If critique denotes in the Caribbean tradition the struggle to bring together a transcendental position of analysis and judgment over a given situation, with the effective means to intervene within that situation for its transformation, the promise of a critique of Caribbean violence is to allow us to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate violence, to sort and discriminate (from the Greek krinein) the rightful expression of power from the proscribed categories of illicit domination. If Kantian critique sought to establish and police the borders of legitimate reason, the critique of Caribbean violence has repeatedly rejected the transhistorical demarcation of the a priori conditions of reason, pure, moral, and aesthetic. Kant's critique of reason is

For Kant, critique is the tribunal overseeing the faculty of reason, the three critiques, the restrictive compendium of law, preventive and limitative in its function. Within this system, Kant's defense of the French Revolution, described above, cogently refuses the legitimacy of any and all popular revolt, whether with democratic or reactionary intent, to reaffirm the sole legitimacy of the law itself, grounding his defense of 1789 in the quasi-miraculous exception of Louis XIV's abdication of sovereignty (in calling the États généraux) rather than the popular revolts of July 1789 or August 1792.

The lived experience of plantation slavery made any respect for the law on the part of the enslaved absolutely unbearable. C. L. R. James's description is still unsurpassed: