The world has once again discovered Haiti in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake. In addition to sending money, Germanists can read up on the long history of forgetting and remembering Haiti by taking another look at Susan Buck-Morss's essay "Hegel and Haiti," first published in Critical Inquiry ten years ago, and now reprinted with an introduction and accompanying essay by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Buck-Morss argues that news of the Haitian Revolution must have motivated Hegel as he elaborated the "Master-Slave dialectic" portion of his Phenomenology of Spirit. The Master-Slave dialectic is perhaps Hegel's most famous argument, one that has been read for almost two centuries as a precursor to Marxism.
In college I was taught that Hegel was thinking about Stoicism and the fate of Christians in the Roman Empire when he wrote that section of the Phenomenology, but Buck-Morss argues that the immediate condition of African slaves in the New World and the first successful revolution against white masters in Haiti must also have had a profound impact on the young Hegel, one which scholars have since forgotten.
Her argument is by no means confined to one German Idealist. She traces the long history of how European intellectuals looked past the immediate oppression of Africans when they theorized on freedom and slavery. The Mediterranean ancient past was always assumed to be the philosophical context for Enlightenment arguments against slavery, a perversion given the aggressive involvement of all European maritime powers in the Atlantic slave trade.
How much Buck-Morss's argument will shift our understanding of Hegel remains to be seen, but her essay, and this new book, is a compelling place to rediscover Haiti's crucial stand against oppression and the two hundred years of punishment that the United States and Europe of meted out ever since sugar cane slaves rose up against their masters.
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