Everything about Samuel P Huntington totally explained
Samuel Phillips Huntington (born
April 18,
1927) is an American
political scientist who gained prominence through his "
Clash of Civilizations"(1993, 1996) thesis of a new post-Cold War world order. Previously, his academic reputation had rested on his analysis of the relationship between the military and the civil government, his investigation of
coups d'etat, and for his more recent analysis of threats posed to the U.S. by contemporary
immigration.
Biographical details
Huntington graduated from
Yale University, served in the army and received his doctorate from
Harvard University at the age of 23 and started teaching there. He is Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at the Department of Government. In the 1960s, he became a prominent scholar upon publishing
Political Order in Changing Societies, a work that challenged the conventional view of
modernization theorists that economic and social progress would produce stable democracies in recently
decolonized countries. As an adviser to
Lyndon Johnson, and in an influential 1968 article, he justified heavy bombardment of the countryside of
South Vietnam as a means of driving
Viet Cong supporters to the cities. He also was co-author of
The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, a report issued by the
Trilateral Commission in 1976. During 1977 and 1978 he was the White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the
National Security Council.
Notable arguments
Political Order in Changing Societies
In
Political Order in Changing Societies Huntington argues that political order is a state's most important, socially stabilizing characteristic. Order is threatened when the level of political mobilization exceeds the level of administrative institutionalization within a society, and that, as a result of economic development, political mobilization will increase faster than will the appropriate social, political, and economic institutions to handle said political behavior, thus leading to instability. As a solution, there must be a stronger emphasis on institution-building in a society's development, most important, the establishment of a stable
party system.
He is sceptical of less institutionalized political mobilization and protest, which made him the target of heated
student activist criticism on the book's publication in
1968.
Political Order in Changing Societies is considered a classic work in post–World War Two political science.
In the 1970s, Huntington applied his theoretical insights as an advisor to governments, both democratic and dictatorial. In 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
PRI. After a prolonged
transition, Brazil became democratic in 1985.
Huntington frequently cites 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,
Lula da Silva's
Partido dos Trabalhadores (Party of the Workers), emerged in opposition to controlled-transition. Moreover, Hooper claims that the lack of civil participation in contemporary Brazil stems from that top-down process of political participation transition.
The Clash of Civilizations
1993, Professor Huntington provoked great debate among
international relations theorists with the interrogatively-titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", an extremely influential, oft-cited article published in
Foreign Affairs magazine. Its description of post–Cold War
geopolitics 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 likely 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) the 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 locus of war. Thus, Western nations will lose predominance if they fail to recognize the irreconcilable nature of cultural tensions.
Critics (see
Le Monde Diplomatique articles) call
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order the theoretical legitimization of American-led Western aggression against China and the world's Islamic cultures. Nevertheless, this post–Cold War shift in geopolitical organization and structure requires that the West internally strengthen itself culturally, by abandoning the imposition of its ideal of democratic universalism and its incessant military interventionism. Other critics argue that Prof. Huntington's taxonomy is simplistic and arbitrary, and doesn't take account of the internal dynamics and partisan tensions within civilizations. Huntington's influence upon U.S. policy has been likened to that of British historian
A.J. Toynbee's controversial religious theories about Asian leaders in the early twentieth century.
Who Are We and immigration
Professor Huntington's, latest book,
Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, was published in May of
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 coining 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 met.
The National Academy of Sciences controversy
In 1986, Prof. Huntington was nominated for membership to the
National Academy of Sciences, with his nomination voted by the entire academy, but most votes, by scientists mainly unfamiliar with the nominee, are token votes. Professor
Serge Lang, a
Yale University mathematician, disturbed this electoral status quo by challenging Prof. Huntington's nomination. Prof. Lang campaigned for others to deny Huntington membership, and eventually succeeded; Prof. Huntington was twice nominated and twice rejected.
» In the book Political order in changing societies that Huntington published in 1968 he used pseudo-mathematical arguments to prove that in the 1960s South Africa was a "satisfied society". Lang didn't believe the conclusion so he looked how Huntington justified this claim and saw that he used methodology 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 fought a vigorous campaign to prevent Huntington becoming a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 after he'd been nominated. Lang was successful on this occasion and also on a second occasion when Huntington was again nominated. 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.(External Link
) Google Books, Contents:
(External Link)
Huntington's prominence as a Harvard professor and (as then) Director of Harvard's Center for International Studies contributed to much reportage by
The New York Times newspaper and
The New Republic magazine of his defeated nomination to the NAS.
Prof. Lang was inspired by the writings of mathematician
Neal Koblitz who accused Prof. 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 appear convincing. Prof. Lang documents his accusations in his book
Challenges.
Professor Huntington’s supporters include
Herbert Simon, a 1978
Nobel Laureate in Economics. The
Mathematical Intelligencer offered Simon and Koblitz an opportunity to engage in a written debate, which they accepted.
Quotations
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world won't be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do —— The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p.51.
Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted, but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq, but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth, but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China, but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed, but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle —— The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p.184.
In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it's false; it's immoral; and it's dangerous . . . Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism —— The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p.310.
In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations, from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders —— "The Clash of Civilizations?", original 1993 "Foreign Affairs" magazine article.
Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West isn't Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power —— Huntington's 1998 text The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.
Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community —— Who Are We? America's Great Debate, p.12.
Selected publications
(1957),
(1961),
Political Order in Changing Societies (1968),
(1976),
(1981),
(1991),
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996),
Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004), an article based on the book is available after (free) registration at Foreign PolicyFurther Information
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