In all this, however, the polemical edge to Pagden's argument is only ever thinly hidden. For many years the standard account of the Enlightenment was provided by Peter Gay. "There were many philosophes in the eighteenth century," Gay wrote, "but there was only one Enlightenment." More recently, Jonathan Israel (in three magisterial volumes) has suggested that we should speak  in terms of a moderate and a radical Enlightenment. Pagden takes a position close to that of Gay. For all that "they spoke in many different voices", he writes, the "true philosophes...all contributed to a single ‘project'." 

Pagden's Enlightenment, in short, is the Enlightenment of Immanuel Kant, that of subjecting all dogmas to critical evaluation; in Kant's famous phrase, of "daring to know". Redescribed by Pagden, it is an assault on the past in the name of the future, "the beginning of modernity, as an open-ended, continuing progression, subject to constant scrutiny". It is the intellectual movement that ultimately gave birth to liberal democracy and to our sense of global citizenship. What the Enlightenment was quite definitely not, in Pagden's view, was the simple and exclusive application of reason to explain the vast complexities of the human condition. 

According to Pagden, therefore, there was no causal connection between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and thus no responsibility of the Enlightenment for the Reign of Terror. Nor can the Enlightenment stand accused of the numerous evils with which it has been associated from the Romantics onwards: pseudo-scientific racism, empire building, the devastation of the environment, the destruction of cultural identities, economic globalisation, and, of course, the mobilisation of modern technology to produce the gas chambers of Auschwitz. 

And here the stakes are high. For, if Pagden has Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's infamous Dialectic of Enlightenment in his sights, so too he is gunning for Alasdair MacIntyre and the argument advanced in the latter's After Virtue. MacIntyre's alternative future is not one where an ossified Europe has fallen under Ottoman rule but where, thanks to Enlightenment, we have lost any sense of morality and where, worst of all, we are not aware of it. 

It is not difficult to have considerable sympathy with this. Universities are now full of postcolonial theorists, communitarians, postmodernists and multiculturalists only too eager to have a swipe at any aspect of Enlightenment universalism they can lay their hands on and, in the process, to condemn Western civilisation as a form of cultural and political tyranny.