Eduardo Grüner explores the Haitian Revolution as a political and philosophical response to Eurocentric Enlightenment modernity and as a radical rejection of slavery and Western capitalism. From the start of his analysis, Grüner painstakingly establishes the difference between the slavery that existed in the Americas (modern slavery), particularly in Saint-Domingue/Haiti, and forms of slavery that existed in Europe in pre-modern times (ancient slavery). Fundamentally, the difference is that slavery in the Americas was particularly racialised and constituted the central basis for the capitalist system, unlike slavery in ancient Europe where the slave shared the master's skin colour and benefited from treatment of partial humanity. Using a Marxist framework, Grüner describes the slave as simultaneously the embodiment of labour power and a means of production, central components of capitalism. The slave trade facilitated the expansion of the nascent capitalist system and the beginning process of its globalisation.
By analysing racialised slavery and capitalism as intimately intertwined, the author also calls attention to modernity. Modernity is considered as an ideology that forms its economic basis upon capitalism but gained its philosophical and political resonance through the Enlightenment philosophers’ writings and its materialisation through the French Revolution. Thus modernity came with a (false) promise of universalism that proclaimed ‘Equality, Liberty and Fraternity’ among the citoyens (citizens). The promise did not, however, extend to the vast enslaved population in the French colonies. The slave was considered a ‘thing’ and was denied any ‘political consciousness’. From this angle, Grüner points out that the Haitian Revolution appeared to be inconceivable. Therefore, he argues that the Revolution defies the odds by ‘making the historical and political unconsciousness conscious’ (p. 59).
Such a claim is particularly novel. Yet, Grüner reminds us that the Haitian Revolution has been massively repressed by the collective Western narrative. He bases his analysis on the seminal work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the late Haitian anthropologist, who portrays the Haitian Revolution as completely forgotten by Western intellectuals. More importantly, Grüner critically digs into the French Revolution discourse and Enlightenment philosophy to look for traces of this forgotten ideology. As he brilliantly illustrates, even the more radical Enlightenment philosophers were particularly Eurocentric and nearly blind to the reality of slavery. The philosophes (philosophers) and the French bourgeois society of the eighteenth century did very little to change the reality of slavery in Saint-Domingue/Haiti. Instead, according to the author, slavery was more an economic necessity for the French revolutionary bourgeoisie than a ‘thing’ to be abolished.
The same is true of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and even Rousseau, the most radical Enlightenment philosophe. Their notion of slavery was purely and simply metaphorical: they used ‘slave’ as a political metaphor. Referring to Rousseau, for instance, Grüner cites The Social Contract (1762), in which Rousseau delivered this warning to his contemporaries: ‘As for you modern peoples, you have no slaves, but you are yourselves slaves; you pay for their freedom with your own. Well may you boast of this preference; I find in it more cowardice than humanity’ (Rousseau, cited by Grüner, p. 150). Rousseau made this shocking statement at a time when slavery was widespread in the French colonies.
Grüner fiercely critiques modernity and rebukes the (false) universalism of the French Revolution with its promise, which was denied to millions of slaves in the colonies. Nevertheless, the author's most important contribution is that he frames the Haitian Revolution as ‘another modernity’, and more specifically as a ‘counter-modernity’. He makes the bold claim that ‘the Haitian Revolution offered the first and most radical response to the false philosophical and political universalisms’ of the French Revolution (p. 180). He makes this case not only because the Haitian Revolution materialises the idea of freedom and liberty for the former slaves of Saint-Domingue/Haiti, which the French Revolution failed to do, but also because the Revolution proclaims a ‘particularist universalism’. This form of universalism is highlighted in Article 14 of the Constitution of the new Haitian republic: ‘All Haitians would henceforth be known as Blacks.’ The ‘Blackness’ was extended to the White Europeans who stayed in Haiti in the wake of the Revolution. Hence, in the light of this ‘particularist universalism’, a new philosophy, counter-modernity, was born. Grüner calls it the ‘Black Enlightenment’.
While I found Grüner's critical perspective of the Haitian Revolution fascinating, his perspective may face some practical limitations for at least two reasons. First, the Haitian Revolution has never been able to fully articulate this counter-modernity discourse as a parallel alternative to the Eurocentric modernity offered by the French Revolution. Grüner would argue that the Haitian Revolution was disavowed from its inception and continued to be disavowed even by the most progressive contemporary thinkers. Indeed, Grüner would be right as he convincingly demonstrates that even postcolonial contemporary scholars have consciously or unconsciously disregarded the Haitian Revolution. For example, he references the case of Benedict Anderson's extraordinary book on the origin and spread of nationalism (Imagined Communities, Verso, 1983), in which the Haitian Revolution is nowhere mentioned. Yet, the post-revolutionary conflicts in Haiti, the class struggles and the question of colour between the ‘mulatto’ fraction and the vast ‘Black’ population undermined the country's capacity to facilitate the success of the revolution and positively articulate this counter-modernity discourse.
Second, the Haitian Revolution is fundamentally a unique case. It was orchestrated by the subaltern slaves. Other modern revolutions in different places were instead realised by the conscious bourgeois fraction, which was the case of the US and the French revolutions, and also various revolutions in Latin America. It was the uniqueness of the Haitian Revolution − as a Black/former-slave revolution − that fuelled a vast ‘scientific’ racist movement against Haiti to ensure the failure of the revolution and the impossibility of its replication.
Nevertheless, a book like this that examines the Haitian Revolution through the philosophical lenses of a counter-modernity discourse is particularly novel and philosophically extraordinary. The book makes an excellent and unique contribution to the literature on capitalism and slavery, modernity discourse and, of course, the Haitian Revolution as counter-modernity.
