In a famous passage, Kant wrote: “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.” He added: “Have courage to use your own understanding!” (Kant 1784, p. 54). Though Kant himself was at pains to deny it, this injunction is an enormously subversive political ideal. The most characteristic demand of political leaders has invariably been that their subjects submit their own understanding to the guidance of authorities, either because the authorities are wiser or because an ordered society requires artificial unanimity.

Kant's injunction presumes that the understanding of ordinary citizens is up to the task of deliberating and reflecting on political affairs without the guidance of others; this assumption amounts to the Enlightenment's article of faith.

The Enlightenment thus rejects an older view of politics, going back to Plato, according to which government necessarily relies on noble lies – myths or deceptions designed to secure loyalty and love of country. Machiavelli, like Plato (though for rather different reasons), argued that lies and secrecy are essential instruments of successful government. A successful prince, Machiavelli says, must learn how not to be good; he must accept that lies, like betrayal and violence, are necessary tools of government. (A backhanded contemporary acknowledgment of this is an anecdote related by the late Louisiana Senator Russell Long. When Long was in secondary school, he approached his uncle Earl, then the governor of Louisiana, and said that he had been assigned to debate the question of whether one should use truth in politics. What should he say? Earl asked which side Russell had been assigned.