing the thought of 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.

Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation through a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Historicizing the thought of 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.

Modernity Disavowed is a pathbreaking study of the cultural, political, and philosophical significance of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Revealing how the radical antislavery politics of this seminal event have been suppressed and ignored in historical and cultural records over the past two hundred years, Sibylle Fischer contends that revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal are central to the formation and understanding of Western modernity. She develops a powerful argument that the denial of revolutionary antislavery eventually became a crucial ingredient in a range of hegemonic thought, including Creole nationalism in the Caribbean and G. W. F. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Fischer draws on history, literary scholarship, political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory to examine a range of material, including Haitian political and legal documents and nineteenth-century Cuban and Dominican literature and art. She demonstrates that at a time when racial taxonomies were beginning to mutate into scientific racism and racist biology, the Haitian revolutionaries recognized the question of race as political. Yet, as the cultural records of neighboring Cuba and the Dominican Republic show, the story of the Haitian Revolution has been told as one outside politics and beyond human language, as a tale of barbarism and unspeakable violence. From the time of the revolution onward, the story has been confined to the margins of history: to rumors, oral histories, and confidential letters. Fischer maintains that without accounting for revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal, Western modernity—including its hierarchy of values, depoliticization of social goals having to do with racial differences, and privileging of claims of national sovereignty—cannot be fully understood.

Renowned critical theorist Susan Buck-Morss argues convincingly that a global public needs to think past the twin insanities of terrorism and counter-terrorism in order to dismantle regressive intellectual barriers. Surveying the widespread literature on the relationship of Islam to modernity, she reveals that there is surprising overlap where scholars commonly and simplistically see antithesis. Thinking Past Terror situates this engagement with the study of Islam among critical contemporary discourses-feminism, post-colonialism and the critique of determinism. In a new preface to this paperback edition, Susan Buck-Morss reflects on the events that have marked the world since the book was first published.

Reclaiming the first century as common ground rather than the origin of deeply entrenched differences: liberating the past to speak to us in another way. Conventional readings of antiquity cast Athens against Jerusalem, with Athens standing in for “reason” and Jerusalem for “faith.” And yet, Susan Buck-Morss reminds us, recent scholarship has overturned this separation. Naming the first century as a zero point—“year one”—that divides time into before and after is equally arbirtrary, nothing more than a convenience that is empirically meaningless. In YEAR 1, Buck-Morss liberates the first century so it can speak to us in another way, reclaiming it as common ground rather than the origin of deeply entrenched differences. Buck-Morss aims to topple various conceptual givens that have shaped modernity as an episteme and led us into some unhelpful postmodern impasses. She approaches the first century through the writings of three thinkers often marginalized in current discourse: Flavius Josephus, historian of the Judaean War; the neo-Platonic philosopher Philo of Alexandria; and John of Patmos, author of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible. Also making appearances are Antigone and John Coltrane, Plato and Bulwer-Lytton, al-Farabi and Jean Anouilh, Nicholas of Cusa and Zora Neale Hurston—not to mention Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Kristeva, and Derrida. Buck-Morss shows that we need no longer partition history as if it were a homeless child in need of the protective wisdom of Solomon. Those inhabiting the first century belong together in time, and therefore not to us.

The Haitian Revolution was the first in a modern state to implement human rights universally and unconditionally. Going beyond the selective emancipation of white adult male property owners, the Haitian Revolution is of vital importance, the author argues, in thinking today about the urgent problems of social justice, human rights, imperialism, torture, and, above all, human freedom. He explores the invention of universal emancipation both in the context of the Age of Enlightenment (Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel) and in relation to certain key figures (Ranciere, Laclau, Habermas) and trends (such as the turn to ethics, human rights, and universalism) in contemporary political philosophy.

In this masterful work of historical scholarship, Zeev Sternhell, an internationally renowned Israeli political scientist and historian, presents a controversial new view of the fall of democracy and the rise of radical nationalism in the twentieth century. Sternhell locates their origins in the eighteenth century with the advent of the Anti-Enlightenment, far earlier than most historians. The thinkers belonging to the Anti-Enlightenment (a movement originally identified by Friederich Nietzsche) represent a perspective that is antirational and that rejects the principles of natural law and the rights of man. Sternhell asserts that the Anti-Enlightenment was a development separate from the Enlightenment and sees the two traditions as evolving parallel to one another over time. He contends that J. G. Herder and Edmund Burke are among the real founders of the Anti-Enlightenment and shows how that school undermined the very foundations of modern liberalism, finally contributing to the development of fascism that culminated in the European catastrophes of the twentieth century.