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	Age of Enlightenment is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination was archived. For older candidates, please check the archive.
Article milestones Date Process Result September 9, 2007 Featured article candidate Not promoted

At the moment the lead says Scientific racism also has a background in this period. but there's nothing in the body on this. Some sources:

• The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought (Vartija 2021):

  Enlightenment thinkers present us with a predicament: they politicised the concept of equality while simultaneously making the naturalization of inequalities between Europeans and non-Europeans thinkable. What are we to make of this tension in Enlightenment thought? Scholars have often viewed this situation as a dichotomy: either the Enlightenment was an emancipatory intellectual movement foundational to the modern, liberal democratic defense of human rights, or it is the primary culprit in the dark side of modernity, from scientific racism and sexism to colonialism and even genocide.

• Revisiting Enlightenment racial classification: time and the question of human diversity (Vartija 2020)
• The Enlightenment and the Fabrication of Race (2003)
• Enlightenment Ideas and Colonialism (2022)
• Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies: Reflections on Englightenment and Empire (2013)

Imo there ought to be a short section on the darker side of the Enlightenment, but would be interested to hear people's thoughts Kowal2701 (talk) 17:36, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

OK I fixed it, adding material in section 4, Historiography. Rjensen (talk) 21:09, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That's good. I was thinking it might be due a sub-section somewhere, but there's nowhere it'd really be suitable. I think it's association with imperialism and apologia/justification for European dominance is due a mention, I'll add a sentence. Kowal2701 (talk) 21:25, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The second paragraph of the entry reads: "Many historians now date the end of the Enlightenment as the start of the 19th century, with the latest proposed year being the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804". The passage receives a note, number 8, which points to “https://web.archive.org/web/20230824220906/https://www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/the-enlightenment”. On that page, there is no statement that the final year of the Enlightenment was 1804. We must either cite a source that confirms the statement or remove the statement altogether. MarcusCFOliveira (talk) 23:08, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]