Samuel P. Huntington

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Samuel P. Huntington
Huntington in 2004
Born
Samuel Phillips Huntington

(1927-04-18)April 18, 1927
New York City, U.S.
DiedDecember 24, 2008(2008-12-24) (aged 81)
Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, U.S.
Political partyDemocratic
Spouse
Nancy Arkelyan
​
(m. 1957)​
Academic background
EducationYale University (BA)
University of Chicago (MA)
Harvard University (PhD)
ThesisClientelism: A Study in Administrative Politics (1951)
InfluencesZbigniew Brzezinski
Feliks Koneczny[1]
Academic work
DisciplinePolitical science
International relations
InstitutionsHarvard University
Columbia University
Doctoral students
Notable works
Clash of civilizations
  • forced draft urbanization
  • Great Divergence
  • political decay
    • Influenced

    Samuel Phillips Huntington (April 18, 1927 – December 24, 2008) was an American

    Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor
    .

    During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, Huntington was the White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council.

    Huntington is best known for his 1993 theory, the "Clash of Civilizations" otherwise known as COC, 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 civilization would become the biggest threat to Western domination of the world. Huntington is credited with helping to shape American views on civilian-military relations, political development, and comparative government.[3] According to the Open Syllabus Project, Huntington is the second most frequently cited author on college syllabi for political science courses.[4]

    Early life and education

    Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City, the son of Dorothy Sanborn (née Phillips), a short-story writer, and Richard Thomas Huntington, a publisher of hotel trade journals.

    PhD at Harvard University, where he began teaching at age 23.[8][3]

    Academic career

    Huntington was a member of Harvard's department of government from 1950 until he was denied tenure in 1959.

    Warren Demian Manshel co-founded and co-edited Foreign Policy. Huntington stayed as co-editor until 1977.[11]

    Huntington's first major book was

    The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, a report issued by the Trilateral Commission in 1976. In 1977, his friend Brzezinski – who had been appointed National Security Adviser in the administration of Jimmy Carter – invited Huntington to become White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council
    . He served in this position until the end of 1978.

    Huntington served as an instructor at MIT Seminar XXI.[15] He continued to teach undergraduates until his retirement in 2007.

    Personal life

    Huntington 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.[3]

    After several years of declining health, Huntington died on December 24, 2008, at age 81 in Martha's Vineyard.[5]

    Notable arguments

    The Soldier and the State

    Main article: The Soldier and the State

    In The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957),[16] Huntington presents a general theory of civil–military relations. Huntington proposes a theory of objective civilian control, according to which the optimal means of asserting control over the armed forces is to professionalize them.

    Political Order in Changing Societies

    Main article: Political Order in Changing Societies

    In 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 US policy regarding the developing world during the prior decade.

    Huntington argued 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 gradual 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 (which at that time included police violence, detention without trial, and torture) 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.[17]

    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

    Main article: The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century

    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

    Grawemeyer Award for this book.[18]

    "The Clash of Civilizations"

    Further information: Clash of Civilizations
    Map of the nine "civilizations" from Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations"

    In 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 West's next big war therefore, he said, would inevitably be with Islam.[19] 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: (i) Western, (ii) Latin American, (iii) Islamic, (iv) Sinic (Chinese), (v) Hindu, (vi) Orthodox, (vii) Japanese, and (viii) 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. Underscoring this point, Huntington wrote in the 1996 expansion, "In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous."[20]

    The identification of Western Civilization with

    New York Times obituary on Huntington states 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."[23]

    Huntington wrote that 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.[24]

    Who Are We and immigration

    Main article: Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity

    Huntington's last book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, was published in May 2004. Its subject is the meaning of American national identity and what he describes as a cultural threat from large-scale immigration by Latinos, which Huntington says could "divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages". In this book, he called for America to force immigrants to "adopt English" and the US to turn to "Protestant religions" to "save itself against the threats" of Latino and Islamic immigrants. In a book review for the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, Gary M. Segura, Dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs,[25] asserted that the book should not be considered social science because of its divisive views and rhetoric.[26] Segura also called Huntington's writing of the book unforgivable on account of Huntington's academic position, saying that the work was a polemic rather than a work of scholarship.[26]

    Other

    Huntington is credited with inventing the phrase

    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.[27]

    National Academy of Sciences controversy

    In 1986, Huntington was nominated for membership to the

    pseudo-science. Lang claimed that Huntington distorted the historical record and used pseudo-mathematics to make his conclusions seem convincing. Lang's campaign 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.[28]

    Huntington's prominence as a Harvard professor and director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs led to significant media coverage of his defeated nomination to the NAS, including by The New York Times and The New Republic.

