Political Order in Changing Societies
With his famous book Political Order in Changing Societies, published in 1968, the American political scientist and Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington is considered to be one of the ”Founding Fathers” of neo-institutionalism, the historical institutionalism. The book is dealing with the role of political institutions in changing political systems. Huntington stated that ”the most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government”.[1] As stated by Francis Fukuyama, Huntington argued that political decay was "at least as likely as political development", and that neither "economic nor social development" could proceed without political order, the actual experience of newly independent countries being "one of increasing social and political disorder".[2]
For Huntington, ”the capacity to create political institutions is the capacity to create public interests”.
The existence (or lack) of order should not be confused with the issue of the type of that order (both on political level -
Influences
Controversial on first release,
Reviews
Writing in 1997, Francis Fukuyama believed that the book "shaped the understanding of a generation of students on the nature of party systems", though he considers the "characterization of the Soviet Union and other communist states as highly developed polities" odd in retrospect, since "their surface institutional calm masked a high degree of internal rot and illegitimacy."[8]
Writing in 2011, Fukuyama considered that Political Order in Changing Societies "appeared against the backdrop (of) and frontally challenged" the assumptions of "the Americanized version of modernization theory", which included "the sunny view that all good things went together: Economic growth, social mobilization, political institutions, and cultural values", all "changing for the better in tandem." Fukuyama considers the book Huntington's "(most important) contribution to the study of politics", and "probably the last major attempt to write a general theory of political development", though its "significance needs to be placed in the context of the ideas that were dominant in the 1950s and early 1960s. "[9]
References
- ^ Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968),3
- ^ "Samuel Huntington's Legacy".
- ^ Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), 24.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7391-2046-0.
- ^ Huntington, Political Order, vii
- ^ Huntington, Political Order, 4
- ^ "Political Order in Changing Societies". Foreign Affairs. 28 January 2009.
- ^ "Political Order in Changing Societies". Foreign Affairs. 28 January 2009.
- ^ "Samuel Huntington's Legacy".
External links
- Reviewed by Francis Fukuyama, Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997
- Review author[s]: A. F. K. Organski, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 63, No. 3. (Sep., 1969), pp. 921–922.
- Gordon C. Ruscoe, Comparative Education Review, Vol. 14, No. 3, Papers and Proceedings: Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, Atlanta Georgia, March 22-24, 1970. (Oct., 1970), pp. 385-386.