Day 3: Larry Diamond
Samuel P. Huntington's work was so prolific and such a
force of intellectual nature over so many decades, it is hard to pick his best
and worst insights. Naturally and instantaneously, his admirers have been drawn
to perhaps his greatest, most original work, Political Order in Changing Society -- the
one book I retain on my shelf in its original form from my freshman year, the
binding broken, the heavily underlined pages struggling to hang
together.
It was a brilliant and enduring insight to establish,
all over again after Hobbes, the primary of political order -- the most basic
question of political science. But this was not the hopelessly conservative book
it was often denounced as in the 70s. It was a study of the need (in the midst
of modernization) for political institutionalization, the need to create rules,
organizations and patterns of behavior to acquire the value, stability,
predictability and general acceptance that would make them last. This in turn
meant they had to become, in his famous four-fold typology, adaptable to new challenges and
generations, complex in evolving
multiple diversified subunits, autonomous from other social groupings or
purposes that might subordinate or capture them, and coherent in sharing a unified sense of
purpose and accepted procedures for resolving disputes. That insight and the
larger thinking about political institutions, order, and change in that book --
for example, that stability required modernization of political institutions to
keep pace with socioeconomic development, became a core building block for
generations of future work on political development. Huntington understood what
the Communist Chinese will have to wrestle in the next two decades, that
"modernity breeds stability, but modernization breeds instability," that
countries can pass through dangerous periods as their old social structures are
rattled and people are freed up for new forms of mobilization and belief.
Huntington understood -- and this was one of his greatest insights -- that
refashioning political order in the midst of social change requires filling the
gap with new, durable, and effective political institutions. "Organization," he
wrote on the final page of Political
Order, "is the road to political power, but it is also the foundation
of political stability and thus the precondition of political
liberty."
For me, however, Huntington's most enduring work will
prove to be The Third Wave: Democratization
in the Late Twentieth Century. Its generalizations are not as
sweeping because it is bound by historical time, but 35 years after the
inception of what he himself identified as a third decisive wave of democratic
change in global history, the key drivers of democratic change he elucidated --
social, economic, cultural, regional, and political -- remain the central
players in drivers of democratic change. That countries were undergoing
simultaneous processes of political, economic, and social change leading in
similar (democratic) directions; that their positive dimensions of success were
"snowballing" or gathering momentum into demonstration effects that were rolling
across borders; that there important tactical lessons of moderation and
pragmatism that could be learned and transferred to other transitions were all
immensely important insights that actually helped to advance democratic change
after this book was published in 1991. Not all of it was new, but it had never
been formulated with such elegant clarity and global comprehensiveness, nor had
any political science scholar had the temerity to offer such practical tips as
this one dealing with departing autocrats: "the least unsatisfactory course may
well be, do not punish, do not forgive, and above all do not
forget."
I think The Third
Wave was Huntington's most flawless book -- a remarkable
illumination of analytic thought, global perspective, and diverse historical
trends and explanations. In this field, it stands in marked contrast to his
essay of less than a decade before in Political Science Quarterly (Summer
1984), where, reviewing what he
(and many colleagues) had thought to be the social science conditions for
democracy, he concluded:
The substantial power of anti-democratic
governments (particularly the Soviet Union), the receptivity to democracy of
several major cultural traditions, the difficulties of eliminating poverty in
large parts of the world, and the prevalence of high levels of polarization and
violence in many societies all suggest that, with few exceptions, the limits of
democratic development in the world may well have been
reached.
That was a huge bonehead mistake, missing the third wave
momentum that was already gathering, but it did not stop a great social
scientist from regrouping, uncovering where he went wrong, and documenting the
scope and causes of the great transformation that followed.
In his later years in particular, Huntington became too
obsessed with the cultural variable, which took on a deterministic air in seeing
a grand cultural conflict brewing between East and West, and Christianity and
Islam, over differences on values, immigration, and democracy itself. The huge
mistake I think he made here was to essentialize rival cultures in ways that
made conflict inevitable. Of course, there is a prescient caution in the book,
warning Americans (like George W. Bush) "not to attempt to shape other
civilizations in the image of the West, which is beyond their declining power."
But it is simply wrong to suggest that "pluralism, individualism, and rule of
law" represent the "distinctive" value inheritance of the Christian world. The
story of the Third Wave, which proceeds in a way that leaves Huntington at odds
with himself, suggests that with creative efforts at institution building and
civic mobilization, these values can indeed become universal, and indeed I think
ultimately democracy, freedom, and the rule of law are becoming universal
values.
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at
the Stanford's Hoover Institution and the author of Squandered
Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to
Iraq (Times Books, 2005).
