Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment

Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and Radical Enlightenment. By Nick Nesbitt. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8139-2803-6. 260 pp. $22.50 paperback. In second half of twentieth century, revisionist versions of legacy of Enlightenment moved from plumbing depths of philosophies of chosen few from France, England and, little later, Germany, to examining positive and negative effects of eighteenthcentury sea changes in technology, cross-cultural contact, and revolutions on modern society. To be sure, Enlightenment ideas and theories created new subjects and new aspirations, but first twentieth-century revisionist schools concentrated primarily on damage done by Enlightenment. In 1970s, as graduate student of eighteenth-century, I studied first round of critics who dethroned Enlightenment's proud legacy of individual rights and freedom to pursue happiness and personal expression and who blamed Terror and Holocaust on inherent bankruptcy of these theories which allowed emerging bourgeoisie and capitalists to usurp authority for their own purposes. Postmodernist critics honed these critiques while extending their sights to another failure of Enlightenment: its inability to produce an effective critique of expanding slave trade, an institution that most certainly contradicted all of its ideals. Postmodernism's commitment to turn literary critiques into principled statements on contemporary political and economic conditions has created new Enlightenment site, that of its racism, which they analyze alongside postcolonial critics. Eighteenth-century conjectural discourses on origins of human race, such as those anthologized by Emmanuel Eze (1997), shows how great minds, intent on categorizing all cultural differences in human race they claimed to be equal and universal, could do little more than establish hierarchies for differences they found in non-Europeans. These hierarchies, based in concepts of cultural and scientific progress placed white race and European cultures clearly on top. Enlightenment philosophers pragmatically compromised and betrayed their own ideals by adjusting them to economic, political and social realities of their time. Postmodernism is undergirded by theories of Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida. Most central is Foucault's conceptualization of Enlightenment as creator of new types of repressive authority. The Enlightenment's faith in dialectic of history rather than religious dogma and divine right to resolve problems scientific and economic progress created engendered new ways of linking knowledge to power that postmodernism's skepticism and refusal of metanarratives claims to demystify. Nonetheless, as Daniel Gordon argues, postmodernist historiography, popular in American and Australia, is often victim of its own unvoiced presuppositions: its desire to critique Europe and deny their legacy to us and their own version of political mystique inspired by Foucault's Discipline and Punish (2001). Foucault did not totally dismiss Enlightenment by refusing to idealize it. Instead he proposes new dialectic that would radicalize Enlightenment by pushing its pursuit of freedom, which he calls the art of not being governed, and would continue Kant's legacy of daring to know and call to overthrow submission to blind authority.1 In Universal Emancipation Nesbitt enters critical debates in how to salvage what is positive and relevant in Enlightenment (on several occasions he announces his intent to analyze relation between Haitian Revolution and predicaments of our present age (229, n.l) as he defends Haitian revolutionary ideals as concretization of Enlightenment's most radical ideas proposed by Spinoza and his followers. The slaves and their leaders were active participants in a single, variegated transnational public sphere, not mere segregated counterpublic (219, n. …