America Has Lost a Moral and Intellectual Giant

Samuel P. Huntington, RIP.

America has lost a great man.

Excerpting from the above linked obituary...

Samuel Phillips Huntington was born on April 18, 1927... graduated from Stuyvesant High School, received his B.A. from Yale in 1946, served in the U.S. Army, earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1948, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1951, where he had taught nearly without a break since 1950... retired from active teaching in 2007, following 58 years of scholarly service at Harvard... Huntington, the father of two grown sons, lived in Boston and on Martha's Vineyard. He was the author, co-author, or editor of 17 books and over 90 scholarly articles. His principal areas of research and teaching were American government, democratization, military politics, strategy, and civil-military relations, comparative politics, and political development... graduated from Yale College at age 18 and who was teaching at Harvard by age 23... Huntington's first book, "The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations," published to great controversy in 1957 and now in its 15th printing, is today still considered a standard title on the topic of how military affairs intersect with the political realm... Huntington was a life-long Democrat, and served as foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert Humphrey in his 1968 presidential campaign. In the wake of that "bitter" campaign, she said, Huntington and Warren Manshel - "political opponents in the campaign but close friends" - co-founded the quarterly journal Foreign Policy (now a bimonthly magazine). He was co-editor until 1977... [Huntington's] 1969 book, "Political Order in Changing Societies," is widely regarded as a landmark analysis of political and economic development in the Third World... [Huntington's] 1991 book, "The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century" - another highly influential work - won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and "looked at similar questions from a different perspective, namely, that the form of the political regime - democracy or dictatorship - did matter," said Dominguez. "The metaphor in his title referred to the cascade of dictator-toppling democracy-creating episodes that peopled the world from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, and he gave persuasive reasons for this turn of events well before the fall of the Berlin Wall." As early as the 1970s, Huntington warned against the risk of new governments becoming politically liberalized too rapidly. He proposed instead that governments prolong a transition to full democracy - a strand of ideas that began with an influential 1973 paper, "Approaches to Political Decompression." Huntington's most recent book was "Who Are We? The Challenges of America's National Identity" (2004), a scholarly reflection on America's cultural sense of itself.

It's this last book which has had the most influence on my thinking and which I'd highly recommend others read. In fact, it should be required reading.

Should you follow the above link and read the reviews posted on the Amazon.com page, you'll see that "Who We Are" was (and still is) a controversial work clearly not designed to win hosannas from the Left, Huntington's thesis clearly one which got under the skin of reviewers writing for liberal establishment organs such as Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, and Booklist; but in a sense this supports my premise that Huntington's "Who We Are" is well worth reading. After all, the sort of folks who would dismissively (and falsely) refer to Huntington's exhaustively researched text as a "polemic" are the sort of folks one can count on to get it wrong far more often than they get it right. Their disdain should actually be looked upon as a a rousing endorsement for "Who We Are."

For more accurate, less ideologically skewed reviews of "Who We Are" I suggest you click upon this link and this link. To access reviews from Right, Left, and Center... I suggest you check out this link.

In any case... RIP Dr. Huntington.