CAPSIZALS

The most striking reaction to the pluralization of the Enlightenment is found in Jonathan Israel’s effort to reclaim the univocity of the Enlightenment. In a series of weighty tomes, Israel has unearthed a “Radical Enlightenment,” traceable to Spinoza’s philosophical monism. It consists of nothing less than “the system of ideas that has principally shaped the Western World’s most basic social and cultural values in the post-Christian age;” that is, everything that is worth protecting today from the perspective of a moderate, centrist, republican order continually under siege by assaults from both the right and the left (Reference Israel2010, xi). Once thus conceived, Israel continues, the impulse to diversify it becomes understandable, but ultimately misguided: “basing one’s view of the Enlightenment on a ‘diverse family’ typology, though understandable as a reaction to … historiographical problems, weakens our sense of the Enlightenment’s unity, universal pretensions, and cosmopolitan flavor, as well as near global reach, and our sense of its continuing relevance to politics and society today” (Reference Israel2019, 1).

What is the political content of this unity as Israel conceives of it? Israel (Reference Israel2011) formulates an answer along these lines:

The Enlightenment is thus “characterized less by plurality than by duality,” and, based on that insight Israel frames the Enlightenment in terms of “a set of rifts between closely interactive competitors”—in his reckoning, the moderate and radical streams of Enlightenment—which could, nonetheless, be “readily classifiable as a single narrative” (Reference Israel2011, 6). Israel’s massive reconstruction of the Enlightenment in terms of this duality rests on a larger periodization and level of detail hitherto unsurpassed. Even when his core narrative is overwhelmingly intra-European, his comparative transnational approach commendably looks beyond Western Europe. But even as the Enlightenment’s transatlantic movements are acknowledged, Israel (Reference Israel2019) depicts the transatlantic spaces as merely “a battleground for rival moderate and radical Enlightenment factions” in which a conflict born and fully fleshed out in Europe is simply reenacted (2).

Yet this representation of Enlightenment’s transatlantic moment illustrates the pitfalls of a singular narrative in which “the unfolding Enlightenment” becomes a unifying thread, but that reduces particular instances (in all their difference, as alluded earlier on) to an example of a universal that is understood to be born in Europe with all its conceptual determinations already in place. This is not to say that Israel does not allow for innovation. But this is cast as mostly epiphenomenal: “Certainly the great Enlightenment projects of the 1800–30 period were no mere emulation of past efforts. Some new elements appeared. But these are all best viewed as applications of typically pre-1800 principles in new contexts, as with Bolivar’s revolution in South America, or extensions of eighteenth-century concerns…” (Reference Israel2019, 23).Footnote ⁶ The language of “applications” and “extensions” is very revealing. Through these terms, Israel further describes the ways in which the Enlightenment traveled across the Atlantic, and beyond, as already formed and reduces the “new elements” to mere applications and extensions, rather than reworkings or appropriations, radicalizations, or dialectical misplacements of the Enlightenment, that at once enrich and complicate its history.

The political and critical limits of this unitarian narrative of the Enlightenment become more graspable in Israel’s treatment of the Haitian Revolution, which reduces Black emancipation and the Haitian Revolution to a particularity of an already fully-formed universal Enlightenment.Footnote ⁷ Israel is unequivocal in his defense of Black emancipation. Even so, the grip of Eurocentrism on the narrative remains in place, as does the truncation of the Haitian Revolution (Israel Reference Israel2017, 361–84; Reference Israel2019, 729–68). Absent any reference to Laurent Dubois’s work on revolution and emancipation in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions—A Colony of Citizens and Avengers of the New World—or foundational works like Michèle Duchet’s Anthropologie et historie au siècle des Lumières and James’s The Black Jacobins in his otherwise voluminous bibliography, Israel’s account of “Black Emancipation” proceeds to cut Toussaint Louverture down to size, but lionizes the French abolitionist Léger-Félicité Sonthonax. Israel (Reference Israel2015) claims that the “Caribbean Revolution proper began” not with the rise of the Saint Domingue masses, but “with the dispatch to Saint Domingue of 6,000 troops (bringing 30,000 rifles), to assert the now fully republican Assembly’s authority” (405) under Sonthonax’s command. Not only the “essential impulse behind revolutionary subversion in the Caribbean area in the 1790s, including Haiti,” is presented as emanating “from revolutionary France itself”; but that “the principal agent of black emancipation in the Caribbean was unquestionably the philosophic tendency within the revolution, that is, the Radical Enlightenment” (Reference Israel2015, 419).Footnote ⁸

In sum, in Israel’s account, an already formed Enlightenment traveled across the Atlantic and beyond. Subsequent actualizations of the Enlightenment are thereby reduced to the addition of “some new elements,” mere applications and extensions, rather than the reworking or appropriation of its tenets in concrete material conditions, radicalization, or dialectical misplacement of the Enlightenment that at once enrich and complicate it (Schwarz Reference Schwarz and Gledson1992; Vázquez-Arroyo Reference Vázquez-Arroyo2018).

