authorDiscover the Best Books Written by Samuel P. Huntington
Samuel Phillips Huntington was an American political scientist, adviser, and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor. During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, Huntington was the White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council. During the 1980s Apartheid era in South Africa, he served as an adviser to P. W. Botha's Security Services.
Huntington is best known for his 1993 theory, the "Clash of Civilizations," 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 extremism would become the biggest threat to Western domination of the world. Huntington is credited with helping to shape American views 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. Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City, the son of Dorothy Sanborn (née Phillips), a short-story writer, and Richard Thomas Huntington, a publisher of hotel trade journals. His grandfather was publisher John Sanborn Phillips. He graduated with distinction from Yale University at age 18, served in the U.S. Army for a brief period, earned his master's degree 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 the 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). This work 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 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.
