by Anthony Pagden.

Random House. 640 pages. $35.

By DONALD D. BREED
Special to the Journal

The Twin Towers came down, and the United States went to war in two countries. Is it a battle between good and evil, between democracy and “Islamo-Fascism,” between capitalism and collectivism, between Christians and Muslims, between oil consumers and oil producers?

Anthony Pagden, who was educated in Oxford and Cambridge and after teaching at Johns Hopkins now is a professor of political science and history at UCLA, says it’s between East and West. And it started with the Trojan Wars.

For purposes of Pagden’s analysis, “east” is more like the present Middle East; he doesn’t talk about China or Japan. Moreover, while his “struggle” covers 2 1/2 millennia, he doesn’t get into World War II or the cold war; the combatants were Europeans, except for the Japanese, who had gone through selective but extensive westernization.

If you can put all that aside, Pagden’s narrative, which goes almost to the present, is very instructive about world history and about current crises. Starting with the conflict between the Greeks and the much more numerous Persian invaders, the theme is individual freedom in the West versus slavery and despotism in the East.

The Roman Empire was not a pure democracy, but it carried citizenship, and Pagden credits the Romans with inventing “the concept of a right — perhaps the single most important term in the political and legal vocabularies of the West.”

With the rise of the monotheistic religions — Judaism, its offshoot Christianity and, six centuries later, Islam — the contrast between West and East becomes not only political but also religious and intellectual. Pagden notes that Jesus had distinguished between what one can “render unto Caesar” and the demands of faith. But Muslims, he writes, believe “that everything that derives from Muhammad, also derives from God,” so secular law, made by humans and subject to change, makes no sense to them.

Pagden addresses religious differences from the perspective of an atheist, although he’s no polemicist. This becomes clear when he talks about the huge change in Christianity caused by Martin Luther. Even though the passions aroused caused fearful wars, Pagden says that the result was to question the church’s authority on many matters and rely instead on scientific analysis. That, in turn, allowed the West to overtake the Muslims, who once were technologically ahead.

As the book draws to a close, we see the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation by the victors in World War I of new and artificial nations, one of which is Iraq. As for the war there now, Pagden suggests it was the product of a lot of ignorance, and not just about weapons of mass destruction. WORLDS AT WAR: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West,

ddbreed@cox.net