Samuel Phillips Huntington was an influential American conservative
political scientist, adviser and academic. He spent more than half a
century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for
International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor.
During the Carter administration, Huntington was the White House
Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council. He is most
well known by his 1993 theory, "The Clash of Civilizations", of a post-Cold
War new world order. He argued that future wars would be fought not between
countries, but between cultures, and that Islamic extremism would become the
biggest threat to Western world domination. Huntington is credited with
helping to shape U.S. views on civilian-military relations, political
development, and comparative government. Early life and education
Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City, the son of Richard
Thomas Huntington, a publisher of hotel trade journals, and Dorothy Sanborn, a
short-story writer. His grandfather was publisher John Sanborn Phillips. He
graduated with distinction from Yale University at age 18, served in the U.S.
Army, earned his Master's degree from the University of Chicago, and completed
his Ph.D. at Harvard University where he began teaching at age 23.
Academic career He was a member of Harvard's department
of government from 1950 until he was denied tenure during 1959. From 1959 to
1962 he was an associate professor of government at Columbia University where
he was also deputy director of their Institute of War and Peace Studies.
Huntington was invited to return to Harvard with tenure during 1963 and
remained there until his death. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences during 1965. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel
co-founded and co-edited Foreign Policy. Huntington stayed as co-editor until
1977. His first major book was The Soldier and
the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, which was
highly controversial when it was published, but presently is regarded as
the most influential book on American civil-military relations. He became
prominent with his Political Order in Changing Societies, a work that
challenged the conventional opinion of modernization theorists, that economic
and social progress would produce stable democracies in recently decolonized
countries. As a consultant to the U.S. Department of State, and in an
influential 1968 article in Foreign Affairs, he advocated the concentration
of the rural population of South Vietnam as a means of isolating the Viet Cong.
He also was co-author of The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of
Democracies, a report issued by the Trilateral Commission during 1976.
During 1977 and 1978, in the administration of Jimmy Carter, he was
the White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security
Council. Huntington continued to teach
undergraduates until his retirement in 2007.
Political position Huntington was a lifelong Democrat and
liberal on domestic matters. In relation to foreign policy he was a conservative.
Personal life He met his wife, Nancy Arkelyan, when
they were working together on a speech for 1956 presidential candidate Adlai
Stevenson. They had two sons, Nicholas and Timothy. After several years of
declining health, Huntington died on December 24, 2008, at age 81 in Martha's
Vineyard, Massachusetts. Notable arguments
= Political Order in Changing Societies= During 1968, just as the United States'
war in Vietnam was becoming most intense, Huntington published Political
Order in Changing Societies, which was a critique of the modernization theory
which had affected much U.S. policy regarding the developing world during
the prior decade. Huntington argues that, as societies
modernize, they become more complex and disordered. If the process of social
modernization that produces this disorder is not matched by a process of
political and institutional modernization—a process which produces
political institutions capable of managing the stress of modernization—the
result may be violence. During the 1970s, Huntington was an
advisor to governments, both democratic and dictatorial. During 1972, he met
with Medici government representatives in Brazil; a year later he published the
report "Approaches to Political Decompression", warning against the
risks of a too-rapid political liberalization, proposing graduated
liberalization, and a strong party state modeled upon the image of the Mexican
Institutional Revolutionary Party. After a prolonged transition, Brazil became
democratic during 1985. During the 1980s, he became a valued
adviser to the South African regime, which used his ideas on political order
to craft its "total strategy" to reform apartheid and suppress growing
resistance. He assured South Africa's rulers that increasing the repressive
power of the state can be necessary to effect reform. The reform process, he
told his South African audience, often requires "duplicity, deceit, faulty
assumptions and purposeful blindness." He thus gave his imprimatur to his
hosts' project of "reforming" apartheid rather than eliminating it.
Huntington frequently cited Brazil as a success, alluding to his role in his
1988 presidential address to the American Political Science Association,
commenting that political science played a modest role in this process. Critics,
such as British political scientist Alan Hooper, note that contemporary Brazil
has an especially unstable party system, wherein the best institutionalized
party, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's Workers' Party emerged in opposition to
controlled-transition. Moreover, Hooper claims that the lack of civil
participation in contemporary Brazil results from that top-down process of
political participation transitions. = The Third Wave=
In his 1991 book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth
Century, Huntington made the argument that beginning with Portugal's
revolution during 1974, there has been a third wave of democratization which
describes a global trend which includes more than 60 countries throughout
Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa which have undergone some form of
democratic transition. Huntington won the 1992 University of Louisville
Grawemeyer Award for this book. = "The Clash of Civilizations"=
During 1993, Huntington provoked great debate among international relations
theorists with the interrogatively-titled "The Clash of
Civilizations?", an influential, oft-cited article published in Foreign
Affairs magazine. In the article, he argued that, after the fall of the
Soviet Union, Islam would become the biggest obstacle to Western domination
of the world. The next West's big war therefore, he said, would inevitably be
with Islam. Its description of post-Cold War geopolitics and the "inevitability
of instability" contrasted with the influential End of History thesis
advocated by Francis Fukuyama. Huntington expanded "The Clash of
Civilizations?" to book length and published it as The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996. The article and the book
posit that post-Cold War conflict would most frequently and violently occur
because of cultural rather than ideological differences. That, whilst in
the Cold War, conflict occurred between the Capitalist West and the Communist
Bloc East, it now was most likely to occur between the world's major
civilizations—identifying seven, and a possible eighth: Western, Latin
American, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Japanese, and African. This
cultural organization contrasts the contemporary world with the classical
notion of sovereign states. To understand current and future conflict,
cultural rifts must be understood, and culture—rather than the State—must be
accepted as the reason for war. Thus, Western nations will lose predominance
if they fail to recognize the irreconcilable nature of cultural
tensions. Huntington argued that this post-Cold War shift in geopolitical
organization and structure requires the West to strengthen itself culturally, by
abandoning the imposition of its ideal of democratic universalism and its
incessant military interventionism. The identification of Western Civilization
with the Western Christianity was not Huntington's original idea, it was
rather the traditional Western opinion and subdivision before the Cold War era.