To gain fuller measure of the stakes involved in the non-dialectical oppositions of one and many enlightenments, and how under scrutiny it capsizes, it is helpful to contrast Israel’s construction to a figure closer to the world of political theory: J. G. A. Pocock, who presents a more complicated and far more interesting case than the common-place pluralization of the Enlightenment and its legacies. In the context of his study of Edward Gibbon, Pocock has detected several enlightenments out of which Gibbon weaved his own powerful formulation of “enlightenment history.”Footnote ⁹ Not a champion of de-differentiation, for Pocock (Reference Pocock2008) the question at stake is not about multiple phenomena or national variations of a single phenomenon or theme. Rather, “‘Enlightenment’ is a word or signifier;” and while there is no such thing as a “single or unifiable phenomenon describable as ‘the Enlightenment,’” one can think of a variety of interconnected statements from the rather discontinuous seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to which the term can be “usefully applied” (83). By casting it as a signifier Pocock (Reference Pocock2008) dismisses talk of “The Enlightenment” as a linguistic reification, rather than a concept. For Pocock, then, “it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided” (83). With this shift, Pocock writes of “an Enlightenment” rather than “the Enlightenment.”

But this is not to deny continuities and overlapping tenets and concerns. Instead, what these otherwise discontinuous statements have in common is best recast as something like a set of family resemblances. Pocock (Reference Pocock2008) proposes the following:

Yet five pages later the stridency of these passages softens. When engaging with the actual details of Enlightenment historians, he concedes that “there remains the possibility” that all “‘Enlightenments’ display similarities and may perhaps have had shared origins and effects” (91).

The appearance of these tics in an otherwise supremely confident narrative tells the tale. For all the initial talk of signifiers with emphasis on pluralization and indefiniteness, Pocock ultimately reverts to ideas of Enlightenment as a period of European history, even if one with countercurrents and national variations within it, which are tacitly reduced to the diffusion of ideas emanating from a core. But, to Pocock’s credit, there is no reification of the Enlightenment. For the idealization and reduction of the Enlightenment to a diffusionist episteme one needs to return to Israel’s reconstruction of the Enlightenment in terms of moderate and radical wings fighting for ascendance across the span of two centuries and several continents. Responding to Israel’s work, Pocock (Reference Pocock2016) has rightly characterized it as driven by a tendency to homogenize different narratives of Enlightenment as opposed to “particularize” them (67).Footnote ¹⁰ In contrast, for Israel, it makes little sense to pluralize the Enlightenment according to nationalities as Pocock does. Israel (Reference Israel2011) insists that “the rifts” of the Enlightenment “were characterized less by plurality than by duality;” and criticizes Pocock for being “too vague and diffuse,” and rather frames the Enlightenment in terms of “a set of rifts between closely interactive competitors”—in his reckoning, the moderate and radical streams of Enlightenment—which could be “readily classifiable as a single narrative” (Israel Reference Israel2016, 6). So, for Israel, two ultimately become one; while for Pocock, one becomes many, only to capsize back to one.

These capsizals symptomatize the quick sands nominalist, positivist and analytical approaches to the Enlightenment find themselves in when trying to thematize the unity of identity and difference; a unity that remains elusive for the thought forms in which their respective accounts of the Enlightenment are embedded. But it is one thing to criticize the contradictions and tendentiousness of strategies of pluralization and univocity, as these ultimately consist of reducing particular historical moments to particularities of an idealized version of universality. Another thing is to grasp the grain of truth in these gestures. Although completely subordinated in these accounts, the truth-content (Wahrheitsgehalt) in them, as Adorno would put it, consists of how the Enlightenment was never homogenous, and paths to achieve it were never univocal. These paths to Enlightenment are always alternate, each singular and thus unique, but also mediated by particular (national) social formations. Any transnational account of the Enlightenment, moreover, needs to both explain and comprehend how it first emerged and how it was transformed and remade in a transatlantic space that is no mere stage in which it simply became applied, but a space that is constitutive of its unfolding in both its regressions and radicalizations. This dialectical unfolding is precisely what in The Black Jacobins James so powerfully presented.

CONSCRIPTIONS

Before we can have an adequate understanding of the centrality of these concerns in The Black Jacobins, it is important to confront an interpretation of James that brushes them aside, and instead posits its own version of pluralization in the name of “colonial enlightenment:” David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity. This book stages a postcolonial reading of this anti-colonial classic that symptomizes a historical moment in which colonialism became overwhelmingly theorized from the perspective of what is known as Postcolonial Theory. Indeed, Scott’s intervention reflected a terminology and politics emblematic of a particular streak within postcolonial studies, and the concomitant rewriting of anti-colonial thinkers into post-colonial sages. Emergent in the mid-1980s, right in the midst of the first wave of North Atlantic neoliberalism, this eclectic and diverse theoretical force field gained ascendance in the 90s, just as neoliberalism was consolidated.Footnote ¹¹ Out of it emerged important correctives to traditional narratives of the Enlightenment, but also a set of basic tenets that in due course became commonplaces. One such platitude, in fact, consisted of homogenizing and rather unhistorical critiques of Eurocentrism, modernity, universalism, and Enlightenment (Lilti Reference Lilti2019, 41–86). This is the discursive field in which Scott intervened. Conscripts of Modernity not only exhibits all these tenets, but it both represents and completes a longer-term tendency within academic postcolonial studies to repudiate social revolution as something proto-totalitarian, to cut down seminal anti-colonial thinkers into liberal postcolonial elders, to repudiate collective self-determination and dislodge political critique in the name of ethics. In the case of Scott, this is further compounded by how, under the guises of a critique of modernity, he deploys the terminology of Cold War liberalism to interpret anticolonial revolutions in the Caribbean.

