Ciccariello-Maher begins with Susan Buck-Morss's influential treatment of Hegel and Haiti, then pushes past it toward larger questions about dialectics and the universal that the Haitian Revolution forces open.

Reading with C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins in hand, he identifies what he calls ironic silences in her argument. Chief among them is the near-absence of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who succeeded Toussaint, and whom Ciccariello-Maher restores to the center of the account. Along with that restoration comes a claim about method: struggles fought in the name of particular identities are not obstacles to the universal but part of how it gets made.

The final move brings in Frantz Fanon, whose rewriting of Hegel's master-slave relation drops out of Buck-Morss's account entirely. Taken up as a corrective, Fanon allows the question of progress toward the universal to be posed again in dialectical terms that have been decolonized.