Enlightenment is Man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” declared Kant; it is the emancipation of humanity from the “inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another”.

The Prince of Wales answers “What is enlightenment?” more simply. It is out of date, he says. Both answers are polemical simplifications. Enlightenment can best be understood as a family of reactions to the horrors of religious war. With the fracturing of the all-encompassing authority of the Roman Catholic Church, religious zealots saw no constraints on their own fervour, plunging Europe into chaos in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Numerous thinkers arrived at the conclusion that only the common standard of reason could form a stable basis for philosophy and, more importantly, for society.

When the Prince attacks the Enlightenment, one suspects that he really means to condemn Robespierre and the Jacobins. The main English Enlightenment used reason conservatively, to justify institutions such as the established Church and the monarchy. That might be more to the Prince’s taste.

To condemn the Enlightenment, in short, is to condemn so many foundations of the modern world that it is effectively meaningless.

If the Prince is looking for a philosopher to support his attack on urbanism and progress, or to share his belief in the moral superiority of nature, he need look no further than that icon of Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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