
Master Plan
In 2000, Susan Buck-Morss published an essay in the journal Critical Inquiry that positively crackled with provocations for research, scholarly imagination, and political action. It had the unlikely title “Hegel and Haiti,” and now she has expanded it into a slim book, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. It still packs a powerful punch.
Its strength lies in the development of a specific claim in the history of philosophy into a general theme concerning universality and politics. The claim is that Hegel was inspired by the Haitian revolution of the 1790s when developing his fundamental concept