Abstract

The contradictory elements of Diderot's and Burke's arguments against empire serve as an illustration of European anticolonialism at its limit. The epilogue draws on C. L. R. James and Theodor Adorno to examine legacies of Enlightenment thought in the mid-twentieth century. Proximate in one respect (as readers of Hegel) and yet so different intellectually (in their own education, also on the question of populism), they provide a more contemporary divergence on the possibilities of critique. The epilogue explores the context of Adorno's remark in Minima Moralia that one must "hate tradition properly" and notes his misrecognition of the historical significance of intellectual formations associated with third-worldism and the politics of decolonization in the 1940s and 1950s. The chapter considers what the figure of Toussaint Louverture tells us about James's view of Enlightenment critique. Toussaint does not represent pure oppositionality but rather is able to understand the radical implications of Enlightenment thought from within, and thereby serves as a model for the type of engagement with a (radical) tradition for which James hoped.

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