Michael Curtis, a distinguished scholar of political philosophy and political systems, has produced this significant tome at a critical time in the relations of nations. Centered on the perceptions and misperceptions of the current global experience in the post-Western colonial and imperial era, the author seeks to clarify the impact of West on East by delving deep into the historic record of the East's assault on the West. Curtis begins and ends this intellectual exercise with the argument that the East more than the West has pursued a global agenda, and that the European period of expansion and dominance was in actuality an interlude in the Orient's thousand-year quest for preeminence. Most notably, although Curtis does not ignore China or India, or for that matter the Russian quest for self-aggrandizement, he is most concerned with Islamic behavior and the Muslim zealots who have from the time of their emergence sought adherents as well as territory. At the heart of this study is the juxtaposition of oriental absolutism and its unquestioning centralization of power with the evolving European penchant for minimal government and heightened individualism. The author leaves no doubt that Muslim forces will never waver from their earthly goal of realizing Allah's kingdom, and that European civilization must be ever cognizant of the distinct and unchanging differences between itself and its long-standing and persistent adversary.

While seeking to avert Westerners’ eyes from their guilt-laden immediate past, Curtis draws attention to the way global events unfolded in the period prior to the Europeans’ extension of their influence and power in the nineteenth century. Sidestepping to some extent the writings of European imperialists and their subsequent detractors in the twentieth century, Curtis seeks to reveal how Europeans saw and ruminated over the Eastern experience as it washed over their lands and people before the Industrial Revolution offered advantages that allowed them to repel and for a time subdue their invaders. After a scholarly run through the writings of the numerous travelers and political thinkers of early record, Curtis settles down to a reexamination of the reminiscences and impressions of Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, James and John Stuart Mill, Marx, and Max Weber, all of whom had more than casual interest in the power and determination of the oriental world. Collectively, European travelers and writers of the Middle Ages shared a critical view of Islamic practices and preaching but they reserved their particular criticism for the Prophet Muhammad, who they were inclined to believe perpetrated a fraud upon a gullible and unsuspecting public. What they do not explain, however, is the power of the Prophet's message, how it radiated far and wide and captured the imagination and allegiance of people on a global scale. Clearly, Curtis is not so much concerned with dwelling on the appeal of the Islamic experience as he is with arguing the simple fact that Muslims early on assumed an offensive missionary role that they have never cast aside.

Montesquieu's focus on comparative political systems emphasizes the geographic circumstances influencing East and West, ultimately concluding that the East is despotic at its core because the environmental circumstances that envelop it cannot be tempered by climate or by institutions that do not demand blind obedience. The spirit of the laws that he identified with the Occident cannot be duplicated in conditions that fix relationships between superiors and inferiors. Burke, although more constrained in his examination of oriental culture and heavily influenced by the exploits of the East India Company, nevertheless accepts the view that the concentration of power in India, most notably under the Mughals, illustrates the absolute power of the monarch and cites their total mastery over territory and people within the realm. Brutality and vice are intimately connected with Mughal ruling practices, and the excesses of a long succession of potentates reinforces the authors' argument that Islam is too ensconced in authoritarianism to be more than distracted by the European-cum-British experience. De Tocqueville sees little in the oriental mindset or manners to believe that change toward a more humanistic system can occur. Like Burke he longed for the opportunity to chart a humanitarian course for the people of the oriental world. Although critical of their countrymen's performance in pursuing social and political improvements in the lives of Asian populations, in the final analysis they remain ever mindful of the power of oriental behavior and the ongoing and sustained threat it poses for the European world. The civilizing mission, so pronounced in the age of European imperialism and so closely identified with the expression of Jules Ferry, can be traced to European fear of a renascent Orient.