Critics call The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order the
theoretical legitimization of American-caused Western aggression
against China and the world's Islamic and Orthodox cultures. Other critics
argue that Huntington's taxonomy is simplistic and arbitrary, and does not
take account of the internal dynamics and partisan tensions within
civilizations. Furthermore, critics argue that Huntington neglects
ideological mobilization by elites and unfulfilled socioeconomic needs of the
population as the real causal factors driving conflict, that he ignores
conflicts that do not fit well with the civilizational borders identified by
him, and they charge that his new paradigm is nothing but realist thinking
in which "states" became replaced by "civilizations". Huntington's influence
upon U.S. policy has been likened to that of British historian Arnold
Toynbee's controversial religious theories about Asian leaders during the
early twentieth century. The New York Times obituary on Samuel
Huntington notes, however, that his "emphasis on ancient religious empires,
as opposed to states or ethnicities, [as sources of global conflict]
gained...more cachet after the Sept. 11 attacks."
Huntington wrote that the Ukraine might divide along the cultural line between
the more Catholic western Ukraine and Orthodox eastern Ukraine:
While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian-Ukrainian war,
a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility
of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would
lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but
far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia. = Who Are We and immigration=
Huntington's last book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National
Identity, was published during May 2004. Its subject is the meaning of American
national identity and the possible cultural threat posed to it by
large-scale Latino immigration, which Huntington warns could "divide the
United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages".
= Other= Huntington is credited with inventing
the phrase Davos Man, referring to global elites who "have little need for
national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully
are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past
whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global
operations". The phrase refers to the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, where leaders of the global economy meet.
During the 1980s, the South African apartheid government of P.W. Botha
became increasingly preoccupied with security. On Huntington's advice,
Botha's government established a powerful state security apparatus to
"protect" the state against an anticipated upsurge in political
violence that the reforms were expected to cause. The 1980s became a period of
considerable political unrest, with the government becoming increasingly
dominated by Botha's circle of generals and police chiefs, who managed the
various States of Emergencies. National Academy of Sciences controversy
In 1986, Huntington was nominated for membership to the National Academy of
Sciences. The entire academy voted on the nomination, although many scientists
were unfamiliar with the nominee. Professor Serge Lang, a Yale University
mathematician, disturbed this electoral status quo by challenging Huntington's
nomination. Lang campaigned for others to deny Huntington membership, and
eventually succeeded; Huntington was twice nominated and twice rejected. A
detailed description of these events was published by Lang in "Academia,
Journalism, and Politics: A Case Study: The Huntington Case" which occupies the
first 222 pages of his 1998 book Challenges.
Lang was inspired by the writings of mathematician Neal Koblitz, who accused
Huntington of misusing mathematics and engaging in pseudo-science. Lang claimed
that Huntington distorted the historical record and used pseudo-mathematics to
make his conclusions seem convincing. As an example he used Huntington's 1968
book Political Order in Changing Societies, in which Huntington argued
that South Africa was a "satisfied society" in the 1960s. Lang didn't
believe the conclusion, so he looked at how Huntington justified this claim and
concluded that he used a method which was simply not valid. Lang suspected
that he was using false pseudo-mathematical argument to give
arguments that he wanted to justify greater authority. It was, said Lang, "a
type of language which gives the illusion of science without any of its
substance." Lang documents his accusations in his book Challenges.
Huntington’s supporters included Herbert A. Simon, a 1978 laureate of the Bank of
Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The Mathematical
Intelligencer offered Simon and Koblitz an opportunity to engage in a written
debate, which they accepted. Huntington's prominence as a Harvard
professor and director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs led to
significant coverage of his defeated nomination to the NAS by the media,
including The New York Times and The New Republic.
Selected publications The Soldier and the State: The Theory
and Politics of Civil-Military Relations,
The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics,
Political Order in Changing Societies, The Crisis of Democracy: On the
Governability of Democracies, American Politics: The Promise of
Disharmony, The Third Wave: Democratization in the
Late Twentieth Century, The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human
Progress Who Are We? The Challenges to America's
National Identity, an article based on the book is available after registration
at Foreign Policy See also
Intermediate Region Civilization
Clash of civilizations Modernization theory
Political geography New institutionalism
Historical institutionalism Historical sociology
International relations theory References
External links Samuel Huntington explaining himself his
book and thesis about the clash of civilization in a 1997 interview with
Charlie Rose The Crisis of Democracy Trilateral
Commission report Appearances on C-SPAN
Sam Huntington discusses "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National
Identity" with Jenny Attiyeh on Thoughtcast
"Interview with Sam Huntington" by Amina R. Chaudary – a 2006 interview with
Islamica Magazine Samuel P. Huntington – selected quotes