In the name of “colonial enlightenment,” Scott’s version of pluralization, Conscripts of Modernity takes as its point of departure James’s suggestion about how Toussaint Louverture’s ultimate “failure” was one of enlightenment, not darkness. As Scott (Reference Scott2004) writes, “The tragedy of colonial enlightenment, I will argue, is not to be perceived in terms of a flaw to be erased or overcome, but rather in terms of a permanent legacy that has set the conditions in which we make of ourselves what we make and which therefore demands constant renegotiation and readjustment” (21). In the name of adjustment and negotiation to “the paradoxes of colonial Enlightenment,” however, more than just accounting for sedimented legacy is at stake: emancipation and the intellectual traditions and the forms of collective agency capable of actualizing it, are safely ensconced in what Scott characterizes as a “future past,” and thus denied any contemporary import. These, he goes on to argue, no longer bear on a post-colonial present. Instead, the politics of adjustment and negotiation, along with modesty and receptiveness in the face of contingency abide in the postcolonial predicament, which demand rejection of the radical traditions of socialist and anti-colonial nationalism. Scott’s invocation of adjustment and negotiation amounts to a coded plea for defending William E. Connolly’s postmodern liberalism, which Scott has made his own and has recast in postcolonial terms.Footnote ¹² This postcolonial liberalism is the political perspective that deeply informs how Scott interprets The Black Jacobins.

It is along these lines that Scott interprets The Black Jacobins as staging a variation of a “longing for total revolution” whose outcome can only be tragic (Reference Scott2004, 5, 6, 10, 89, 91, 92, 95, 135). Scott’s argument largely pivots on the idea that in the processes of revision, from the 1938 to the 1963 edition of the book, tragedy displaces romance as the master trope in The Black Jacobins. Footnote ¹³ In Scott’s interpretation, the 1938 edition offers romance as its master trope, and thus remained attached to a longing for total revolution concerned with totally overcoming colonialism. But this longing belongs to another present, which is James’s, not ours, and ought to be kept there. Through this interpretative move, Scott tacitly downplays the dialectic of realism and utopia that is central to James’s actual account of tragedy and severs its critical import from present-day struggles. Equally diminished are the subtleties of James’s account of Toussaint’s tragic predicament, as that of an actor in a political situation embedded in a colonial situation structured by the imperatives of a plantation economy.

Central to Scott’s argument is the notion that “the paradox of the Enlightenment” comes into focus once the ideas of the Enlightenment are expressed in contexts shot through with the legacies of colonialism and slavery. Yet, like Israel, Scott ultimately shares the assumption that once the Enlightenment first emerged it was fully actualized, even if its paradoxical and tragic natures are most clearly revealed in Toussaint’s actions, struggles, and eventual fate. This assumption is tacitly disclosed by the centrality accorded to “conscription” in Scott’s story. In sharp contrast to James’s own account, Toussaint emerges not as a revolutionary agent radically misplacing, actualizing, and radicalizing a political legacy, let alone a legitimate heir of it. Instead, Toussaint is dramatically depicted as a “conscripted” and “tragic subject” imprisoned by “the modern conditions of his life” and thus forced to “seek his freedom in the very technologies, conceptual languages, and institutional formations in which modernity’s rationality has sought his enslavement” (Reference Scott2004, 168; emphases added). As these undialectical and rather overwrought passages clearly show, few notions are more mystified than “modernity” in Scott’s book (Reference Scott2004, 106ff.). Meanwhile, the figure of Toussaint qua political actor that emerges in these passages is minimized; instead, he is presented as an enfeebled political actor, a depiction which has no correspondence with James’s, let alone with what the historical record indicates (Forsdick and Høgsbjerg Reference Forsdick and Høgsbjerg2017b; Hazareesingh Reference Hazareesingh2021).

By characterizing the problem this way, the predicaments in which Toussaint (and James) acted become depoliticized and their historical agency is misrecognized. Scott’s invocations of modernity, moreover, have the effect of de-differentiating the imperatives of domination and exploitation, along with the concrete historical crucible out of which the Haitian Revolution emerged, thus negating the modicum of agency and historical responsibility in revolutionary situations that James’s account clearly avows. Stated differently, Scott fails to do justice to James’s nuanced understanding of historical causality and political responsibility, one of the most illuminating aspects of The Black Jacobins. James’s Toussaint is a historical actor subjected to the social forces and political imperatives structuring the situation in which he acted, a situation to which he responded by sometimes expressing, or being swept by these forces, at other times rearticulating them with a modicum of freedom, or downright refusing them. No one’s conscript, in these predicaments responsibility for the actions he undertook was at times lessened, mitigated, or enhanced by the structuring of the colonial situation in which he acted (Vázquez-Arroyo Reference Vázquez-Arroyo2016, 256). To suggest otherwise is to de-historicized the crucible James sought to historicize.

For instance, even if one confines the discussion to the Enlightenment in revolutionary France, one could readily see how contradictory and equivocal many claims stemming from the Enlightenment were, and how these became transformed in the revolutionary process. In what remains the best reconstruction of the Enlightenment in relation to slavery and the colonies, Duchet (Reference Duchet1995) showed that the legacies of the Enlightenment were complex, contradictory, and contested in ways that polemics against it fail to register. During the French Revolution, as James shows, these contradictions exploded and led to abolition, which is why he concatenates the masses in Saint Domingue with the masses in Paris (Reference James1989, 85–144); an insight confirmed by subsequent historians.Footnote ¹⁴ These contradictions were further challenged, questioned, and radicalized, as James clearly shows, by the Haitian Revolution. The already radical ideas of the French Revolution were thus made more complex and enacted on a very different basis by the Haitian revolutionaries. In these struggles, the agency of the colonized was both denied and affirmed. James unequivocally affirms the importance of collective agency against all odds and the transformation and radicalization of the Enlightenment’s emancipatory legacies in a colonial situation, along with the right of the colonized to inherit, misplace, and radicalize them.

