The Roots of Haitian Despotism

The companion volume to Fatton's Predatory Republic, tracing the structural roots of Haitian authoritarianism from the colonial plantation through Dessalines's militarism, nineteenth-century presidential monarchism, the US occupation, the noirisme movement, and the Duvalier regime, using Bourdieu's concept of habitus to argue that the authoritarian dispositions crystallized under slavery have reproduced themselves across two centuries regardless of the formal ideology of successive rulers. Fatton shows that the US occupation centralized rather than reformed these tendencies, and that post-Duvalier democratization has failed because the predatory state structure remains intact even when individual despots fall.