Hegel and Haiti Author(s): Susan Buck-Morss Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Summer, 2000), pp. 821-865 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344332 Accessed: 28-07-2016 19:27 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344332?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry This content downloaded from 128.59.222.107 on Thu, 28 Jul 2016 19:27:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Hegel and Haiti Susan Buck-Morss 1 By the eighteenth century, slavery had become the root metaphor of Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations.' Freedom, its conceptual antithesis, was considered by Enlightenment thinkers as the highest and universal political value. Yet this political metaphor began to take root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery-the systematic, highly sophisticated capi- talist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force in the colonies-was increasing quantitatively and intensifying qualitatively to the point that by the mid-eighteenth century it came to underwrite the entire economic system of the West, paradoxically facilitating the global spread of the very Enlightenment ideals that were in such fundamental contradiction to it.