But this is precisely what Scott’s notion of conscription negates. For it only makes sense to speak of something like “conscription” if one either simplifies or moralizes colonial predicaments. But once the concrete imperatives and practices that define a “colonial situation” are grasped, including multiple subject-positions ranging from victims to structural beneficiaries and collaborators, such simplifications are revealed to be just that.

The political valences of Scott’s notion of “colonial enlightenment,” and how these are at odds with those animating James’s classic book, become even more clear once his account of “tragedy” is brought into closer focus.Footnote ¹⁵ For Scott (Reference Scott2004), “the images through which James figures his tragic hero, Toussaint Louverture—the image of the man of exceptional knowledge, courage, skill, compassion, and so on—are the recognizably conventional images of the mythic hero of enlightenment” (191). In the very next sentence James is curiously cast as “a mythmaker.” Leaving aside the meaning of “mythmaker” in this context, and the absence of references and substantial textual evidence to support Scott’s concoction of “the mythic hero of enlightenment,” James’s account of tragedy has little to do with Scott’s conventional understanding of this genre, as revealed by the curious invocation of mythical heroes in this passage. In contrast, the conception of tragedy underlining The Black Jacobins is closer to the relationship between tragedy and revolution as exemplified by the figure of Trotsky, and as carefully formulated by Raymond Williams.Footnote ¹⁶

In Williams’s socialist account, the core concerns are not about heroes. The focus is on the orders and disorders in which revolutionary action is embedded in situations in which masses and leaders confront and seek to transform the structures, imperatives, and practices in a political situation that at once enables and limits, often tragically, the purview and scope of their actions. These are situations mediated by both inextricable, often obdurate, structures along with accidents and occasions. All of which needs to be grasped and seized by politically literate actors for whom “a sense of tragedy,” Williams (Reference Williams1980) insists elsewhere, means a sense of the struggle for the “ending of an imperialist and capitalist order” (115).Footnote ¹⁷ In line with James’s staging of tragedy and enlightenment, Williams’s account of tragedy is thus driven by the concerns of a genuine socialist who aims at the destruction of an existing order, the seizing of power, and the founding of a new political order. In formulating tragedy in this way, Williams (Reference Williams1966) was deeply attuned to the predicaments of the Bolshevik Revolution and anti-colonial struggles, and the hardening that “the inevitable working through of a deep and tragic disorder” inexorably brings about (75). Or as Williams further writes: “The real tragedy occurs at those dreadful moments when the revolutionary is so nearly lost, or so heavily threatened, that the revolutionary movement has to impose the harshest discipline on itself and against relatively innocent people in order not to be broken down and defeated” (395). This is especially so, Williams emphasizes, when such moments are traversed with “revenge and senseless destruction, after the bitterness and deformity of oppression” that constitute unavoidable aspects of revolutionary anti-colonial situations (78). These moments are precisely what James’s book sought to convey and draw lessons for socialist anti-colonial politics.

That The Black Jacobins lent expression to and staged the tragedy of revolution Williams theorized, and that James sought to draw lessons from Toussaint’s ultimate defeat and his errors by way of analogies with the October 1917 revolution should be clear to any reader who takes the architecture of James’s book seriously. Responding to his own political situation and commitments, James sought to interpret Toussaint in the context of defeats and tragic outcomes—not least the fate of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the onset of the Spanish Civil War in the first edition, along with pending revolutionary struggles of emancipation in the non-western world—and thus make the Haitian Revolution a central referent in contemporary struggles and those to come (Høgsbjerg Reference Høgsbjerg2016; Reference Høgsbjerg2020). James saw his book as enhancing the political literacy of future political actors in colonial and post-colonial predicaments by learning from past defeats as part of a shared history that he explicitly traces in the appendix to the second edition of The Black Jacobins.

In the 1980 preface to the book, James (Reference James2001) is not only clear about how he wanted “to write a book in which Africans or people of African descent instead of constantly being the object of other peoples’ exploitation and ferocity would themselves be taking action on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs;” he explicitly, tells readers that the new edition was written “not with the Caribbean but with Africa in mind” (xv, xvi). For the dice was already cast in Haiti, but not so in analogous predicaments. It thus became paramount to write an enlightened history that would retrieve the agency of the masses of former slaves as revolutionary actors and would also contribute to the political education and literacy of those engaged in Pan-African struggles. Carrying this out required James to dispense with the “romanticism” that he characterized as typically caught up in the “volcanic eruptions” and “the meteoric flares” of events. Instead, the imperative was to seek and adequately grasp historical causation, as the preface to the first edition makes explicit. There, James (Reference James1989) emphasizes the long-term causes of the revolution and soberly comprehends what lies in the “sub-soil” (sic) of events, sedimented over centuries of imperial plunder and justified by a racialization with clear “materialist origins” (x, 43, 44).Footnote ¹⁸

This thus required a realist depiction of the masses that James rightly credited with beginning a world-historical revolutionary process but without idealizing them, or those who led them. James memorably depicts and celebrates the role of the masses, the basis of Toussaint’s power, while fully registering the effects of the brutalization of slavery, including and how it “detribalized Africans,” in a colonial situation in which “violence and ferocity” were at the root of a “calculated brutality and terrorism” that persisted throughout and produced “a backward and ignorant mass.” In turn, he ascribes their confidence, political education, and political literacy to their engagement and participation in the revolutionary process that abolished slavery and sought to establish freedom and equality (7, 12, 198). James, accordingly, recognizes the ignorance and backwardness of the masses as a result of slavery, and poses the political relationship between masses and leaders, rulers and ruled, in a situation shot through with the imperatives intrinsic to the struggle to seize power for the creation of a new order and its consolidation (94–5).

