The trouble is that, in Pagden's hands, this turns into a sustained diatribe against religion, and for Pagden religion only ever seems to exist in the form of the reactionary doctrines of Joseph de Maistre or the obscurantist fundamentalism of the American Midwest. Has Pagden, one wonders, ever heard of the concept of a Christian Enlightenment? Does he have any awareness of the fact that there were many Christians-Catholics included — who were receptive to the intellectual advances of science and who shunned blind dogma? In short, to see the Enlightenment in terms of a stark and irreconcilable division between secular philosophes and religious anti-philosophes is a gross simplification, and one that is ill served by suggesting that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI suffers from a form of intellectual bipolar disorder. The Enlightenment, it seems, is what "most educated people" believe in.

Pagden argues (in a text littered with typos) that if the developing world gives billions to help the poor and needy in less privileged countries, it is because we see them as being humans like us. This, he states, "could hardly have occurred" without the Enlightenment. Funnily enough, it had never dawned on me before that this was why I give money to Christian Aid.