Comments on: Samuel Huntington, 1927-2008

By: Samuel P. Huntington, 1927-2008 « Big in Japan

Samuel P. Huntington, 1927-2008 « Big in Japan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:27:35 +0000

[...] & Letter Daily website – one I try to read almost every day – and found a link to a Samuel Huntington obituary written by Francis Fukuyama. “Huntington is dead,” I mumbled for a moment, amazed, and [...]

By: rob strauss

rob strauss — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 01:20:22 +0000

sam huntington will be seriously missed in academia, who need more people like him – bold and clear thinkers who opened up new avenues of research. most of academia today tests other peoples arguments and/o puts stale arguments forward that can immediately be framed around formal models and tested with fancy statistical models. huntington’s arguments made political science an interesting and policy relevant (real world relevant) area of research. political science needed him and we need others like him; people who come up with bold ideas and then for others to test the arguments so that an accumulation of important knowledge can occur. today, we have some accumulation, but over less real-world or practical knowledge.

By: Mahir Zeynalov

Mahir Zeynalov — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:41:04 +0000

Samuel Huntington’s academic work is not that huge yet whatever he said became the top discussion agenda among political scientists and even people beyond this line. He had few yet very sounding books with very general and strong claims.

I like his persuaviness, very clear and coherent language, amazing presentation of facts to support his thesis and of course, argumentation.

By: Francois Bredenkamp

Francois Bredenkamp — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:19:48 +0000

The regrettable death of a highly respected political scientist. He played an immense role in the minds of political and social planners for South Africa’s peaceful transition to full democracy. Since then, the (new) SA govt has flagrantly disregarded his rich insights – at our society’s peril.

By: aaron mueller

aaron mueller — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:08:34 +0000

I believe FF also owes an intellectual debt to Leo Strauss. I should like very much to read a reconciliation (if he thinks them in opposition), or a harmonization, of their fundamental positions, and his own take on whether or not LS is relevant.

By: John Nazelrod

John Nazelrod — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:56:57 +0000

A great mentor was lost. But we should be grateful for the likes of Frank Fukuyama to keep the colloquy alive.

By: safe bet

safe bet — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:39:49 +0000

Tis is not to belittle Huntington in any way, bet Fukuyama’s credibility for picking safe bets is certainly less than stellar:

“If socialism signifies a political and economic system in which the government controls a large part of the economy and redistributes wealth to produce social equality, then I think it is safe to say the likelihood of its making a comeback any time in the next generation is close to zero.”

Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, in Time magazine in 2000.

By: Totar Singh

Totar Singh — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:07:03 +0000

And we write, and write, and write, and write…………………………….

And nothing changes it goes on, and on, and on, and on……………………………

Only blood brings forth major changes.

Politican who is suppose to be our servants end up with the largest pension ever. They have at their disposal 40,000.0000 employees at federal, state, and city.

We pay their wages. They end up with an average of 60,000.00 a year in pension and other benefits to carry out the orders from our servants to keep us in our place.

Greece died. Rome died. Europe is dying. America is infected. No cure in sight. It is dying time.

Totar Singh

By: Harold Kildow

Harold Kildow — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:52:09 +0000

Fascinating, the tension between culture and politics as the definitive baseline for development. Dr Fukuyama, you and Dr Huntington both have your hands on significant parts of the elephant, none of which can be discarded or left out of account. It has often seemed to me that the prematire forcing of modernity on tribal and even primitive cultures was not only a mistake, but a move that guaranteed the inability of these people to ever join the modern world. Freedom is the answer, so that each developing nation comes to the modern world in its own way, at its own pace, for its own reasons. But the onrush of scientific, technological, and economic progress is a harsh environment for backward nations to try to join in, perhaps more cruel and difficult than other, past eras in world history.

Unfortunately, freedom is not the default position for humanity, and it almost seems it is not a native plant in many places in the world. It must be cultivated assiduously even in the most fertile soil, and has little chance in the stoniest. We are then faced with the prospect that, though liberalism is the high water mark for political development, much of the world will not accomplish its establishment any time soon due to the miriad of countervailing and opposing conditions that seem so easliy to snuff out the improvements made possible by the arts and sciences.

I believe Huntington was correct in positing culture as the soil in which decent political development grows. Whether non- Western and premodern cultures are malleable enough to accept the preconditions of orderly development in the current milieu, and whether the West is judicious enough in ordering the sequence of develpment, are questions we must wait for time to answer.

By: Michael Cull

Michael Cull — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:56:11 +0000

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, so I will only speak ill of The Clash of Civilizations, a truly awful book that has had a pernicious influence on American political discourse of the past decade. The book illustrates how a failure to understand the history and philosophical significance of key concepts–civilization, culture–can lead an author of undisputed brilliance into patent falsehoods and fallacies. To anyone familiar with the development of the concept of civilization in the 18th and 19th centuries, Huntington’s main thesis–that civilizational identities are (or soon will be) the cause of war and conflict between peoples and nations—makes about as much as the Orwellian slogan from 1984 that Peace is War, and vice versa. Put simply but I think not inaccurately it is equivalent to saying that as people become more civil or civilized they become in fact more warlike. Plato and Rousseau might have thought something along those lines, but the inventors of the concept of civilization were of a decidedly different opinion. For that is what civilization meant to several generations of thinkers (Condorcet, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Kant, Benjamin Constant, August Compte, John Stuart Mill etc.) who thought that the goal of civilizaton was universal peace. Through enlightenment, science, the rule of law, refinement of manners, democracy (to name the main components of the concept) human beings were thought to be progressing away from a state of barbarism and war towards a state of civility and peace.

The proton pseudos of Huntington’s argument was the identification of civilizations with the major world religions. From there everything else followed inevitably to the bellum omnium contra omnes.