If James is clear-eyed about both the greatness and shortcomings of the masses, he is similarly unsparing on those who led them and sought to “translate mass feeling into action” (121). Toussaint is praised for his leadership and ability to identify and seize openings, the capacity to respond to the spontaneous violent eruptions and forestall the prospects of a famine, due to an understandable but ultimately unsustainable “devastation” that “was making it impossible for them to exist,” and for his unrelenting commitment to anti-slavery (103, 148). But he is unflinchingly criticized for his “excessive reserve and aloofness,” autocracy, the despotic means he deployed at times and the lack of accountability to the masses (188). Key to his tragic fate is that he “never troubled to explain,” as he was “overconfident that he had only to speak and the masses would follow,” which ultimately led to his downfall: “sowing off the branch on which he sat” (240, 275). If Toussaint’s defeat was mediated by the imperatives structuring the situation he responded to, as a political actor he made decisions and bore responsibility within the constraints the situation imposed. That is why in a powerful account of historical possibility James explores an alternative path, while also illustrating the reasons why it remained a missed opportunity, placing the political responsibility on Toussaint. Hence: the centrality of accounting for Toussaint’s actions and errors and accurately registering both for the sake of struggles to come; all as part of a shared transatlantic history that foster political literacy in a largely post-colonial but still imperial and capitalist world order (284ff.).

Scott’s conscription of The Black Jacobins into his own postcolonial, liberal, recasting of revolution distorts all of that. All in all, in the name of adjustment and negotiation to “the paradoxes of colonial Enlightenment,” emancipation, and the intellectual traditions and the forms of collective agency capable of actualizing it, are safely ensconced in a “future past” no longer bearing on a present defined by a chastened politics of adjustment and negotiation, modesty, and receptiveness, in the face of contingency.Footnote ¹⁹ Politically, to be sure, Scott’s reading of James amounts to a rejection of the radical traditions of socialist and anti-colonial nationalism and effectively amounts to an active disavowal of the radical traditions informing the recent past.Footnote ²⁰ By severing these moments of a shared transatlantic history, along with the socialist and colonial internationalisms defining it, Scott negates their critical import for the present. Upended, too, is a history of concatenated transatlantic thought, encompassing both possibility and missed opportunities, available for a radical politics of emancipation, for anyone willing to learn and redeem those legacies in new situations.

Absent here, in sum, is any sense of the capacity that any political actor committed to act in real political situations, and thus confronts predicaments of power, needs to possess: the ability, to borrow a phrase from Gillian Rose (Reference Rose1992), “to know, misknow and yet grow” (310). That is: to grasp a predicament, in all its complexity, both its internal imperatives and the historical logics that produce it, fully aware of one’s fallibility, which also implies the possibility of failing (or that of misknowing or misrecognizing); and yet, out of the experience learn and grow as a political actor. This is a lesson in political literacy avowed by James, but that Scott decisively upends. Instead of the “paradox of colonial enlightenment,” in The Black Jacobins one finds a powerful enlightened history of the radical misplacement of the Enlightenment in a colonial situation. The texture of the situation that James stages, which constitutes a particular instantiation of the tragedy of revolution, is best described by recourse to one of Erich Auerbach’s (Reference Auerbach1984) formulations: the colonial situation Toussaint confronted, and James grasped, is thoroughly mediated by “the inextricable fabric of heredity, historical situation, individual temperament, and the consequences of our own actions” (122). All of which is accounted for by James and negates Scott’s conscription.

AN ENLIGHTENED HISTORY

The Black Jacobins is a classic historical interpretation of the Haitian revolution that powerfully stages the dilemmas of actualizing the political principles of the Enlightenment in a colonial situation supervened by a plantation economy, its social and cultural imperatives, and constitutive practices. It also offers a radical recasting of history as one genre of political theory in which the interplay of realism and utopia in revolutionary action can be glimpsed in its situational contradictoriness.Footnote ²¹ In doing so, it resonates and goes beyond the themes developed by European thinkers—Thucydides, Machiavelli, Weber, de Beauvoir, Trotsky, Weil—by placing at the heart of its narrative the question of political action—structure and agency—in context of a colonial situation located in a Caribbean plantation society. Cast in this light, The Black Jacobins partakes in a well-known genre: political theory as historical excavation. And yet, this characterization requires further clarification, because The Black Jacobins is a reworking of the Enlightenment’s tradition of “enlightened history,” and goes beyond even its most radical expression in Raynal’s (and Diderot’s) Histoire des deux Indes (1770).Footnote ²² Like Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories and Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime, it is a work that offers a historical account, but is hardly a work of history in any conventional sense. Its most immediate inspiration is Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, in and of itself a radical and political heir of Enlightenment histories that dialectically combines a sense of political responsibility with historical causality. In the case of James, the account is shot through with the imperatives of colonialism in a plantation-based social formation that also includes important reflections on political possibility and stages the complex dialectic of rule in ways that enhance the reader’s political literacy.

