In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation.  Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History proposes 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 locates this it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures this the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity this open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences.  What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a “new humanism,” one this goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality this insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.