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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.--publisher description

"This book offers a reevaluation of the twentieth century. It argues that the disintegration of Soviet socialism marked the abandonment of the idea of mass utopia by both sides in the Cold War. One of the casualties of the end of that war was the shattering of dreamworlds of industrialization, mass culture, and historical progress that gave meaning to collective social life in East and West. Dreamworld and Catastrophe is an experiment in visual culture, using images as philosophy, presenting, literally, a way of seeing the past. Its pictorial narrative rescues historical data that with the end of the Cold War are threatened with oblivion, and challenges common conceptions of what the century was about. The book is written for the general public but will be of special interest to critical theorists, historians, philosophers, and artists."--Jacket.

Universal history as traditionally understood emerged out of the semi-secularization of Biblical history that followed Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's attempt to think the whole of religion, philosophy, and history as a cosmological system of modernity. That was the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, universal history became an attempt to include all so-called civilizations within an academic canon. By unearthing the central significance of the Haitian Revolution for Hegel's idea of freedom, the author argues for an inversion of historical understanding: the alleged margins of history are central, the alleged divisions between histories are mythical, and the goal of a universal history of humanity is to be achieved by dismantling the topology in which the past has been framed and passed down to us. The goal is to disrupt the intellectual order by exposing the blind spots that hinder conceptual, hence political, imagination—a writing of universal history upside down. A universal history worthy of the name will go far beyond the notion of correcting the Eurocentricity of history writing; it will need to be based on a deprivatized, denationalized structure of collective memory, effecting nothing short of a different world order. If the present is imagined not as the culmination of the past but rather as its rescue, then a radical pedagogy practices this gesture in its mode of historical recuperation. Theoretical pragmatics as a method of universal history, the transitory visibility of truth, respects the past's lack of closure and welcomes the past's intrusion in the present. It views history as a gift, given to all of us, without restrictions.

O paradoxo entre o discurso da liberdade e a prática da escravidão marcou a ascensão de uma série de nações ocidentais no interior da nascente economia global moderna. O artigo explora o uso da metáfora da escravidão no iluminismo filosófico europeu, e sugere que a "dialética do senhor e do escravo" hegeliana tem raízes mais na história contemporânea - particularmente, nas notícias que chegavam à Europa da Revolução Haitiana de 1791 - do que na tradição herdada pelo filósofo alemão.