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When Samuel P. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel cofounded Foreign Policy in 1970, their explicit goal was to attack entrenched orthodoxies in the Washington debate. They promised a journal that would be “serious but not scholarly, lively but not glib, and critical without being negative.”

Already a well-established scholar, Huntington published his most controversial work,  The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, several decades later.

In light of Huntington’s recent passing, FP is hosting a “virtual roundtable,” conducted over e-mail, on his life and legacy. All this week, we’ll be posting answers and reactions from leading commentators and scholars on the question: “What was Samuel P. Huntington's greatest insight about the world and/or what was his greatest analytical error?”

Day 1: Minxin Pei

Of all the great political scientists in the past half century, Sam Huntington stands out as the only one who has made fundamental contributions to each of the four subfields of political science: political theory, American politics, international relations, and comparative politics. Sam has a unique gift that might be called an "intellectual Midas touch" -- whatever he has written has become a classic. So it is nearly impossible to identify what his greatest intellectual contribution to the study of politics is. All his contributions are important and unique in their own ways.

As one of Sam's students, however, I think Sam's most profound insight is that ostensible economic and political progress generates the instability and conflict that endanger the very progress itself. Sam's most influential book is not The Clash of Civilizations," but Political Order in Changing Societies (1968). Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the early 1960s that modernization would bring about, simultaneously, economic progress and political development, Sam sees just the opposite. He observes that modernity is stabilizing, but modernization -- the process of achieving modernity -- breeds instability. So, instead of political development, modernization generates political decay, marked by rising political violence and chaos in developing countries.

Contrarianism also marks Sam's understanding of the causes of international conflict after the Cold War. Keenly aware of the complexities of cultures, Sam is not persuaded by the ideological triumphalism that accompanied the West's victory in the Cold War. He sees, instead of emerging ideological homogeneity, new ideological divides based on historically embedded religious and cultural differences and historical memories. In other words, the end of the Cold War will not cement the ideological hegemony of Western liberalism or lead to an era of "democratic peace." Ironically, the looming dominance of Western liberalism would motivate non-Western societies to mobilize their own cultural resources and create countervailing ideologies. As in Sam's Political Order, The Clash of Civilizations is centered on the same insight that progress can, ironically if not perversely, generate the very conflict which progress is intended to eliminate.

Sam's understanding of how politics, whether domestic and international, creates conflict has led to his long quest for order. As a realist, Sam understands conflict is a given, but can be managed and channeled into peaceful expressions with the right political institutions. His emphasis on political order and its relationship with well-organized governments and capable leadership in Political Order has left the impression that Sam is advocating authoritarian rule for developing countries.  Unfortunately, such a reading misrepresents Sam's view. Nowhere in Political Order does Sam explicitly claim that autocracy is more capable of providing order than democracy. What he does argue is that weak democracies in developing countries are doomed to fail. Truth hurts, but Sam is not afraid of saying it.

Although Sam did not answer the question of which types of government are better guardians of order in 1968, he has a more explicit answer almost a quarter century later. In The Third Wave (1992), an analysis of the transition to democratic rule from the early 1970s to the end of the Cold War, Sam shows that, for all their faults and infirmities, democratic political institutions have become preferred custodians of political order in the developing world.

Minxin Pei is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

• Read on for Day 2: Stephen M. Walt
  

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.

• Read on for Day 3: Larry Diamond
  

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).

• Read on for Day 4: Daniel W. Drezner
  

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.