Book Review: The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters by Anthony Pagden ASIN: B009Y4JPTA

I haven't even started book yet. I picked up this book because another Pagden book. I was trying to answer: Why Western world got the enlightenment while Eastern world missed it? What was the secret ingredient that was missing from Eastern culture that prevent enlightenment's birth? From when such ingredient was lost in Eastern history?
[Update] Page 269 to page 292 alone is worth the cover price. This part of the book talks extensively about key figures of Enlightement especially Leibniz and Montesquieu opinion on China and Chinese culture.Montesquieu in his The Spirit of the Laws categorized Chinese government as despotism, a governance that is "one alone, without law and without rule, drags everything along by his will and his caprice". Montesquieu identified three possible types of government:

• Republics, either democratic or aristocratic, which the "people as a body or ionly a part of the people" exercise sovereign power
• Monarchies,where sovereignty is held by "one alone" in accordance with "fixed and established laws"
• Despotism, where "one alone, without law and without rule, drags everything along by his will and his caprice"

Of the three, Montesquieu thinks only the first two were truly legitimate. Despotism is a condition in which "there are no laws, so to speak, there are only customs and manners, and if you overturn them, you overturn everything. Laws are established, customs are inspired." And in his opinion, the immobility of Chinese government structure was the result of Chinese emperors smart use of "manners" and "customs" to rule over their citizens. Customs are generally those long-accepted practices of a community that hold it together on a daily basis. Manners are the routine social exchanges between individuals and the code of behavior that all but real savages need in order to negotiate their daily lives. Both of them are superficial, carry no meaning of virtue or vice. Unlike laws which reflects a consensus and changes as circumstances change, customs and manners are not examined and exist only for the sake of they always existed. And Chinese rulers have been using Keju (科举), a meritocratic system to enforce manners and customs, and by promoting Confucian the Chinese emperors upped these manners and customs to the sacred and secular level, a religion which "fear added to fear", and exempt those manners and customs from change or criticism. It is very similar to Muslims choosing Qur'an as their "sacred book that acts as a rule". The Chinese seemed to have gone one step further than any other "Oriental" despotism, in that their legislators have successfully "confused religion, laws, mores, and manners" thus emptying the concepts of vice and virtue of any real meaning. The outcome of all this was to make of the nation one single, indivisible character, so tightly bound together as to be impervious to any change. In this way China had come to resemble not a society but an immense family, and it was an image that Chinese philosophy had worked hard to present as a reflection of a perfectly harmonious world."The Emperors of China are very eager for the people to believe the maxim of the Chinese philosopher that the empire is a family and the emperor its father". It is an illusion fostered by despots and work to their ruling advantage."a spider's web, with the emperor like the spider at the center. He can not move without everyone else moving, and no one else can move without him moving also". Despotism of this kind, however can only exist in isolation. And China's isolation was reinforced by the Chinese system of writing, a non-alphabet system of more than three thousand unique characters for daily usage, a symbol system that demands life learning to be able to read, a system so burdened and heavy that Chinese had neither the resources nor the inclination even to interpret much less challenge the received wisdom of past centuries. What science the Chinese had was thus reduced to little more than "the knowledge of language" and of a language "barely sufficient for daily life".
[Update, 11/10/2013] To read this book will require a strong discipline resulted from a set of urgent problems. The writing does not lend to a easy read.