亨廷顿18岁毕业于耶鲁大学，1949年即23岁时开始在哈佛大学执教，直到2007年退休。他的研究和教学领域包括美国政府、军事政治、战略、军民关系、比较政治和政治发展。
美国当代著名的政治思想家、国际政治理论家。早年就读于耶鲁大学、芝加哥大学和哈佛大学， 1951 年在哈佛大学获博士学位后留校任教，并先后在美国政府许多部门担任过公职或充当顾问。现任哈佛大学阿尔伯特·魏斯赫德三世学院教授，哈佛国际和地区问题研究所所长，约翰·奥林战略研究所主任。曾任卡特政府国家安全计划顾问，《外交政策》杂志发言人与主编之一，美国政治学会会长。
亨廷顿在国际政治方面著述颇丰，一般被认为是持保守观点的现实主义政治理论家。《变化社会中的政治秩序》是其理论的奠基之作，该书从第三世界各国存在的实际情况出发，提出了第三世界国家走向现代化的“强政府理论”，其要义是，第三世界国家在进行现代化变革的过程中，要根除国内政治的动荡和衰朽，就必须建立起强大的政府，舍此无他路可走。所谓强大政府也就是有能力制衡政府参与和政府制度化的政府。亨廷顿在这本书中卓越的理论贡献使得该书成为研究现代化理论的经典之作。
1991 年，亨廷顿出版了《第三波： 20 世纪末民主化浪潮》，探讨了在他看来是 20 世纪后期的一项重要的也可能是最重要的全球性的政治发展的状况，即发生在 1974 —— 1990 年期间的全球民主化浪潮。亨廷顿指出，从 1974 年葡萄牙走上民主化的道路开始，大约 30 个国家由非民主政治体制过渡到民主政治体制，相继走上了民主道路。民主制度在如此短的时间内急速成长，成为人类历史上最壮观也是最重要的政治变迁。他认为，在第三波之后 20 年的今天，民主化的条件远比以前有利得多，西方自由民族国家的各国政府在促进全球民主化方面都可以有更大的作为。共产国际已经寿终正寝，现在该是建立民主国际的时候了。
1996 年，亨廷顿出版了《文明冲突和世界秩序重建》一书，系统地提出了他的“文明冲突论”。认为冷战后，世界格局的决定因素表现为七大或八大文明，即中华文明、日本文明、印度文明、伊斯兰文明、西方文明、东正教文明、拉美文明，还有可能存在的非洲文明。冷战后的世界，冲突的基本根源不再是意识形态，而文化方面的差异，主宰全球的将是“文明的冲突”。除上述著作外，亨廷顿的主要著作还有《难以抉择》、《文明冲突与世界秩序的重建》、《美国政治》、《现代社会中的权威政治》、《民主的危机》等。
他参与编写过17本图书，撰写超过90篇学术论文，其中1996年问世的《文明的冲突与世界秩序的重建》一书被翻译成39种文字，在全世界引起强烈反响。此外，《变革社会中的政治秩序》、《第三波——20世纪后期民主化浪潮》、《我们是谁：美国国家特性面临的挑战》等专著均有较大影响。
哈佛大学荣誉退休教授亨利·罗索夫斯基说：“萨姆（·亨廷顿）是那种令哈佛大学成为一所伟大学校的学者。全世界的人都在研究、争论他的观点。我认为他显然是过去50年里最有影响力的政治科学家之一。”
Samuel P. Huntington, an influential political scientist and longtime Harvard University professor, died at the age of 81 on Wednesday, according to an obituary on Harvard’s Web site. Mr. Huntington’s most famous thesis – that world conflicts stem from the competing cultural identities of seven or eight “civilizations” – became a fundamental, if controversial, premise of post-Cold War foreign policy theory. His emphasis on ancient religious empires, as opposed to states or ethnicities, gained even more cachet after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Michael Ignatieff summarized the thrust of Mr. Huntington’s 1996 book in a Times book review:
In expanding the Foreign Affairs article into ”The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” Mr. Huntington has thickened out his argument, but it remains controversial. If there are seven or eight world civilizations, he says, the West had better shed the hubristic notion that its civilization is destined to spread its values across the globe. The West is ”unique” — but its values are not universal. Universalism, Mr. Huntington maintains, is just a leftover from imperialism. Western aid workers have no business telling the Afghan Taliban to allow their women to go to school. Washington has no business tying human rights conditions to its trade with China. It is a significant change of heart for a former architect of American policy in Vietnam to assert that ”Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world.”
