Overview

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 \u201cnew humanism,\u201d 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.

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9780822959786

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Reviews

<p> Few books . . . contain as much fascinating material, new interpretations, intriguing possibilities and intellectual stimulation. <br> --Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

A provocative book and one that will be of interest to scholars in the field of race AND philosophy. <i> Black Cultural Studies</i></p>

<p> A provocative book and one that will be of interest to scholars in the field of race AND philosophy. <br> --Black Cultural Studies

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. <br> --Walter Mignolo, Duke University

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

Author Information

Susan Buck-Morss is Jan Rock Zubrow Ô77 Chair of Social Sciences, and professor of political philosophy and social theory in the department of government at Cornell University. She is the author of Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the

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