Grüner reads the Haitian Revolution as the moment when the contradiction inside modernity becomes impossible to miss. Working from Marxist theory and from Adorno and Horkheimer, he treats the period not as one forward movement but as an age at war with itself: the decades that produced the French Revolution's language of universal liberty also required inventing new forms of racial slavery to underwrite an emerging capitalism.

The book declines the choice between writing about Haiti and writing about the modern, arguing that the choice is itself a Eurocentric one. When enslaved people took the promises of liberty and equality literally, they exposed how narrowly those promises had been drawn — reserved in practice for men who were white, European and free. What Grüner names counter-modernity is not a position outside or before the modern but the place where its violence and its emancipatory claims are stretched furthest apart, and he writes it deliberately from the South.