Samuel P. Huntington
Who Was Samuel P. Huntington?
Samuel Phillips Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City. He died on December 24, 2008, at Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, at the age of 81.
He was an American political scientist, academic, and government consultant. He spent 58 years teaching at Harvard University, where he held the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor chair — one of the university’s highest faculty distinctions.
According to the Open Syllabus Project, Huntington is the second most frequently cited author on college syllabi for political science courses. He wrote or co-wrote 17 books and produced over 90 scholarly articles. “Every one of his books had an impact,” said Harvard economist Henry Rosovsky. “These have all become part of our vocabulary.”
Early Life and Education
Samuel Phillips Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City. He was the son of Richard Thomas Huntington, an editor and publisher, and Dorothy Sanborn Phillips, a writer. His grandfather was publisher John Sanborn Phillips.
Huntington attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He graduated from Yale College at age 18. He then served in the U.S. Army before earning a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago. He earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 1951.
Academic Career: Harvard, Columbia, and Back
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.
Huntington was invited to return to Harvard with tenure in 1963 and remained there until his death.
He was director of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs from 1978 to 1989. He founded the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and was director there from 1989 to 1999.
Huntington retired from active teaching in 2007, following 58 years of scholarly service at Harvard. In a retirement letter to the President of Harvard, he wrote: “It is difficult for me to imagine a more rewarding or enjoyable career than teaching here, particularly teaching undergraduates. I have valued every one of the years since 1949.”
His doctoral students included Francis Fukuyama, Fareed Zakaria, and Eliot Cohen — three of the most consequential voices in post-Cold War foreign policy.
Government Service
Huntington was a lifelong Democrat and served as foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert Humphrey in his 1968 presidential campaign.
From 1977 to 1978, he served as coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter.
In the wake of the bitter 1968 campaign, Huntington and Warren Manshel — “political opponents in the campaign but close friends” — co-founded the quarterly journal Foreign Policy. Huntington stayed as co-editor until 1977. Foreign Policy is today one of the most widely read journals in international affairs.
Major Works
The Soldier and the State (1957)
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 the military relates to civilian government.
In part, The Soldier and the State was inspired by President Harry Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur — and at the same time praised corps of officers that in history remained stable, professional, and politically neutral.
Political Order in Changing Societies (1968)
His 1969 book, Political Order in Changing Societies, is widely regarded as a landmark analysis of political and economic development in the Third World.
Huntington showed that the lack of political order and authority was among the most serious debilities the world over. It was false, he argued, that “all good things go together” — because the relationships between political order, democracy, economic growth, and education often created complex challenges and often undercut each other.
The Third Wave (1991)
The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991) is a post-hoc analysis of more than thirty countries that became democratic political entities during the 1970s and 1980s — the third wave, following the first wave from 1828 to 1926 and the second from 1943 to 1962.
Huntington was the winner of the Grawemeyer Award in 1992 for “Ideas Improving World Order” for this book.
The Clash of Civilizations (1993 / 1996)
In 1993, Huntington provoked great debate among international relations theorists with the interrogatively titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”, an influential, oft-cited article published in Foreign Affairs magazine.
His central argument was direct: in a post-Cold War world, violent conflict would come not from ideological friction between nation-states, but from cultural and religious differences among the world’s major civilizations.
The Weatherhead III University Professor identified these major civilizations as Western (including the United States and Europe), Latin American, Islamic, African, Orthodox (with Russia as a core state), Hindu, Japanese, and Sinic.
He expanded the thesis into a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which appeared in 1996, and has since been translated into 39 languages.
The thesis generated fierce criticism and enduring influence in equal measure. The book anticipated reasons for challenges and tragedies that unfolded in Iraq during the years following 2003.
Awards and Recognition
- 1960 — Silver Pen Award, Journal Fund
- 1969–70 — Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University
- 1972–73 — Guggenheim Fellow
- 1986–87 — President, American Political Science Association
- 1992 — Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, for The Third Wave
Jorge Dominguez, Harvard’s vice provost for International Affairs, described Huntington as “one of the giants of political science worldwide during the past half century.”
Personal Life
Huntington met his wife, Nancy, during Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign and married her the following year. Huntington and his wife Nancy first came to Martha’s Vineyard on their honeymoon in 1957.
He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Nancy Arkelyan Huntington; two sons, Timothy Mayo Huntington and Nicholas Phillips Huntington; two daughters-in-law, Kelly Brown Huntington and Noelle Lalley Huntington; and four grandchildren.
Huntington died of congestive heart failure at the age of 81. He died on December 24, 2008, at Martha’s Vineyard.
Quick Facts
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Samuel Phillips Huntington |
| Born | April 18, 1927 — New York City, New York |
| Died | December 24, 2008 — Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts |
| Age at Death | 81 |
| Education | Stuyvesant High School; B.A. Yale (1946); M.A. University of Chicago; Ph.D. Harvard (1951) |
| University | Harvard University (1950–2007, with Columbia interlude 1959–1963) |
| Title | Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor |
| Books | 17 authored, co-authored, or edited |
| Articles | 90+ scholarly articles |
| Key Works | The Soldier and the State (1957); Political Order in Changing Societies (1968); The Third Wave (1991); The Clash of Civilizations (1996) |
| Award | Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (1992) |
| Journal | Co-founder, Foreign Policy (1970) |
| Government Role | NSC Coordinator of Security Planning, Carter Administration (1977–78) |
| Political Party | Democratic |
| Wife | Nancy Arkelyan Huntington (married September 8, 1957) |
| Sons | Timothy Mayo Huntington; Nicholas Phillips Huntington |
Bibliography
| Year | Title | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| 1957 | The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations | Harvard University Press |
| 1968 | Political Order in Changing Societies | Yale University Press |
| 1976 | The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies | New York University Press |
| 1981 | American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony | Harvard University Press |
| 1991 | The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century | University of Oklahoma Press |
| 1996 | The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order | Simon & Schuster |
| 2004 | Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity | Simon & Schuster |