James’s inheritance, creative formulation, and radical actualization of this genre are accomplished by inscribing the Haitian Revolution and its political crucibles in a transatlantic history that at once sheds critical light on the European articulation of the Enlightenment and its misplacement in a colonial situation in the non-European world. In it, the Haitian Revolution emerges as a world-historical event that led to the first successful slave revolt in modern history, the establishment of the first Black independent republic in the western hemisphere and the defeat of Napoleon in the Caribbean. The Haitian Revolution is conceived as an integral link in a transatlantic concatenation of revolutions that reverberated throughout the nineteenth century, a world-historical crucible, of which James only offered a vignette: how “the history of liberty in France and of slave emancipation in San Domingo (sic) is one and indivisible” (61–2), and how the history binding the two is an instance of connected history and needs to be studied as such.Footnote ²³

Instead of the traditional unidirectional trajectory in which revolutionary enlightened principles are “applied” in the colonies (Israel’s approach), James formulates a mutually constituted constellation defined by a connected history in which events concatenate and crystallize in a meaningful differentiated totality. This is a history of liberty best understood as the unity of continuity and discontinuity that grasps and narrates the misplaced, always imperfect, actualization and concatenation of revolutionary principles. In this history, Enlightenment principles of freedom and equality acquire new meaning and determination in a colonial situation, while the presuppositions of their prior actualizations are revealed in the misplacement and non-identity of idea and actuality, metropolis, and colony.Footnote ²⁴

The Black Jacobins offers a systematic formulation of transatlantic political theory in the age of revolution, one firmly anchored in the Caribbean, which grasps the importance of a colonial situation defined by a plantation economy. James’s book, however, refuses to disavow the universality of his account and places the events in San Domingo as part of an account of negative universal history, which narrates the past as a unity of continuities and discontinuities, blockages, and opportunities (Vázquez-Arroyo Reference Vázquez-Arroyo2008). This enables James to grasp the lessons to be drawn for the emancipation of Africa and the West Indies and situates the revolution in a larger canvass in which the violence of revolution and counterrevolution is staged. James poignantly reflects on the politics of elite/mass; the sedimentations of the past and its binding imperatives; the historical and situated unfolding of a dialectic of the universal and the particular, and how this dialectically unfolds in a colonial predicament. Here we can see the dialectic of subjective and structural violence, and the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution, along with reckonings with alliances and foreign invasions, while encircled by the empires of the day.

Consider, for instance, James’ account of the centrality of the plantation and how it organizes power and domination through violence. In a chapter tellingly titled “The Property,” James pithily states: “Violence and ferocity became the necessities of survival and violence and ferocity survived” (7). Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the persistence of the plantation, whose role was first and foremost one of exploitation. In colonial situations defined by a plantation economy, all manner of forms and degrees of domination were subordinated to the economic and social imperatives of exploitation. The recrudescence of domination was a function of exploitation (Blackburn, Reference Blackburn2024; Moreno Fraginals Reference Moreno Fraginals1983, 24–49, 56–117, 162–71).

From the sixteenth century on, plantations and the presence of enslaved Africans were already found in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean; by the seventeenth century, these spread through the Lesser Antilles and Jamaica. With the rise of sugar in the world market in the eighteenth century came the intensification of slave labor which served as the prelude to the revolution in Haiti (Moreno Fraginals Reference Moreno Fraginals2014, 1: 5–122). These structures continued in Cuba, which sought to fill the void left by Haiti in the world market after 1792 (Blackburn Reference Blackburn2024, 57–88, 195–228; Ferrer Reference Ferrer2014). Resistance to the domination of plantations traveled, too. It was transmitted through underground networks in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions (Scott Reference Scott2018).

IMPERATIVES

This resistance needs to be understood in its colonial context without conflating its invocation of the Enlightenment with European political agendas. Here is James’ remarkable formulation: “[Toussaint] knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves” (271). It is in this vein that James writes of Toussaint’s sole serious political mistake, one already adduced here: “the neglect of his own people” under the pressure of the imperatives of necessity inaugurated by the counterrevolutionary offensive aiming to restore imperial control over San Domingo and, by extension, slavery (224, 240). In James’ formulation:

This is the tragedy of revolution in general and that of Enlightenment in a colonial situation in particular. Under duress, imperatives of necessity for the survival of the revolution call for the hardening of the self and forms of violence that betray the political processes, practices, and forms that are meant to embody it, something poetically articulated in Bertolt Brecht’s great poem “To Those Born Later” (Reference Brecht, Willett and Manheim1979, 318–20). Among many examples, one can indicate the fates of the Russian October Revolution during the civil war of the twenties and, to a lesser degree, Cuba, from the Bay of Pigs failed invasion on. In James’s own times, the fate of October and the Spanish Republic were tragic predicaments in this very historical sense, and very much on his mind.

Yet acknowledging this tragic dimension hardly clouded James’s realism, nor does it let him abjure anti-colonialism and radical emancipation. James’s characterization of the tragedy of Toussaint is devoid of the humanist hypostatization found in classic accounts of tragedy; namely, his mistake is not traced to hubris, or any other transhistorical flaw defining the human condition; instead, it is the outcome of acting in a politically constituted situation shot through with imperial, colonial, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary imperatives that creates the tragic predicament. It took the skills and political literacy of Toussaint, mediated by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the African traditions the enslaved brought with them, to successfully navigate the tumultuous waters of the revolution and, with the masses, achieve the foregoing transformations (Thornton Reference Thornton1991; Reference Thornton1993). Toussaint’s successes were not any more foreordained than his mistakes, even if these often responded to the imperatives of necessity found in the logic of the situation in which he acted. It is the severance of the political connection between masses and elites that makes the situation tragic in James’s account. Even if Toussaint’s own temperament, certainly exacerbated by the external imperatives of counterrevolution, played a major role in his downfall, James still refuses to cast Toussaint as a classic tragic hero.

