Michel-Rolph Trouillot's claim that the Haitian Revolution was unthinkable to Western thought meets a methodological challenge here. Tomich contends that treating concepts and events as self-enclosed objects leaves an unchanging Western ontology standing outside the phenomena it supposedly governs, while slave agency hardens into an essence judged by its outcome. Borrowing Bourdieu on habitus, he holds that the line between thinkable and unthinkable is remade in practice rather than fixed once at the Renaissance. His test case is Victor Schoelcher, the French abolitionist who sailed to Haiti in 1840 and published Colonies etrangeres et Haiti three years later. Radical republicanism let Schoelcher credit the enslaved with authoring their own emancipation, defend Toussaint Louverture while placing his violence in the setting of slavery and civil war, and blame Boyer's autocracy and the mulatto elite for the ruin he saw. Yet his idea of liberty as a civilizing process displaced what freedpeople wanted for themselves.