Table of Contents

1: Introduction
2: Remaking the Natural Law
3: Bringing Pity Back In
4: The Second Death of Religion
5: The Science of Humankind
6: The Search for Natural Man
7: The Defence of Civilization
8: Cosmopolis
9: The Enemies of Enlightenment and the Consequences of Perversity
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Anthony Pagden has published widely on both Spanish and European history and has worked as a translator and as a publisher in addition to his many academic posts. He taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard before a professorship at Johns Hopkins University, and he is currently Distinguished Professor of Political Science and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book prior to this one, Worlds at War: The
2,500 Year Struggle Between East and West, was also published by Oxford University Press.

Reviews

`Review from previous edition His bold, panoramic and highly readable book is often a page-turner...Worlds at War is hard to put down.'
Amy Chua The Scotsman
`Pagden's narrative is engagingly written and always interesting.'
Literary review, John Gray
`If you are going to read only one book on the Manichean struggle between East and West, this is the book'
Efraim Karsh, Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of London and author of Islamic Imperialism: A History
`A masterpiece of stunning scope, readability, and relevance. Pagden is as fine a storyteller as he is a scholar. Worlds at War makes epic battles of the past come alive, not just as turning points of history but as illuminations of what is happening today in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.

'
Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former US Deputy Secretary of State
`Learned, fluent and thorough... One of the pleasures of Pagden's splendid book is that it is perfectly possible to enjoy and learn from it while disagreeing with its thesis
'
Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Telegraph,
`His breadth of knowledge across two and a half millenia of Western (and to a great extent Eastern) history is impressive... As an intellectual history of Western views of the East, the book is exemplary.'
Ian Garrick Mason. Spectator.
`'Worlds at War' offers some fine vignettes...witty, provocative conversation from a sage.'
Economist

This is a defense by Pagden (political science & history, Univ. of California, Los Angeles; Worlds at War) of Enlightenment thought. Although John V. Fleming's The Dark Side of the Enlightenment is the more exploratory, Pagden's is the more conservative, but both books are based on their authors' long familiarity with the age. Against the age's critics, who argue that the philosophes' hyper-skepticism and materialism undermined authority and destroyed social cohesiveness, Pagden argues that the Enlightenment was not so much a revolutionary movement as a reformist one. Enlightenment thinkers preached a broader vision of humankind, opening the possibility for talk of universal human rights, and of such a modern-day extra-national community as the European Union. VERDICT This is top-down intellectual history-Greats talk to Greats-and the cast of characters is predictable, from Hobbes and Grotius to Montesquieu, Hume, and Kant. But Pagden knows what he's talking about and his argument is worth reading in our contentious age. Heavy going at times, this solid book is not for those seeking easy popular history. It will probably appeal most to serious lay readers of the subject.-David -Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.