Samuel Phillips Huntington

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Samuel Phillips Huntington
Doctor Samuel Phillips Huntington on August 17, 1985
Born	April 18 1927 (1927--) (age 80) New York, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Academic

Samuel Phillips Huntington (born April 18, 1927) is a controversial US political scientist known for his analysis of the relationship between the military and the civil government, his investigation of coups d'etat, his thesis (inspired by Polish scientist Feliks Koneczny) that the central political actors of the 21st century will be civilizations rather than nation-states and, most recently, for his views on US immigration. He graduated from Yale and received his Ph.D. from Harvard. As an advisor to Lyndon Johnson and in an influential 1968 article, he justified heavy bombardment of the countryside of South Vietnam as a means to drive the peasants and supporters of the Viet Cong into urban areas. Huntington also served as co-author on the report, "The Governability of Democracies", that was issued by the Trilateral Commission in 1976. More recently, he garnered widespread attention for his analysis of threats posed to the United States by modern-day immigration. He is a professor at Harvard University. Huntington came to prominence as a scholar in the 1960s with the publication of Political Order in Changing Societies, a work that challenged the conventional view of modernization theorists that economic and social progress would bring about stable democracies in recently decolonized countries.

Notable arguments

Political Order in Changing Societies

Main article: Political Order in Changing Societies

In Political Order in Changing Societies Huntington argues that order is the most important characteristic of states. Order is threatened when the level of mobilization exceeds the level of institutionalization within a society. Huntington is concerned that, as a result of economic development, political mobilization will increase faster than the appropriate institutions can arise, thus leading to instability. As a solution he advocates a stronger emphasis on institution building in development, most importantly the establishment of stable party systems. He remains highly skeptical of less institutionalized political mobilization and protest, which made him the target of heated criticism by student activists at the time of the book's publication in 1968. Political Order is widely considered one of the classic works in post-war political science and is still required reading for most graduate students in political science in the U.S. During 1977 and 1978 he worked at the White House as coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council.

In the 1970s, Huntington applied his theoretical insights as an adviser to several governments, democracies as well as dictatorships. In 1972 he discussed with representatives of the Medici government in Brazil that had approached him and one year later he produced a paper entitled "Approaches to Political Decompression", in which he warned against the risks of a rapid liberalization and proposed gradual steps and a strong party state after the image of the Mexican PRI. After a drawn-out transition process, Brazil became fully democratic in 1985. Huntington has frequently cited Brazil as a success and alluded to his own role in his 1988 presidential address to the American Political Science Association, commenting that political science had "played a modest role in this process". Critics such as the British political scientist Alan Hooper point to the fact that Brazil today has an especially unstable party system, in which the best institutionalized party, Lula da Silva's Partido dos Trabalhadores, emerged in opposition to the controlled transition process. Moreover, Hooper claims that the lack of civil participation in today's Brazil goes back to the top-down transition process.

Huntington also coined the phrase 'Davos man' to refer to the type of people who began to meet in Davos, Switzerland, who were/are generally white, male, western, rich global elites.^[1]

The Clash of Civilizations

For more details on this topic, see Clash of Civilizations.

In 1993, Huntington ignited a major debate amongst international relations theorists with the publication in Foreign Affairs of an extremely influential and often-cited article entitled "The Clash of Civilizations?" The article contrasted with another political thesis regarding the core dynamics of post-Cold War geopolitics expressed by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History. Huntington later expanded the article into a full-length book, published in 1996 by Simon and Schuster, entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. The article and the book articulated his views that post-Cold War conflict would occur most frequently and violently along cultural as opposed to ideological lines. He argued that, whilst in the cold war conflict was most likely to occur between the Western free world and the Communist Bloc, it was now most likely between the world's major civilizations, of which he identified eight with a possible ninth: Western, Latin American, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese, and the possible ninth, African. Huntington believes that this cultural organization better describes the world than the classical notion of variegated sovereign states. He surmised that to understand conflict in our age and in the future, cultural rifts must be understood, and culture (instead of the state) must be accepted as the locus of war. Thus, he warned that Western nations may lose their predominance if they fail to recognize the irreconcilable nature of this brewing tension.

Critics (see Le Monde Diplomatique articles) call Clash of Civilizations the theoretical basis to legitimize aggression by the US-led West against China and the world of Islam. However, Huntington has also argued that this shift in geopolitical structure requires the West to strengthen itself internally, abandoning democratic universalism and incessant interventionism. Other critics have argued that his taxonomy is simplistic and arbitrary, and does not take account of internal dynamics and tensions within civilizations. The influence of Huntington's ideas on US policy has been likened to that of British historian A.J. Toynbee's controversial religious theories of the early 20th century on Asian leaders.

Who Are We and immigration

The latest book by Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity was released in May 2004. The subject is the meaning of American national identity and the possible 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."

The National Academy of Sciences controversy

In 1986, Huntington was nominated for membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Nominations are voted on by the entire academy, but most votes, which are by scientists who are mainly unfamiliar with the nominee, are token votes. This status quo was disturbed when Serge Lang, a Yale University mathematician, began challenging Huntington's nomination. Lang campaigned for others to deny Huntington membership and was eventually successful, with Huntington being nominated and rejected twice.

Huntington's prominence as a Harvard professor and (at the time) director of Harvard's Center for International Studies contributed to the coverage by publications such as The New York Times and The New Republic.

Lang was largely inspired by the writings of Neal Koblitz, another mathematician, who accused Huntington of misusing mathematics and engaging in pseudo-science. Lang's accusations included claims that Huntington had distorted the historical record and used pseudo-mathematics to make his conclusions appear more convincing. Lang's side of the controversy is covered in his book Challenges.

Huntington's supporters included Herbert Simon, a 1978 Bank of Sweden Nobel Laureate in Economics. The Mathematical Intelligencer offered Simon and Koblitz an opportunity to engage in a written debate, which they accepted.

Quotes

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Samuel P. Huntington

• "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not 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 is false; it is immoral; and it is 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." (Clash of Civilizations, original 1993 Foreign Affairs article)

• "Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not 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." (The Clash of Civilisations)

• "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

• The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957),
• The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics (1961),
• Political Order in Changing Societies (1968),
• American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (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 Policy
• America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. (2004), [1]

See also

• Civilization
• Spanish in the United States
• Clash of civilizations
• Modernization theory
• Fareed Zakaria

External links

• Huntington's personal homepage at Harvard University
• Articles By Samuel Huntington
• The Crisis of Democracy, by Samuel Huntington
• Sam Huntington discusses "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity" with Jenny Attiyeh on Thoughtcast
• A list of comments, mainly critical ones, on Who Are We on Foreign Policy, available to (freely) registered users. Among the writers are a number of eminent scholars of immigration and Latin American studies.
• Professor Edward Said's critique of Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations' theory.
• An article by Alan Hooper that criticizes the impact of Huntington's advice during the transition process on the quality of democracy in Brazil.
• The Slow suicide of the West by Jorge Majfud
• "Your New Enemies" by Said Shirazi - A leftist critique of Huntington.
• "Interview with Sam Huntington" by Amina R. Chaudary - A 2006 Interview with Islamica Magazine

References

1. ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1404411,00.html

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