Day 2: Stephen M. Walt
Samuel P. Huntington was a major figure in modern political
science because he always asked big questions, and because he made
controversial arguments that forced his readers to think. His relentless
curiosity, commitment to tackling important real-world issues, and intellectual
fearlessness were both inspiring and daunting. That rare combination of traits
may explain why he is the only foreign-policy intellectual whose fan club includes
realists, liberals, and neoconservatives.
Like Minxin Pei, I believe Political Order in Changing Societies is
Huntington’s greatest work. It proceeds from what I take to be his core
insight—that stable political orders are rare and stable liberal orders
rarer still. From the very beginning, Huntington’s work emphasized the
importance of effective political institutions and the cultural foundations
that underpinned them. He was a conservative because he never took order for
granted; he knew that it does not take much misconduct to shatter the delicate
bonds that keep a society from imploding. And though one can take issue with
some of its subsidiary arguments, the central claim of Political Order—that
modernization is a disruptive process and that developing countries will find
it difficult to make progress in the absence of effective institutions—has
stood the test of time.
If Political Order is his greatest achievement, The Soldier and the
State exerted the most influence. Together with Morris Janowitz’s The
Professional Soldier, Sam’s first book cast a long and lasting shadow over
the entire subject of civil-military relations. Equally important, Huntington’s
ideas helped convince Americans that a large peacetime military establishment
was not a threat to democracy, a conclusion at odds with much of America’s
liberal tradition. I think Huntington’s conception of military professionalism
understates the indirect impact of what came to be called the
“military-industrial complex,” but his vigorous defense of military virtues
continues to resonate in large segments of the body politic.
Huntington’s most famous work, of course, is The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order. Having reviewed it for this magazine in
1997, I won’t rehearse all of my objections to it here. It’s a bold and
interesting work, to be sure, but Huntington never convinced me that
“civilizational” loyalties were supplanting national (or sub-national)
identities. More importantly, the evidence in the book showed that clashes within
civilizations were becoming more numerous and intense than clashes between
them. But like all of Sam’s books, Clash was hard to put down and
harder to ignore.
If pressed to identify a weak spot in his oeuvre, I cast my vote for American
Politics: the Promise of Disharmony. Although it displayed his typically
vigorous prose and flair for adroit conceptualizing, attributing the unruly
political history of the United States to an unbridgeable gap between American
ideals and our institutions was too mono-causal for my tastes. But the
shortcomings of one book are easy to excuse (after all, he wrote or edited
17 of them), and he is the only political scientist I can think of who
left substantial footprints in at least three different subfields (comparative
politics, international relations, and American politics).
Last but not least, Huntington was simply a great man. Not just because of his
remarkable career as scholar, teacher, mentor, magazine-founder, academic
administrator, foreign-policy practitioner, and public intellectual, but
because he had a rare capacity to engage with ideas he didn’t share and to
respect those who disagreed with him. I took issue with him on several
occasions—and didn’t pull any punches when I did—his reaction was to answer my
criticisms fairly and forcefully and then help recruit me to Harvard. Needless
to say, this is not typical behavior in the thin-skinned world of academe. John
Mearsheimer and I dedicated a book to him not because he agreed with our thesis
(though some of his own writings contain similar warnings about the distorting
influence that ethnic groups could have on U.S. foreign policy), but because
his willingness to say what he thought even when it might be impolitic was an
inspiration for anyone who tries to grapple with the complex political
challenges of our era. I will miss him, and so will his admirers (and critics) around the world.
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard University and a member of the editorial board of Foreign Policy. He blogs at walt.foreignpolicy.com.
