Can dialectical thought survive decolonization? Ciccariello-Maher tests the question on Susan Buck-Morss's Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, which treats the killing of whites in 1804 as the moment Saint-Domingue abandoned universal principle. Reading C. L. R. James against her, he holds that Toussaint Louverture's failure was his belief that formal equality was available immediately, a conviction that carried him toward the colonists, away from the labourers, and finally to the execution of Moise. Dessalines, whom Buck-Morss casts as an avenging destroyer of the universal, is here the leader who began from what the masses actually felt and so finished the war. Fanon supplies the theoretical step. Because colonial racism denies the colonized any standing to be recognised, the reciprocity Hegel assumes is missing, and one-sided struggle over identity has to come first. The universal, on this account, is reached through the particular, and it lies in the future.