Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment

by Nick Nesbitt

Unlike the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution was the first in a modern state to implement human rights universally and unconditionally. Going well beyond the selective emancipation of white adult male property owners, the Haitian Revolution is of vital importance, Nick Nesbitt argues, in thinking today about the urgent problems of social justice, human rights, imperialism, torture, and, above all, human freedom. Combining archival research, political philosophy, and intellectual history, Nesbitt explores this fundamental event of modern history--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 (Rancière, Laclau, Habermas) and trends (such as the turn to ethics, human rights, and universalism) in contemporary political philosophy. In doing so, he elucidates the theoretical implications of Haiti's revolution both for the eighteenth century and for the twenty-first century. Universal Emancipation will be of interest not only to scholars and students of the Haitian Revolution and postcolonial francophone studies but also to readers interested in critical theory and its relation to history and political science.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very mixed feelings. Far too obsessed with specific streams of Western philosophy, especially Kant and Arendt-derived analyses of "totalitarianism" for an analysis of the Haitian Revolution (the most ridiculous being Nesbitt's strange reliance upon Havel Vaclav and Jan Potacka, and almost equating Saint-Domingue enslavement with socialist Czechoslovakia). Nesbitt does good at relating the ideological forces both from Africa and Europe which spurred the leaders of the Haitian Revolution; the sections contraposing the moderate vs. radical Enlightenment are excellent, but I think he overstates the influence of Spinoza, Diderot, etc. The Enlightenment influence upon the Haitian Revolution was filtered entirely through a Jacobin reading of the Declaration of the Rights of Man; it seems an overestimation to derive from that a sort of conscious or deep philosophical connection to the influencers of the Declaration. I like his engagement with Buck-Morss's work. His discussion of the Haitian "nation against state" and the "stateless egalitarianism" of the Haitian countryside is again interesting, but I worry it is overstated and more of a fetishization of Haitian rural life along the lines of the now discredited scholarship surrounding "tribes without rulers" in Africa that scholars and Western anarchists so fetishized.

[Taylor Gregory · Rating 2 out of 5]

I fear Nick won't be escaping the Eurocentric matrix any time soon. Why spend an entire book subsuming unparalleled (decidedly radical) political praxis into the constraints of tired Enlightenment philosophy? In 2026, no less. Very bored.