Theme 3: The Contradiction at the Heart of the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment proclaimed universal rights. But the same era practiced the largest slave trade in history, denied women the rights it gave men, and excluded the propertyless from political power. This contradiction was not a hidden flaw; contemporaries (Wollstonecraft, the Haitian revolutionaries, abolitionists) pointed it out at the time. The struggle to make Enlightenment universalism actually universal is the story of the next two centuries.