Sat Dec 27, 2:28 PM ET

Influential US political scientist Samuel Huntington, author of "The Clash of Civilizations" and a professor at Harvard University, pictured here at the 2002 World Economic Forum, has died at the age of 81, the university announced on its website Saturday.

(AFP/POOL/File) 




 

Influential US political scientist Samuel Huntington dies

NEW YORK (AFP) – Influential US political scientist Samuel Huntington, author of "The Clash of Civilizations" and a professor at Harvard University, has died at the age of 81, the university announced on its website Saturday.

Huntington, who retired from teaching in 2007 after 58 years at Harvard, died on December 24 in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, the university said. It did not give the cause of his death.

He was co-author or editor of 17 books, mostly on US government, democratization, military politics, civil-military relations and political development.

Huntington was perhaps best known for believing that in a post-Cold War world violent conflict would come from cultural and religious differences, and not ideological differences between nation states.

This view was fully explained in the 1996 book "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," which has been translated into 39 languages.

Huntington was "one of the giants of American intellectual life of the last half century," said one of his colleagues, Robert Putnam at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Another colleague, Harvard professor Stephen Rosen, said Huntington "combined a fierce loyalty to his principles and friends with a happy eagerness to be confronted with sharp opposition to his own views."

Huntington graduated from Yale College at 18 and was teaching at Harvard by age 23, according to the university website.

A life-long Democrat, he served as foreign policy adviser to Hubert Humphrey in his failed 1968 presidential campaign, and served in the White House under president Jimmy Carter in the National Security Council in 1977 and 1978.

Huntington was born in New York city on April 18, 1927 into a writer's pedigree; his father Richard was an editor and publisher, and his mother Dorothy Sanborn Phillips was a short-story author.

He received his bachelor's degree from Yale in 1946, served in the US Army, then earned a Master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1948. He obtained his doctorate in 1951 from Harvard in 1951, where the website said he had taught nearly without a break since 1950.

He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, and by two grown sons.

Huntington's books include "The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations" (1957); "Political Order in Changing Societies" (1968); "The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies" (1976); "The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century" (1991); and "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004)."

BOSTON (Reuters) – Political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose controversial book "The Clash of Civilizations" predicted conflict between the West and the Islamic world, has died at age 81, Harvard University said on Saturday.

Huntington, who taught for 58 years at Harvard before retiring in 2007, died Wednesday at a nursing facility in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, the university said on its website.

In his 1996 "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," which expanded on his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, Huntington divided the world into rival civilizations based mainly on religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism and said competition and conflict among them was inevitable.

His focus on religion rather than ideology as a source of conflict in the post-Cold War world triggered broad debate about relations between the Western and Islamic worlds, especially in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Despite criticism his thesis was simplistic or in the words of Middle East scholar Edward Said promoted the idea of "West versus the rest," Huntington told Islamica magazine in 2007, "My argument remains that cultural identities, antagonisms and affiliations will not only play a role, but play a major role in relations between states."

Huntington's 2004 book, "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity," also sparked heated debate by arguing the massive influx of Mexican immigrants to the United States threatened traditional American identity and national unity.

"People all over the world studied and debated his ideas," friend and Harvard professor emeritus Henry Rosovsky wrote on the Harvard website. "I believe that he was clearly one of the most influential political scientists of the last 50 years."

Huntington, who wrote, co-wrote or edited 17 books, served in the White House in 1977 and 1978 under President Jimmy Carter as coordinator for security planning for the National Security Council.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy, and two sons.

(Reporting by Muralikumar Anantharaman; Editing by Peter Cooney)




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