Hegel 13/13 with Susan Buck-Morss
Political theorist Susan Buck-Morss engages with Hegel's philosophy and its political implications in Columbia University's celebrated 13/13 lecture series.
Why we picked this
Buck-Morss literally wrote the book on Hegel and Haiti — her argument that the master-slave dialectic was inspired by the Haitian Revolution remains one of the most consequential rereadings in modern philosophy.
Susan Buck-Morss is best known for Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, a work that made a compelling historical case that Hegel’s master-slave dialectic — one of the most discussed passages in all of Western philosophy — was directly shaped by his knowledge of the Haitian Revolution. The argument was not just a historical footnote but a fundamental reframing: if Hegel was responding to a real struggle for freedom between actual enslaved people and their captors, the entire reception of that passage shifts. Published in 2009, the book has been widely assigned, widely debated, and has never really been answered.
Columbia University’s Hegel 13/13 series works through the full sweep of Hegelian thought across thirteen sessions, each featuring a different scholar engaging the text from a distinct vantage point. The format encourages depth over survey — participants are expected to sit with difficulty, follow an argument across multiple sessions, and engage with thinkers who bring genuinely different orientations to the same philosophical tradition.
Buck-Morss’s session will likely draw on her broader body of work, which spans Benjamin studies, Cold War cultural theory, and questions of universalism and political emancipation. For anyone following the series or simply interested in what political philosophy can do with its own canonical texts, this is one of the sessions most likely to change how you read the others.