Critique of Abstract Right - Human Rights and Property in the Time and Age of the Haitian Revolution.

During the last decades, a new field that studies the origins and contemporary status of human rights has emerged. The aim of Carl's thesis is to contribute with a critique of the human rights field, by means of an intervention into an on-going conflict about universal juridico-political rights in the research on the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), in which slaves and their allies abolished slavery and created an independent state.

The thesis consists of historical investigations of the Haitian Revolution as a social movement and theoretical investigations of different possibilities to formulate the relation between abstract political forms and social property relations.