    Mathematical Intelligencer, with other mathematicians joining in through Letters to the Editors column.[31][32][33][34][35]

    Selected publications

    As editor:

    • Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress with Lawrence E. Harrison (2000)
    • Many Globalizations : Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World with Peter L. Berger (2002)

    See also

    References

    1. ^ Biliński P.Feliks Karol Koneczny - Droga Kariery Akademickiej (in Polish) (English summary @ PubMed), Kwart Hist Nauki Tech.
    2. ISBN 978-1-137-48358-4
      .
    3. ^ a b c d Lewin, Tamar (December 28, 2008). "Samuel P. Huntington, 81, Political Scientist, Is Dead". The New York Times. Retrieved June 9, 2015.
    4. ^ "Open Syllabus Project". Retrieved November 5, 2023.
    5. ^ a b Hart, Dan (December 27, 2008). "Samuel Huntington, Harvard Political Scientist, Dies". Bloomberg News.
    6. ^ "POINTER - Journals - 2009 - Volume 35 Number 1 - Featured Author: Samuel P Huntington". Mindef.gov.sg. Retrieved August 17, 2012.
    7. Fold3
      by Ancestry.com website. Retrieved November 30, 2023. Enlistment Date is listed as "17 Apr 1946" and Release Date is listed as "11 May 1947".
    8. ^ "Samuel Huntington, Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor". Department of Government, Harvard University. Archived from the original on April 30, 2008. Retrieved December 27, 2008.
    9. ^ "Professor Samuel Huntington author of The Clash of Civilizations". The Times. London. December 29, 2008.
    10. ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter H" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved April 22, 2011.
    11. ^ "Samuel Huntington, 81, political scientist, scholar | Harvard Gazette". News.harvard.edu. February 5, 2009. Retrieved August 17, 2012.
    12. ^ Michael C. Desch. 1998. "Soldiers, States, and Structures: The End of the Cold War and Weakening U.S. Civilian Control." Armed Forces & Society. 24(3): pages 389–405.
    13. ^ Michael C. Desch. 2001. Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
    14. ^ Peter D. Feaver. 1996. "An American Crisis in Civilian Control and Civil-Military Relations?" The Tocqueville Review. 17(1): 159.
    15. ^ Art, Robert (September 1, 2015). "From the Director: September, 2015". MIT Seminar XXI. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
    16. ^ "Samuel P. Huntington The Soldier And The State ：the Theory And Politics Of Civil Military Relations Belknap Press (1957)" – via Internet Archive.
    17. ^ Joseph Lelyveld, Move Your Shadow (New York, 1985), pages 68–69; Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, "South Africa Since 1976: an historical perspective," in Shaun Johnson, ed., South Africa: No Turning Back (London, 1988), pages 28–29
    18. ^ "1992- Samuel Huntington, Herman Daly and John Cobb". Archived from the original on December 2, 2013.
    19. ^ Haruna, Mohammed (September 26, 2001). "Nigeria: September 11 And Huntington's Prophecy". Daily Trust.
    20. ^ "A Guide to the Work of Samuel Huntington". contemporarythinkers.org.
    21. ^ Peter Harrison, An Eccentric Tradition: The Paradox of 'Western Values'
    22. ^ see Richard E. Rubenstein and Jarle Crocker (1994): Challenging Huntington, in: Foreign Policy, Number 96 (Autumn, 1994), pages 113–28
    23. ^ Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard Dies at 81, The New York Times, December 27, 2008
    24. ^ "Testing Huntington in Ukraine". European Tribune.
    25. ^ "Gary Segura Dean UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs". September 4, 2019.
    26. ^
      S2CID 143248422
      .
    27. ^ Davos man's death wish, The Guardian, 3 February 2006
    28. ISBN 978-0-387-94861-4
      .
    29. ^ Boffey, Philip M. (April 29, 1987). "Prominent Harvard Scholar Barred by Science Academy". The New York Times. section A, page 1. Archived from the original on October 20, 2023. Retrieved October 20, 2023.
    30. ^ Zakaria, Fareed (July 27, 1987). "Blood lust in academia: The professor's vendetta". The New Republic. Vol. 197, no. 4. pp. 16–18.
    31. S2CID 121312716
      .
    32. S2CID 123030288
      .
    33. ISSN 0343-6993
      .
    34. S2CID 123171596
      .
    35. S2CID 189886367
      .

    Further reading

    External links

    Wikiquote has quotations related to Samuel P. Huntington.
    Look up Huntingtonianism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
    Academic offices
    New office Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor Succeeded by
    Professional and academic associations
    Preceded by President of the American
    Political Science Association
    1986–1987     		Succeeded by
    Awards
    Preceded by
    World Commission on
    Environment and Development
    Grawemeyer Award for
    Ideas Improving World Order
    1992
    With: John B. Cobb and Herman Daly
    		 Succeeded by
    Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Samuel_P._Huntington&oldid=1221408874"