But critics, including Edward W. Said, a Columbia University professor who wrote “Orientalism,” said Mr. Huntington’s theory perpetuates a “West against the rest” mentality.
Mr. Huntington’s most recent book, “Who Are We? The Challenges of American National Identity,” was published in 2004 and tackled immigration. That volume also attracted criticisms of his assertion that low levels of assimilation by Hispanic immigrants could cleave the country in two.
Born Samuel Phillips Huntington in New York City on April 18, 1927, he was an adviser to Hubert H. Humphrey and Jimmy Carter. He stepped down from active teaching at Harvard in 2007, and he died on Dec. 24 in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
Samuel Huntington, 81, political scientist, scholar
'One of the most influential political scientists of the last 50 years'
By Corydon Ireland
Harvard News Office
Samuel P. Huntington - a longtime Harvard University professor, an influential political scientist, and mentor to a generation of scholars in widely divergent fields - died Dec. 24 on Martha's Vineyard. He was 81.
Huntington had retired from active teaching in 2007, following 58 years of scholarly service at Harvard. In a retirement letter to the President of Harvard, he wrote, in part, "It is difficult for me to imagine a more rewarding or enjoyable career than teaching here, particularly teaching undergraduates. I have valued every one of the years since 1949."
Huntington, the father of two grown sons, lived in Boston and on Martha's Vineyard. He was the author, co-author, or editor of 17 books and over 90 scholarly articles. His principal areas of research and teaching were American government, democratization, military politics, strategy, and civil-military relations, comparative politics, and political development.
"Sam was the kind of scholar that made Harvard a great university," said Huntington's friend of nearly six decades, economist Henry Rosovsky, who is Harvard's Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Emeritus. "People all over the world studied and debated his ideas. I believe that he was clearly one of the most influential political scientists of the last 50 years."
"Every one of his books had an impact," said Rosovsky. "These have all become part of our vocabulary."
Jorge Dominguez, Harvard's vice provost for International Affairs, described Huntington as "one of the giants of political science worldwide during the past half century. He had a knack for asking the crucially important but often inconvenient question. He had the talent and skill to formulate analyses that stood the test of time."
Huntington's friend and colleague Robert Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, called him "one of the giants of American intellectual life of the last half century."
To Harvard College Professor Stephen P. Rosen, Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs, "Samuel Huntington's brilliance was recognized by the academics and statesmen around the world who read his books. But he was loved by those who knew him well because he combined a fierce loyalty to his principles and friends with a happy eagerness to be confronted with sharp opposition to his own views."
Huntington, who graduated from Yale College at age 18 and who was teaching at Harvard by age 23, was best known for his views on the clash of civilizations. He argued that in a post-Cold War world, violent conflict would come not from ideological friction between nation states, but from cultural and religious differences among the world's major civilizations.
Huntington, who was the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, identified these major civilizations as Western (including the United States and Europe), Latin American, Islamic, African, Orthodox (with Russia as a core state), Hindu, Japanese, and "Sinic" (including China, Korea, and Vietnam).
"My argument remains," he said in a 2007 interview with Islamica Magazine, "that cultural identities, antagonisms and affiliations will not only play a role, but play a major role in relations between states."
Huntington first advanced his argument in an oft-cited 1993 article in the journal Foreign Affairs. He expanded the thesis into a book, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," which appeared in 1996, and has since been translated into 39 languages.
To the end of his life, the potential for conflict inherent in culture was prominent in Huntington's scholarly pursuits. In 2000, he was co-editor of "Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress." And just before his health declined, in the fall of 2005, he was beginning to explore religion and national identity.
"His contributions ranged across the whole field of political science, from the deeply theoretical to the intensely applied," said Putnam, author of a lengthy appreciation of Huntington in a 1986 issue of the journal PS: Political Science and Politics. "Over the years, he mentored a large share of America's leading strategic thinkers, and he built enduring institutions of intellectual excellence."
And Putnam added a personal note. "What was most rare about Sam, however, was his ability to combine intensely held, vigorously argued views with an engaging openness to contrary evidence and argument. Harvard has lost a towering figure, and his colleagues have lost a very good friend."