In a passage with striking echoes of Machiavelli’s realism and its economy of violence, James decisively delineates an original political ethic in a colonial context besieged by counterrevolutionary duress, a context in which the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution unleashed by the French Revolution at once reverberates and becomes more complex in its materialist aspect within the context of imperialism and capitalism:

While Robespierre’s conflict with his left wing was structural, James argues, Toussaint’s was not.Footnote ²⁶ The wedge between the two was about a racial question that while politically and socially constituted, had an existential resonance with the former slaves that Toussaint underestimated. James, to be sure, frames this rift in terms of “advanced” and “backward.” These tropes lead to the finale of James’s account of the fall of Toussaint, which he characterizes as “a failure of enlightenment.” Here James contrasts Toussaint with Jean-Jacques Dessalines, another revolutionary leader that would go on to become the first ruler of an independent Haiti under the 1815 constitution. For James, Dessalines is the intellectually inferior, but more politically literate of the two:

This failure of enlightenment can be rendered as a concrete manifestation of a racialized colonial situation whose specificity rather mystified terms like “modernity” tend to occlude.

How exactly? In Haiti’s colonial situation, the actualization of ideas of fraternity and equality was bound to be abrogated. Toussaint’s point of departure was already a result, his origin a historical consequence, marred with contradictions such as the impossibility of, say, extending that equality to whites who have presided over a social formation predicated on the brutalization and exploitation of Blacks. Toussaint’s attempt to do so was bound to backfire, as his universalism was on this point abstract and unable to see how compromised its realization was in a thoroughly racialized social order emerging out of a colonial situation. The unmediated “application” of any universal principle, or form, was bound to founder. The social presuppositions that could make it actual in the metropolis were not in place in the colony. At the same time, however, Toussaint was clearsighted enough to understand the need to extend some recognition to those with the education and skills needed for a viable reconstruction of the island’s economy that permanently barred slavery, while beset by imperialists seeking its restoration.

These are the contradictions of the dialectic of enlightenment in a particular colonial situation. James shows readers how these singularly played out in it: abstract and utopian ideas of liberty and equality were incompletely actualized; but, as ideas, these gained further determination. This absence of social and materialist presuppositions for an effective actualization of them was conjoined by Toussaint’s all too common lack of distanced nearness to the European civilization he looked up to, and the political aloofness that proved to be so decisive in his fall. In the opening lines of the chapter titled “The War of Independence” the tragic trope is quickly deployed and recast apropos of this particular question: “The Defeat of Toussaint in the war of independence and his imprisonment and death in Europe are universally looked upon as a tragedy. They contain authentic elements of the tragic in that even at the height of the war Toussaint strove to maintain the French connection as necessary to Haiti and its long and difficult climb to civilization. Convinced that slavery could never be restored in San Domingo, he was equally convinced that a population of slaves recently landed from Africa could not attain to civilization by ‘governing alone’” (289).

Toussaint’s tragedy is thus framed as a tragedy stemming from a colonial situation and the difficulty of a new beginning in it, one that needs to reckon with the legacies of the past, including the plantation and the need for the technical know-how of the former masters, which as James makes abundantly clear was intrinsic to Toussaint’s attitude toward the whites. James is cautious to avoid seeing this tragedy (as Scott does) as exemplary of the decontextualized idea of the tragic. Unequivocally, he writes:

Toussaint’s tragic predicament is historical and political. It has “historical actuality,” which at once “explains his mistakes and atones for them” (291, 292). Toussaint had to act in a situation where he had an unequal position and in a playing field that was asymmetrically constituted against him. Recognizing this predicament is central to the political realism staged in James’s political history of the Haitian revolution. This is one of the book’s many contributions to political literacy; another is the avowal of how the imperatives of the political situation mediate, albeit never entirely prefigure, the different scenes of action in it. Political action is always constrained by the situation that mediates it.

CONCRETE UNIVERSAL

So: is there really a singular Enlightenment whose dialectical formulation escapes the capsizals of meaning—from one to many, from many to one—criticized in others? Read literally, the idea of “a singular enlightenment” suggests that the Enlightenment is one and unique. Interpreted more literarily, however, it could be read as evoking ambiguity, which is clearly disclosed by the presence of an indefinite article preceding the adjective “singular”: a formulation that conjoins the indefiniteness of the article with an adjective that connotes uniqueness in ways that reintroduces the definiteness the indefinite article is supposed to negate (cf. Jameson Reference Jameson2002). Or as that formidable anti-Hegelian, Søren Kierkegaard, tersely put it: “The single individual can mean the most unique of all, and the single individual can mean everyone” (Reference Kierkegaard, Hong and Hong1998, 115). A singular Enlightenment, mutatis mutandis, can mean both unique and anywhere. But once understood dialectically, the idea of a singular enlightenment must be conceptualized as part of a triad that encompasses universal, particular, and singular.

The stakes of this formulation are best grasped in terms of the contradictions that constitute concept formation. To make more precise the two meanings of singular invoked, one needs to briefly turn to Hegel’s account of concept formation, where Hegel shows that the individual is the singular moment in a concept that is nevertheless mediated by the particular and the universal. Indeed, in his dialectical account, the three moments are thus inextricably connected, and one can think of the concept (Begriff) as the comprehensive unity of the universal, particular, and singular (Reference Hegel and Wood2018, 43–173; cf. Reference Hegel and di Giovanni2010, 508ff.). Translated into the present discussion, this amounts to saying that the concept of Enlightenment is a universal concept that consists of a comprehensive unity of universality (as a concept: Enlightenment), the particular (a specification of the concept: that is, French Enlightenment, Enlightenment in a colonial situation), and singular (the individual, or unique instantiation: Haiti).Footnote ²⁷

Stated somewhat differently, to interpret the formulation “a singular enlightenment” as one moment of the triad—at once universal, particular, singular—requires interpreting the Enlightenment as shot through by material processes that call for theoretical and historical reconstructions, as it eventuated in often connected histories where it acquired or lost determination. This is a historical-material process that once grasped conceptually is best understood in terms of dialectical contradictions, that is how both the singular and the particular at once modify and constitute the universal. That is, in a nutshell, the dialectic of enlightenment insisted upon throughout this article.

