Samuel Huntington

Samuel Huntington was born April 18, 1927, in New York City, the son of a trade-magazine publisher and a short-story writer. He graduated from Yale with distinction in 1946, served in the Army until 1947, took a master's degree at the University of Chicago, and had a Harvard doctorate and a teaching post there by twenty-three. Harvard's government department denied him tenure in 1959 anyway, and he spent several years at Columbia before Harvard changed its mind in 1963 and brought him back for good. In 1957 he had already published The Soldier and the State, a theory of how a democracy keeps its military under civilian control that is still assigned in war colleges.

His 1968 book Political Order in Changing Societies argued, against the confident theory of the day, that modernizing societies grow more chaotic before institutions catch up, a thesis shaped by watching Vietnam come apart. He advised Jimmy Carter's National Security Council in 1977 and 1978, and in the 1970s and 1980s counseled Brazil's military government and South Africa's apartheid regime on how to liberalize gradually without losing power, advice critics said mainly helped apartheid survive longer. His 1993 essay The Clash of Civilizations argued that future conflict would run along cultural rather than ideological lines, above all between the West and Islam; expanded into a book in 1996, it was dismissed by many scholars as an oversimplification and became, after September 11, 2001, one of the most cited works of political science of its generation.

His last book, Who Are We?, in 2004, turned the same argument on his own country, warning that large-scale Latino immigration threatened to split the United States into two languages and two cultures and urging a return to Protestant civic identity to hold it together. Gary Segura, dean of UCLA's school of public affairs, said the book did not qualify as social science, calling it polemic rather than scholarship. Two years earlier, in 1986, a campaign led by the mathematician Serge Lang had already blocked his election to the National Academy of Sciences, accusing him of dressing weak reasoning in pseudo-mathematical language, a fight Lang detailed at length in a later book of his own.

Huntington kept teaching undergraduates at Harvard until 2007, then retired to Martha's Vineyard, where he died on Christmas Eve 2008 at 81. The Clash of Civilizations argument he is remembered for was, by his own account, meant as description and warning rather than endorsement, but American policymakers reached for it after 2001 largely as the latter, framing a war against Islamist terrorism as a struggle between civilizations he had only diagnosed. Political scientists still argue whether the framework explains anything Cold War theory could not; what is not disputed is its reach: the Open Syllabus Project ranks him among the two or three most assigned political scientists on American college courses.

Samuel Huntington's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Soldier and the State book
  Foundational theory of civilian control over the military 1957
• Political Order in Changing Societies book
  Argued that modernization outpaces the institutions meant to absorb it 1968
• The Third Wave book
  Traced a global democratization wave beginning in Portugal in 1974 1991
• The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order book
  Expanded his 1993 Foreign Affairs essay into a full argument 1996
• Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity book
  His final and most controversial book 2004

• 1946 aged ~19 Graduates Yale with distinction
• 1946 aged ~19 Serves in the U.S. Army until 1947
• 1950 aged ~23 Earns his Harvard doctorate and begins teaching there at twenty-three
• 1957 aged ~30 Publishes The Soldier and the State
• 1959 aged ~32 Denied tenure at Harvard and moves to Columbia University
• 1977 aged ~50 Joins Jimmy Carter's National Security Council staff
• Summer 1993 aged ~66 Publishes The Clash of Civilizations? in Foreign Affairs
• 2004 aged ~77 Publishes Who Are We?, his final book
• December 24, 2008 aged 81 Dies on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts

• Francis Fukuyama b. 1952
  Political scientist whose The End of History and the Last Man sparked global debate on liberal democracy. rival
• Henry Kissinger 1923–2023
  National security adviser and secretary of state who shaped détente, China policy, and controversial Cold War interventions. contemporary
• Jimmy Carter 1924–2024
  39th president who emphasized human rights, brokered the Camp David Accords, and built a major post-presidential humanitarian legacy. advised the administration of
• George W. Bush b. 1946
  43rd president who led the country after the September 11 attacks and launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. thesis embraced by