The Enlightenment has traditionally been depicted as a benign era of rationalism which saw the triumph of tolerance over barbaric prejudices and superstitions. It was an era, according to conventional wisdom, when the experimental methods and less inhibited speculation of the seventeenth-century ‘scientific revolution’ were transferred to those branches of learning dealing with human nature and the workings of society. This process, moreover, had depended on the sympathetic assumption that the whole of humankind shared a common nature. Indeed, a philanthropic worldview appeared to be the logical consequence of a more ‘enlightened’ understanding of man-in-society.

In recent decades, however, the Enlightenment has begun to attract a very bad press. Adverse comment has come from several quarters, from postmodernists as well as from traditionalists, from Left as well as from Right. The Enlightenment has played a central role in the culture wars and in debates over the western canon of ‘dead white males’ and its relevance in a world of multicultural societies intent on abandoning traditional gender roles and ethnic stereotypes. Not least among the supposed iniquities of the Enlightenment has been its association with racism. In the first place, there has been a generalised non-specific charge that the Enlightenment, the principal prop of modern western intellectual life, was the achievement of several generations of periwigged white males who complacently assumed the superiority of white European culture to the values of extra-European civilisations and gave at the very least implicit, sometimes very explicit, support to campaigns for overseas empire and colonialism.