Timothy Colton, the Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies at Harvard, remarked on his old friend's breadth of intellectual interests. He used the American political experience as a pivot point (Huntington's doctoral dissertation was on the Interstate Commerce Commission), but soon deeply studied a globe-spanning range of topics.
"He was anchored in American life and his American identity, but he ended up addressing so many broad questions," said Colton, who had Huntington as a Ph.D. adviser at Harvard in the early 1970s. "His degree of openness to new topics and following questions where they take him is not as often found today as when he was making his way."
Huntington's first book, "The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations," published to great controversy in 1957 and now in its 15th printing, is today still considered a standard title on the topic of how military affairs intersect with the political realm. It was the subject of a West Point symposium last year, on the 50th anniversary of its publication.
In part, "Soldier and the State" was inspired by President Harry Truman's firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur - and at the same time praised corps of officers that in history remained stable, professional, and politically neutral.
In 1964, he co-authored, with Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Political Power: USA-USSR," which was a major study of Cold War dynamics - and how the world could be shaped by two political philosophies locked in opposition to one another.
Brzezinski, a doctoral student at Harvard in the early 1950s who was befriended by both Huntington and Rosovsky, was U.S. National Security Adviser in the Carter White House from 1977 to 1981. In those days, said Rosovsky, the youthful Huntington, though an assistant professor, was often mistaken for an undergraduate.
According to his wife Nancy, Huntington was a life-long Democrat, and served as foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert Humphrey in his 1968 presidential campaign. In the wake of that "bitter" campaign, she said, Huntington and Warren Manshel - "political opponents in the campaign but close friends" - co-founded the quarterly journal Foreign Policy (now a bimonthly magazine). He was co-editor until 1977.
His 1969 book, "Political Order in Changing Societies," is widely regarded as a landmark analysis of political and economic development in the Third World. It was among Huntington's most influential books, and a frequently assigned text for graduate students investigating comparative politics, said Dominguez, who is also Antonio Madero Professor of Mexican and Latin American Politics and Economics. The book "challenged the orthodoxies of the 1960s in the field of development," he said. "Huntington showed that the lack of political order and authority were among the most serious debilities the world over. The degree of order, rather than the form of the political regime, mattered most."
His 1991 book, "The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century" - another highly influential work - won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and "looked at similar questions from a different perspective, namely, that the form of the political regime - democracy or dictatorship - did matter," said Dominguez. "The metaphor in his title referred to the cascade of dictator-toppling democracy-creating episodes that peopled the world from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, and he gave persuasive reasons for this turn of events well before the fall of the Berlin Wall."
As early as the 1970s, Huntington warned against the risk of new governments becoming politically liberalized too rapidly. He proposed instead that governments prolong a transition to full democracy - a strand of ideas that began with an influential 1973 paper, "Approaches to Political Decompression."
Huntington's most recent book was "Who Are We? The Challenges of America's National Identity" (2004), a scholarly reflection on America's cultural sense of itself.
Samuel Phillips Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City. He was the son of Richard Thomas Huntington, an editor and publisher, and Dorothy Sanborn Phillips, a writer.
Huntington graduated from Stuyvesant High School, received his B.A. from Yale in 1946, served in the U.S. Army, earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1948, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1951, where he had taught nearly without a break since 1950.
From 1959 to 1962, he was associate director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. At Harvard, he served two tenures as the chair of the Government Department - from 1967 to 1969 and from 1970 to 1971.
Huntington served as president of the American Political Science Association from 1986 to 1987.
Huntington was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs from 1978 to 1989. He founded the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, and was director there from 1989 to 1999. He was chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 1996 to 2004, and was succeeded by Jorge Dominguez.
Huntington applied his theoretical skills to the Washington, D.C., arena too. In 1977 and 1978, he served in the Carter White House as coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council. In the 1980s, he was a member of the Presidential Commission on Long-Term Integrated Strategy.
Huntington is survived by his wife of 51 years, Nancy Arkelyan Huntington; by his sons Nicholas Phillips Huntington of Newton, Mass. and Timothy Mayo Huntington of Boston; by his daughters-in-law Kelly Brown Huntington and Noelle Lally Huntington; and by his four grandchildren.
There will be a private family burial service on Martha's Vineyard, where Huntington summered for 40 years.
In the spring, there will be a memorial service at Harvard. Details are pending.