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33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a magisterial work, useful and lucid, April 15, 2008
This review is from: Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West (Hardcover)
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?)
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44 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Ballad of East and West, April 1, 2008
This review is from: Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West (Hardcover)
The problems with writing a book about the 2,500-year struggle between East and West are manifold: What is East? What is West? What is the essential struggle? And since it has lasted so long, how do you get it all in one volume? UCLA historian Anthony Pagden has made an audacious effort doing just that. In Pagden's view - echoing Kipling - East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.
According to the author, the struggle between East and West can be characterized as a contest between secular, liberal democracies in the West and religious, despotic societies in the East (the East referred to being primarily the Middle East). Pagden's story begins with the Greeks and the Persians. The Greeks in the 5th century AD were a democracy and the Persians under Darius and Xerxes were a classic oriental despotism. This marked the beginning of the struggle known variously as East vs West, Europe vs Asia, secular vs the sacred, etc. The book ends with America in Iraq basically fighting the same battle that has been fought for the last 2,500 years. In this history there is no progress, there is only eternal struggle.
Most people would disagree with this thesis and rightly so. This Manichean worldview seems a gross oversimplification at first glance. Greece, as well as the West as a whole, was not always liberal and secular; it had a long struggle with despotism itself and Christianity did not always see itself as separate from the state. Likewise, the East was not always illiberal and monolithically religious. Islam, for example, during its golden age in Spain was very tolerant of Christianity and Judaism. There is also much diversity within Islam today.
Even though one may not agree with the author's view of the endless struggle between East and West, this book is very informative and very engaging. It tells more about the myths of East and West that inform the historical actors down through history. The so-called civilizing missions of Alexander in India, Napoleon in Egypt, Mehmed the Great in Constantinople, and Americans in Iraq are instances of one civilization trying to convince another of its superior values.
Therein lies the dilemma of Pagden's project. He does not see moral equivalence, for he comes down squarely on the side of secularism and liberal values, as he should. The West, unfortunately, is not always about those things alone; it is, in the eyes of the East, also about imperialism and military conquest. The East, for its part, does not reject Western values; it rejects the West imposing those values, or rather, it wants its own version of those values. In the end we have something much more complex than a standoff between two sets of universal values. There are grey areas on both sides and their boundaries were always shifting.
That being said, Worlds at War is still very good at explaining how these competing worldviews inevitably and inexorably lead to war.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Erudite But Accessible, Ascerbic But Not Scornful, April 2, 2008
This review is from: Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West (Hardcover)
This study of the combative relationship between the West (secular, individualistic, progressive) and the East (intolerant and hidebound) might seem to be yet another entry into the triumphalist school of history: The West Beat The Rest Because Its The Best. However, those who actually read the book will recognize that Anthony Pagden has produced a remarkable work which traces and reassesses anew a centuries long struggle.
By the East Pagden means what most now call the Middle East and Central Asia. Beginning with the struggle between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire, Pagden then covers the empires of Alexander and of Rome, the rise of Christianity and Islam, and the resultant struggles between the two monotheistic religions. Some of Pagden's most ascerbic comments come at the expense of monotheism, whose adherents' tendencies to see the world in black and white he considers to be the root of most of our troubles. Fortunately he resists the temptation to sneer at the followers of those religions, reserving his scorn for those popes, caliphs, and other religious "leaders" who abused their power and wasted the lives of their communicants. Inevitably Pagden must finish his work with an examination of the troubles between the West and the Islamic Middle East in the twentieth century, and he provides an excellent history of that ongoing dispute, ending with some penetrating analyses of the mistakes both East and West have made over the years.
Pagden writes well, with a good eye for an illuminating anecdote. I wish a few more maps had been included to help locate some of the more obscure locales he mentions, but overall this is a fine work which I really enjoyed.
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