Humanism, Antihumanism & the Radical Tradition

Edited extract from The Meaning of Race (Macmillan, 1996), pp 236-242, Kenan Malik

Associated with the anti-universalist stance of poststructuralist theories has been an unremitting hostility to a humanist approach. At the heart of humanism are two key ideas. First, humanists hold that human beings, while an inherent part of nature and subject to its laws, nevertheless have an exceptional status in nature because of the unique ability, arising out of human rationality and sociability, to overcome the constraints placed upon them by nature. Second, humanists believe in the unity of humankind, holding that all humans possess something in common, a something that is often described as a common ‘human nature’.

CLR James, Frantz Fanon & the Meaning of Liberation

by Kenan Malik, Pandaemonium

1776. 1789. 1917. The American. The French. The Russian. The three great revolutions of the modern world. The three revolutions with which everyone is familiar, each one telling a different story about modernity. Yet, as I argued in my previous post, the fourth great revolution that helped define modernity  – the Haitian Revolution of 1791 -  is one that barely anyone remembers these days. It was the first true successful revolt in history. But more than that, the Haitian Revolution was the first time that the emancipatory logic of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was seen through to its revolutionary conclusion. For that alone, it should find its place in history.

The Black Jacobins

A review by Kenan Malik

The poet and statesman Aimé Césaire once wrote of Haiti that it was here that the colonial knot was first tied. It was also in Haiti, Césaire added, that the knot of colonialism began to unravel when ‘black men stood up in order to affirm, for the first time, their determination to create a new world, a free world.’

In 1791, almost exactly three hundred years after Columbus landed there, a mass insurrection broke out among Haiti’s slaves, upon whose labour France had transformed its colony into the richest island in the world. It was an insurrection that became a revolution, a revolution that today is almost forgotten, and yet was to shape history almost as deeply as the two eighteenth century revolutions with which we are far more familiar – those of 1776 and 1789.