Samuel P. Huntington Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) was an American political scientist best known for his thesis that, in the post–cold war world, conflicts would stem from the competing cultural identities of “civilizations” rather than the ideological (and state-based) conflicts of the cold war period.

Huntington earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University before serving in the U.S. Army at the end of World War II (1939–1945). He went on to obtain his master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1948 and then completed his doctorate at Harvard University in 1951. Huntington joined Harvard’s faculty in 1950 and remained with the university for most of his career. For three years (1959–1962) he worked at Columbia University as an associate professor in the Department of Government and the deputy director of the Institute for War and Peace Studies.

Huntington advised Hubert Humphrey during Humphrey’s 1968 campaign for president and served in the Jimmy Carter administration as the coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council from 1977 to 1978. He served as a member of the National Security Council/Defense Department Commission on Long-Term Integrated Strategy from 1987 to 1988. At Harvard, Huntington chaired the Department of Government (1967–1969 and 1970–1971), was director of the Harvard Center for International Affairs (1978–1989), and chaired the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (1996–2004). He founded the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard in 1989 and sat as its director until 2000. He also cofounded and was editor of the magazine Foreign Policy from 1970 to 1977. From 1986 to 1987, Huntington served as president of the American Political Science Association.

Huntington’s often controversial scholarship covered a number of different areas, including civil-military relations, military strategy, political philosophy, American politics, and international development and conflict. In his first significant book, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957), Huntington endorsed civilian control of the military and supports President Harry Truman’s dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War (1950–1953).

In 1968 Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies spawned debate because it challenged the “modernization theory” that economic and social progress produces stable democratic regimes in developing nation-states. Huntington argued that economic and social growth produced more complex societies, which required states to develop political institutions capable of managing the stress produced by this modernization. Failure to do so, Huntington warned, could lead to political instability, chaos, and violence. The book also attracted criticism because Huntington labeled the apartheid regime of South Africa as a “satisfied state.”

In 1993 Huntington published an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Clash of Civilizations,” which was subsequently expanded into a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). Huntington theorized that the end of the cold war meant that future conflicts would be cultural rather than ideological in nature. This view contrasted with “the end of history” thesis presented by American political economist Francis Fukuyama, who had argued that the collapse of communism was a victory of Western ideas and the end to conflict.

Huntington asserted that cultural and religious tensions between the West and other cultures would lead to dangerous instability and future wars. He also predicted that the most likely conflicts would involve the West versus either Islamic or the Sinic (Chinese) cultures. While criticized by many scholars, Huntington’s view attracted additional attention following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

In Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), Huntington warned that America’s national identity had been threatened by large-scale Latino immigration, which he wrote could “divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages.”

Bibliography:

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.
Huntington, Samuel P. American Politics:The Promise of Disharmony. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981.
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1968.
The Soldier and the State:The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957.
Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

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