Taking up only a few pages of his monumental Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic presents a compelling story of struggle, emancipation, and recognition. Two individuals enter into a fight to the death, yielding a master and a slave, only for the slave to ultimately gain the upper hand through labor. Meant as commentary on the true content of freedom, the master-slave dialectic long went unremarked by Hegel’s early readers. But like Plato’s allegory of the cave, it has since taken on a life of its own, spurring dozens of readings and irrigating philosophical, political, and literary thought down to the present. Self and other, bourgeoisie and proletariat, man and woman, white and black, colonizer and colonized: the driving binaries of the modern age have all been analyzed through the prism of the master-slave dialectic. But how can Hegel’s allegory carry—or be made to carry—so much theoretical weight? How, indeed, should it be read: As a realist account of the dialectics of oppression and emancipation or a flawed analogy? As a parable for the age of revolution or a cover story for actually existing slavery? As the skeleton key to understanding political modernity or a seriously flawed model better left behind? Does Hegel’s actual, ambiguous relations to contemporary slavery put its revolutionary potential into question? What, if anything, does it have to tell us about the possibility of emancipation in the present?
In this course, we will study Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and its many afterlives from the nineteenth century to the present. We will begin with a close study of Hegel’s text in the context of the Phenomenology and Hegel’s larger oeuvre. We will consider its thematic, theoretical, and historical origins in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the political economy of early capitalist modernity, and the turmoil of the French Revolution. Next, we will trace its influence, or lack thereof, in Karl Marx’s conception of class struggle, Friedrich Nietzsche’s anti-Hegelian account of master and slave morality, and W.E.B. Du Bois account of double-consciousness in Souls of Black Folk. From there, we will look at the Hegel revival in post-war France, including Alexandre Kojeve’s highly influential Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Frantz Fanon’ critique of Hegel in Black Skin, White Masks, and Simone de Beauvoir’s mapping of gendered difference in The Second Sex. Finally, we will engage contemporary discussions of the master-slave dialectic, its continued influence on Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, and post-structuralist theory, as well as recent reappraisals of Hegel’s relationship to colonialism and slavery, including Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel and Haiti, Axel Honneth’s Struggle for Recognition, and Biko Mandela and Ryan Johnson’s Phenomenology of Black Spirit.
