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Summary:
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.”
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Disappointing.
Customer Rating:
Anthony Pagden's "Worlds at War" was a book I was really looking forward to reading. It sat on my wish list for months and when I saw it just sitting there at my local library I greedily snatched it up and considered myself lucky to even have found it checked in.
Thank goodness I did not waste my money buying it.
I suppose the problem with a book of this nature is that it is bound to disappoint - some things will be "too" highlighted, some left out. Even worse for this book, niggling factual errors crop up that bother the careful reader and throw into doubt the validity of the more complicated interpretations of the work as a whole.
Positives:
As already noted, the book is quite readable and you must give a tip of the hat to anyone who undertakes such a large undertaking.
Negatives:
The anti-religious comments taint large sections of the book: "...nor have I made any attempt...to disguise the fact that I believe the myths perpetrated by all monotheistic religions - all religions indeed- have caused more lasting harm to the human race that any other set of beliefs..." (p. xix) In my opinion, his anti-religious bias does immeasurable harm to this history because holders of religious belief are held in disdain. This is a history full of religious beliefs, perhaps even based on it. Viewing all of those beliefs as despicable and marginalizing them leads to some of the more simplistic interpretations noted in other reviews of this book.
-The author comments that in this book Christianity "seems to fare slightly better than Islam in this story..." (p. xix) but I really doubt that. At least he spent several pages on the life of Muhammad and the early history of Islam. He doesn't even bother to tell about the life of Jesus (not even a "supposed" version) or a history of St. Paul (whom he refers to in passing several times, but the uninformed reader is left, well, uninformed.) Imagine, a history of the West without even a page devoted to the beginnings of Christianity. The closest we get to an outline of Christ is a brief comparison to Mithraism (pp. 130-1). Christians are often slighted, such as on page 519 when he opines that Christians would like to make Shari'a law for the United States if only they could figure out how.
-Judaism fares even worse. It is rarely mentioned. Even then it has inaccuracies, such as on pages 151-2 when he notes, incorrectly that Moses was only given 10 laws. A passing glance through the book of Deuteronomy would tell the most casual of reader that dozens and dozens of laws were given to Moses.
-The Persian-Roman conflicts. I was looking forward to learning more about the Persian empire(s) that fought Rome to a standstill. Usually in this type of history there is just one paragraph that tells you little more than I've already mentioned - that the Persians fought the Romans to a standstill and an accomodation was made. He includes a fancier explanation, but it is still just the one paragraph. (pp. 175-6) I was hoping for much more - especially since this accounts for roughly 500 years of the 2,500 years of conflict that is discussed in the book.
--Refers to the year 1098 as being a part of the "ninth-century". (p. 231)
-Luther's teachings are misstated at times. "Mankind did not need to labor to win God's favor, as the Church had always maintained; it could be vindicated by faith alone. To be justified in the eyes of God, one had only to believe and lead a true and godly life." (p. 297) The part about leading a true and godly life would be the same as laboring to win God's favor. It is not Luther's theology. He stated the godly life would proceed from one's faith, it would not, in and of itself, do anything to get one into heaven.
-On page 74 there is a reference to "brothels in Pompey" (p.74). Pompey was one of Julius Caesar's rivals. Pompeii is the standard spelling for the city he is referring to.
-On page 249 he refers to the Afghan War of 1991. 2001, perhaps?
-There is a complete failure to mention the clash between Communism, Fascism and the East. The Ba'ath Party was influenced by the Fascist movements. Afghanistan was nominally Communist when the USSR invaded it to support the floundering government in 1979. He expounds on the murderous history of religious movements but blows off the terrible history of secular movements like Communism with one really long sentence (pp. 533-4) that fails to address the issue or the scope of their own murderous pasts.
-"Soviet Block"? (p. 526). The standard spelling is bloc, not block.
-On page 526 it is claimed that East Germany "took the first steps that would eventually bring down the Communist regimes of eastern Europe." (p. 526) Funny, I remember it being Poland with Lech Walesa and Solidarity being the first. The Wall came down only when Hungary and other countries had already lowered their barriers and made East Germany's Communist rulers irrelevant.
Final thought: Buy something else. Perhaps more specific histories rather than a more general, biased one that demonstrates little respect for the religious traditions of the peoples involved.
shoddy framework
Customer Rating:
I was appaled by the low quality of research that went into the book. From distortions to sheer factual errors and inventions, Pagden seems to think that he can freely translate the Greek "barbarian" as Oriental/Asian, and argue that both Greeks and Romans were somehow prejudiced against a decadent East. Nothing could be further from the truth. For both the Romans and the Greeks the lure of Persia, Egypt, Syria, was spellbinding, powerful, and largely positive. There may have been a Cultural Prejudice, but it never amounted to what Pagden labels as "World at War".
Pagden chose to select only quotes which reflect badly on both East and West. He genuinely seems to believe that the Greeks, for example, considered themselves a "Western" people. This is factually wrong. Nor does he correctly understand the Roman foundation legend of Aeneas. Wrongly attributing Latin pressure on the Etruscans, to assimilationist calls upon the Trojans! In touching upon Roman perception of Anatolian Greeks, he wrongfully claims that Anatolia was inhabited by Persians - because of a weak link between the Achamenids and Mithridates IV! This is an unpardonable error, in a book of such nature!
This book is poison. For years academics have been trying to rid themselves of Said's "Orientalism" slur against Western Academia, and here we have a self-proclaimed "Westerner" rehashing the very charge all over again- but trying to present it in a positive light!
Do yourself a favor, and skip this book all together. A wilder bag of lies is hard to find.
First class perspective of history
Customer Rating:
This book goes back to the beginning of European civilisation and its main feature: individualism of free people, compared with the oriental collectivism and slavery. Very readable.
Words at War
Customer Rating:
Excellent and easy to read historical review. Helps us understand the predicament we're in because many of our leaders are history-oblivious. History (and this book)shows that we continue to pursue policies that are counter productive because we ignore the lessons of history and repeat the same mistakes.
a magisterial work, useful and lucid
Customer Rating:
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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