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The Haitian Revolution and Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The End of History and the Last Man Standing
Paul C. Mocombe
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2023.05.003
West Virginia State University, West Virginia, USA
This work, using a structurationist approach, phenomenological structuralism, argues that the Haitian Revolution and Jean-Jacques Dessalines represented the first embodiment of Alexandre Kojève’s “End of History” thesis. Following the Haitian Revolution, which is a revolt against slavery and mercantilist capitalism, the founder of the country, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, attempted to synthesize three forms of system and social integration on the island in order to constitute the nation of Haiti: the mercantilist and liberal capitalism of the Affranchis, petit-bourgeois blacks and mulatto elites, respectively; and the Lakouism, communism, of the African majority on the island. In this sense, Dessalines represented the first embodiment of Kojève’s end of history Hegelian thesis. Using a structurationist, structural Marxist, understanding of practical consciousness constitution, the work explores the origins and basis for Dessalines’s social, political, and economic policies to that end. The death of Dessalines, I conclude, would undermine this revolutionary impetus of the Haitian Revolution, rendering it insignificant, and converted Haiti into the so-called poorest country in the Western Hemisphere under American neoliberal capitalist hegemony.
ideological domination, phenomenological structuralism, embourgeoisement, black underclass, Grandon, Mulatto Elites, Haitian Revolution, Bois Caiman, Affranchis
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