Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West
by Anthony Pagden
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Book Summary Information
Author: Anthony PagdenEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-03-25
ISBN: 1400060672
Number of pages: 656
Publisher: Random House
Book Reviews of Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West
Book Review: a magisterial work, useful and lucid
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent work of history. Correction: it is not so much a history - though it is historical through and through - as it is a particular interpretation of one very important aspect of world history: namely, the seemingly endless and seemingly inexplicable antagonism between West (the cultural region where individual and group rights, liberty and liberties, and specific "modern"/modernity-inflected social formations arose) and the East (the cultural region, roughly equivalent to the Arab world, where rights and democracy, let alone the individual, have been largely ignored). As Pagden tells this story, he touches on the important and nodal episodes, but he also adds his view of some of the incidental episodes. He provides an excellent historical overview, supplemented by a clever and diligent scholar's look at key moments, of both of these regions, and of their interrelationships. Obviously a lot has to be left out given the sheer number of centuries in question, but Pagden is hugely learned and so packs in all kinds of salient details. (His academic expertise is on the rise of modern Europe, and its "collision" with other parts of the globe.)
The book is long but thankfully he writes very clearly. He moves fluidly from Aeschylus and Alexander the Great, through the legacy of the "citizen" empire (Rome) and the rise of Muhammad, to the medieval Popes, through to Quesnay, Voltaire and Montesquieu and the Enlightenment, and finally on to the complex recent past and the present (Qutb, etc). He doesn't pull any punches: yes, the "orient" actually has been largely despotic, and yes, the West has often been -- for all of its successes and both its authentic good intentions as well as its exploitative acquisitiveness -- hypocritical and inept even when it has been well-meaning. Re: the latter, he discusses the question of liberal interventions, which he treats almost in a Burkean fashion: these are overly optimistic social engineering efforts, which often naively assume that the conditions for a genuinely valuable and important Western form of government (democracy) can be transplanted to places where the conditions that might nourish it are sadly foreign. He is also tough on Islam's apologists, past and present, rightly noting their own hypocrisy and almost perennial cruelty and anti-democratic impulses. He rightly chastises the leftists who celebrated the rise of Khomeini, pointing out that none had bothered to read his writings before celebrating his accession. And no less a figure than Edward Said -- author of a well regarded but simplistic (if not downright mendacious) tome on a part of the history of West and East -- comes in for some curt but devastating criticism. All in all, this is a grand, sweeping read. It's very much worth acquiring, especially if one is interested in the present and how we got here, but it's also a book one can give to a high school student or university student, e.g., one's nephew and niece, just so they can sample a work that does a fine job of making sense of a vastly complicated relationship. If they get through it, as one would hope, they'll be as shocked and disappointed as I am, and as Pagden is, to learn that in Turkey, Winnie-the-Pooh is no longer televised because the "Piglet" character is deemed offensive to Muslims. Don't laugh. Try to get a piggy-bank for your grandchild in a UK bank these days.
(I must add: reading the review of this book by a top 1000 reviewer - above - I came away thinking that he hasn't even read it. Pagden does in fact credit the Islamic world for many advances, and early on in his preface, he makes it very clear that when he speaks of "East" and "West", he's not talking about "unstable" "relative" geographical categories but cultural, social and political dispositions. Is that the sign of a "book maven": one says some banal and inaccurate things about a book?)
Summary of Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West
Spanning two and a half millennia, Anthony Pagden’s mesmerizing Worlds at War delves deep into the roots of the “clash of civilizations” between East and West that has always been a battle over ideas, and whose issues have never been more urgent.Worlds At War begins in the ancient world, where Greece saw its fight against the Persian Empire as one between freedom and slavery, between monarchy and democracy, between individuality and the worship of men as gods. Here, richly rendered, are the crucial battle of Marathon, considered the turning point of Greek and European history; the heroic attempt by the Greeks to turn the Persians back at Thermopylae; and Salamis, one of the greatest naval battles of all time, which put an end to the Persian threat forever.
From there Pagden’s story sweeps to Rome, which created the modern concepts of citizenship and the rule of law. Rome’s leaders believed those they conquered to be free, while the various peoples of the East persisted in seeing their subjects as property. Pagden dramatizes the birth of Christianity in the East and its use in the West as an instrument of government, setting the stage for what would become, and has remained, a global battle of the secular against the sacred. Then Islam, at first ridiculed in Christian Europe, drives Pope Urban II to launch the Crusades, which transform the relationship between East and West into one of competing religious beliefs.
Modern times bring a first world war, which among its many murky aims seeks to redesign the Muslim world by force. In our own era, Muslims now find themselves in unwelcoming Western societies, while the West seeks to enforce democracy and its own secular values through occupation in the East. Pagden ends on a cautionary note, warning that terrorism and war will continue as long as sacred and secular remain confused in the minds of so many.
Eye-opening and compulsively readable, Worlds at War is a stunning work of history and a triumph of modern scholarship. It is bound to become the definitive work on the reasons behind the age-old and still escalating struggle that, more than any other, has come to define the modern world–a book for anyone seeking to know why “we came to be the way we are.”
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