Day 4: Daniel W. Drezner

A few years ago I wrote, "If a Nobel Prize in political science were ever announced, Samuel Huntington would undoubtedly be among the initial recipients." As Steve Walt has already said, Samuel Huntington was the rare political scientist who managed to earn the respect of liberals, realists, and neoconservatives.

Huntington's greatest strength was his clear-eyed rejection of the Whig theory of history. Whigs tend to believe that history is a story of never-ending progress. During the era in which Huntington wrote, a large number of political scientists believed in the modernization paradigm, in which all polities, economies, and societies would converge over time into similar technocratic, pluralistic societies.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." The bulk of Huntington's research was dedicated to the poking and prodding of that statement. Although Huntington was a lifelong Democrat, his primary insight in political science was to emphasize the central conservative truth and highlight the formidable barriers to achieving the central liberal truth.

Almost all of Huntington's major works were about the ways in which organizational and national culture would pose problems for this expectation. The Soldier and the State was about the conflict between the liberal civilian culture and the conservative military culture in the United States. Political Order in Changing Societies was about the ways in which national political cultures interact with economic modernization in surprising and counterproductive ways. In Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Huntington mocked the "Davos Man" of globalization and argued that the fundamental cleavage of post-Cold war world politics would be across civilizations. He warned that modernization was not the same thing as Westernization. The explanatory power of Huntington's theses are certainly subject to debate; in his focus, however, Huntington identified a political constraint that many scholars ignored simply because they did not like its normative implications.

Huntington's greatest weakness was also his greatest strength: his contrariness. Huntington did not practice what Thomas Kuhn labeled "normal" social science; he thrived by adopting an oppositional position to much of political science. This led to a series of "productive disagreements" and useful debate. Beyond his insight into the importance of culture on politics, however, it is difficult to identify any cumulative quality to Huntington's body of work. A political science discipline populated by a lot of Sam Huntingtons would not make much progress in explaining significant variations in ideas, interests or institutions -- but, damn, the arguments would be fun.

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He blogs at drezner.foreignpolicy.com.