James and John Stuart Mill dwell heavily on the Indian experience, both having spent many years with the East India Company. James Mill wrote an exhaustive history of India, including an in-depth exploration of Hindu culture and ritual. His son John was no less committed to the study of the Indian experience, although his perception was less critical and more directed at the interaction between East and West. Indeed, John Stuart Mill struggled to find positive developments in the meeting of East and West as well as the possibility that common expression would mitigate displays of intense power and rivalry. John Stuart Mill does not share the ardent commitment of Tocqueville to national destiny, nor does he parallel his father in judging the Orient to be mired in a “barbarous” state. And while he reviles the horrors of oriental despotism, he nevertheless sees it more as a consequence of social and psychological stagnation than wanton tyranny. John Stuart Mill therefore accepted the civilizing mission of colonialism. Committed as he was to Britain's overseas ventures, most notably in India, it was only in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 that he vented personal revulsion at the inhumanity and violation of social norms perpetrated by his compatriots. Although a champion of representative government and democratic procedure, in the end the younger Mill echoed his father's conclusion that representative government was not applicable in cultures denied a tradition of free and open public discourse. The permanence of despotism, he concluded, is a given, and both Mills seemed to concur that despotism was a form of legitimate government rooted in its own rules and procedures and not subject to change.

Karl Marx like the Mills saw the Orient as backward and stagnant. Nevertheless, influenced by Hegel, Marx concluded that Asia was isolated from the movement and phases of historical record and therefore did not fit into his unilateral explanation of history in which preceding and succeeding events provoked metamorphosis and inevitable change. Marx all the same gave particular significance to the dynamics of the economic experience in Asia, pressing the argument that it was not so much conquest as it was the necessary public functions that reinforced the power of the personal ruler. Commanding a huge bureaucracy to deliver the services that only a central authority was capable of providing, the monarch was made legitimate by his actions in preserving and reifying the expanded community. Curtis dwells at length on Marx's Asian mode of production and views it as a permanent arrangement between ruler and the ruled. Although not explored in this volume, Karl Wittfogel's twentieth-century examination of hydraulic societies draws from such Marxian exegesis and the bridge that unites them would appear to be their similar conclusions that oriental despotism is inextricably related to the community's essential need for effective and reasonably efficient management. Moreover, given the perennial fear of shortages and natural calamities, only a centralized authority seemed capable of sustaining society. In this context there is little room for individualism, for popular complaint or participation, let alone the pursuit of esoteric realities.

Max Weber is Curtis's choice to round out this volume. Following Marx, Weber decries the bureaucratization of the public good. In oriental despotism Weber discerns all the negative dimensions of bureaucratization. Citing the depersonalization of life experience, Weber laments the loss of human emotions in the quest to assure the survival of the larger whole. Political experience thus yields to administrative expertise and rigid rules reinforce hierarchical patterns of power, ending in what Weber called the “iron cage of future serfdom.” Weber's exposition of the Western movement toward modernity with its flowering of economic capitalism is contrasted with oriental pursuits that seem to explain the absence of Greek scientific rationalism, Roman juridical reasoning, Hebrew prophecy, the growth of individualized cities, and the development of legislative structures that check and balance monarchical power. Oriental societies for Weber, as for his European predecessors, are incapable of realizing genuine development, modernity, or capitalism, in major part because their mentality is shaped by survival and not progressive experience. Moreover, because community survival is the principal responsibility of a highly centralized and often arbitrary authority, popular expression and free will are not only counterproductive but antithetical to the needs of tradition-bound society. Ultimately, Weber's patrimonialism, wherein the larger realm becomes the playground of the total ruler, intertwines with the bureaucracies that service the basic needs of society. Contrary to rational-legal systems, oriental systems operate according to function, the essential aspects of which are fidelity, blind obedience, and service to the fountainhead of power.

Michael Curtis has written an erudite and perspicacious volume that is not light reading. This is a weighty tome that courses back through history as it points to the future. Civilizations are in contact as never before. A long history of interaction between occidental and oriental societies with their indisputably different ways of life has brought the world to a moment of recognition suggesting the genuinely apocalyptic contest is still ahead. Curtis, the renowned scholar of historic political systems, has given the reader still another exploration into the human condition, and most notably into the revival of true-believer movements that fashion their instruments of discourse not from technological and scientific progress but from the spiritual underpinnings of ancient and often obscurantist belief systems. Civilizing missions are to be found in both the East and the West, but as the author appears to lament, universal civility on a global scale is not only elusive but enchained by the repetitious dogma of particularistic experience.