Samuel Huntington

The scholar who predicted a clash of cultures

Samuel Huntington

1927–2008

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“Somewhere in the Middle East,” political theorist Samuel Huntington wrote in his 1996 volume The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, “a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and, between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner.” Five years later, an eerily similar scenario yielded the calamity of 9/11. Though he wrote 17 books on various subjects, Huntington was best known for arguing that religion and culture, particularly Christianity and Islam, would fuel the conflicts of the 21st century.

Huntington graduated from Yale at 18, was teaching government at Harvard by 23, and generated controversy with his first book, said The New York Times. The Soldier and the State (1957), which examined the need for a professional military class within a civilian government, “came under criticism from both ideological sides, with liberals attacking the book as militaristic and conservatives upset by the emphasis on civilian control.” In Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), Huntington argued that strong political authority—not always democracy—was needed for stable developing societies. Critics called the book Machiavellian, but it won Huntington an appointment as a consultant to Lyndon Johnson’s State Department.

The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington’s most famous work, began as a 1993 article for Foreign Affairs, said The Washington Post. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Huntington predicted that the principal causes of future wars “would not be nation-state rivalries over trade, territory, or ideology.” Rather, “wars would erupt over differences in religion, history, language, and tradition.” Huntington even asserted that Cold War antagonisms were relatively minor compared with what he termed “the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.” Opponents derided his thesis as simple-minded and imperialistic—“the West versus the rest,” said Middle East scholar Edward Said.

Huntington was attacked further when the Bush administration’s neoconservative policymakers “used his ideas to promote the invasion of Iraq,” said the London Times. But Huntington, a lifelong Democrat who had advised Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey, was “a steadfast critic” of the invasion. He called the White House’s plans to install a democratic government in Iraq a “joke,” and maintained that “Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: It is false, it is immoral, and it is dangerous.”

Huntington retired from Harvard in 2007, three years after publishing his last book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, in which he argued that massive Hispanic immigration could lead to “a bifurcated America.” He is survived by his wife of 51 years and two sons.