What, then, are the lessons of James’s account of the Haitian Revolution read, as I have tried to do in this essay, as an actualization of the dialectic of enlightenment as the non-identical unity of these three moments? Briefly juxtaposing James with Adorno, two exiled “contrapuntal” intellectuals, sheds light on this question. There are striking affinities between the philosophical histories of modernity as the “self-destruction of reason” found in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and that formulated in James’s brilliant Mariners, Renegades and Castaways ([1953] Reference James2001); but there are also crucial differences in their construction of “negative universal history.”Footnote ²⁸ As Enzo Traverso has shown, while Adorno’s formulation of the dialectic of enlightenment accorded centrality to the unfolding of blind domination, one whose movement can be arrested by way of immanent critique, the West Indian James conceived of it in more robust political terms—the dialectic of enlightenment as driven by historical conflicts and struggles. Its ultimate fate would be risked and actualized in history through collective action. One central episode in this vast plot is the then-forgotten Haitian Revolution, with its incomplete and non-identical actualization of universal freedom in both the progress it represented and the defeats it confronted.

Universals, to be sure, are not empty vessels waiting to be filled. The universal is indeed “inherently divisive” because it is never “neutral” or “empty,” as it is unfortunately often conceptualized; but rather, qua determinate negation, it is always embodied in a particular at the expense of other contents.Footnote ²⁹ Once dialectically understood, universality is always concrete. Any universal always has a particular point of departure that is its content. Its initial formulation is always subject to contestation as it becomes actualized and loses and gains determinations’ it may then become a sedimented meaning. There is, accordingly, as little sense in nominalist listings of this or that universal. Instead, each actualization embodies a non-identical effort to grasp and shape, determine, and form, the universal in particular instances whose singularity is constitutive of its core, even if irreducible to it. Particulars are not exemplifications or stages of the universal, or aspects of it; otherwise, these would be mere particularities (Adorno Reference Adorno1997, 174–5). Rather than particular cases or instances of the universal concept of Enlightenment, each actualization, as Slavoj Žižek (Reference Žižek1999) has lucidly formulated it, constitutes “a desperate attempt to hammer out a position with regard to the very universality of this concept: each time, the universal concept is ‘disturbed’ in a specific way—disavowed, turned around, thrown off by the excessive emphasis on one of its poles” (102). Žižek moreover emphasized how this is “a process or a sequence of particular attempts that do not simply exemplify the neutral universal notion but struggle with it, give a specific twist to it—the Universal is thus fully engaged in the process of its particular exemplification; that is to say, these particular cases in a way decide the fate of the universal notion itself” (Žižek Reference Žižek1999, 102).

It is precisely in that sense that the formulation of Black Jacobins constitutes a concrete universal. James acknowledges the centrality of the ideology of rights, citizenship, and emancipation emanating from Paris, and already present among the planter class, including both whites and free-colored, prior to the slave uprising that triggered the revolution in Haiti. Even so, he understands the abstract nature of that universal and how it finally become actualized as a concrete universality already foreshadowed in Toussaint’s invocation of liberty and equality, free labor, and end to “the age of fanaticism,” while deploying citizen as the category of interpellation conjoining rights and duties (205–6). James noted that, in Haiti, universal equality had to be formulated in terms of recognition of citizens as Black in the 1804 declaration of independence and the 1805 constitution.Footnote ³⁰ Hence, Black Jacobins. But James was too fine a dialectician for him not to intuit the limits of the concrete universal or arrest the universal to this moment. Built in this formulation are also the limits of this actualization of the Enlightenment in a colonial situation that is best captured by highlighting the second term: Black Jacobins.

Part of Toussaint’s failure, then, has to do with the imperatives of the colonial situation and how those led him to seek to restore the plantation economy, an imperative that given the absence of an alternative to plantation agriculture post-independent Haitian state builders, Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Pierre Boyer, the first two presidents of independent Haiti, ended up yielding to; but that the Haitian peasantry resisted as part of a “counter-plantation” small-holding economy that shunned market-dependence. “When [the peasantry] had to choose between a higher income and direct control of the labor process,” writes historical anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “it chose control,” even while such control was never such, as independent Haiti became a “republic for the merchants” (Reference Trouillot1990, 74).Footnote ³¹

Yet, in a post-colonial situation located in a region characterized by the persistence of the plantation, a socio-economic structure that was a virtual society within colonial social formations, Jacobin state-building was bound to flounder in the absence of its social presuppositions. That is why for James the plantation is at once “the most civilizing as well as the most demoralizing influence in West Indian development,” and what makes West Indian history “unique” (392), as a history of capitalism and underdevelopment, with many Haitians eventually becoming braceros (exploited seasonal workers) in Cuban sugar plantations.

Another thinker who clearly saw the stakes involved in actualizing the Enlightenment in colonial situations was Aimé Césaire (Reference Césaire1981), whose account of Toussaint’s failure could be considered both a complement and a corrective of James’, not least for the dialectical categories at work in it:

Toussaint is cast as both mediator and precursor of a concrete actualization of genuine freedom, equality, and fraternity that has proven as elusive in the Caribbean as it has in the North Atlantic world constantly besetting it.