Worlds at War: The 2,500 Year Struggle between East and West (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Worlds at War: The 2,500 Year Struggle between East and West
Pagden writes well, but this is a hard book to get a handle on. It strives to be a single story of two adjoining, but wildly fluctuating, spaces defined teleologically as two “civilizations”—East versus West. Indeed, the goal is to explain the current conflict between the (Western) ideals of democracy versus the word of God (Islam) as, if not the culmination, then an expression of the ancient Greek ideal of democracy versus the Persian commitment to absolute rule. No matter that this rhetoric has appeared only occasionally over the 2,500 year history. Instead of trying to grasp the circumstances in which this rhetoric might have appeared, Pagden contributes to its reification as historically inevitable. His heroes are the Greeks and Romans; the Christians have not been very good; but the real problem is Islamic beliefs. [End Page 511]
Prasenjit Duara received the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association of Asian Studies for his book Culture, Power, and the State: Rural Society in North China, 1900 – 1942. Professor of history at the University of Singapore and professor emeritus of history and East Asian studies at the University of Chicago, his other books include Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern and Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China.
