Mocombe reads Dessalines through phenomenological structuralism, a structurationist framework, and argues that he differs from Haiti's traditional leaderships in a specific way.

Having avenged the island's Taino and African populations against France, Spain, and Britain, Dessalines attempted to mediate between two incompatible modes of social and system integration. On one side stood the Catholic and Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism carried by mulatto elites and creole petit-bourgeois blacks who had taken on their former masters' worldview. On the other stood the African majority's Vodou ethic and its spirit of communism, an ethos they had merged with that of the Taino.

Where the first two classes wanted Haiti absorbed into the capitalist world-system of nineteenth-century Europe, Dessalines tried to constitute the nation within both frameworks at once. Working from a structural Marxist account of practical consciousness, the book examines the roots of his policies and concludes that his death drained the revolution of its momentum.