Samuel Phillips Huntington (April 18, 1927 – December 24, 2008) was an American political scientist, adviser, and academic. He was the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University, where he directed the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, Huntington was the White House coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council.
Huntington is known best 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 greatest threat to Western domination of the world. Huntington is credited with helping to shape American opinions on civilian-military relations, political development, and comparative government. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Huntington is the second most frequently cited author on college syllabi for political science courses in the USA.
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 (née Phillips), a short-story writer. His grandfather was publisher John Sanborn Phillips. He graduated with distinction from Yale University at age 18. He served in the U.S. Army from April 1946 to May 1947 and was stationed at Fort Eustis, Virginia. He then earned his Master of Arts from the University of Chicago and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University, where he began teaching at age 23.
Huntington was a member of Harvard's department of government from 1950 until he was denied tenure in 1959. Along with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had also been denied tenure, he moved to Columbia University in New York. From 1959 to 1962 he was an associate professor of government at Columbia, where he was also associate director of their Institute of War and Peace Studies. Huntington was invited to return to Harvard with tenure in 1963 and remained there until his death. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel co-founded and co-edited Foreign Policy. Huntington stayed as co-editor until 1977.
Huntington's first major book was The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957), which was highly controversial when it was published, but at present is regarded as the most influential book on American civil-military relations. He became prominent with his Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), a work that challenged the conventional opinion of modernization theorists, that economic and social progress would produce stable democracies in recently decolonized countries. He also was co-author of 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. He continued to teach undergraduates until his retirement in 2007.
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.
After several years of declining health, Huntington died on December 24, 2008, at age 81 in Martha's Vineyard.
In The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957), 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
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.
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.
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.
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. Its description of post-Cold War geopolitics and the "inevitability of instability" contrasted with the influential "End of History" thesis advocated by Francis Fukuyama.