Huntington, Samuel Phillips

▪ 2009

      American political scientist

born April 18, 1927, New York, N.Y.

died Dec. 24, 2008, Martha's Vineyard, Mass.

was an important political commentator in national debates on U.S. foreign policy in the late 20th and early 21st century and the author of a number of influential books on subjects that included national security strategy, defense policy making, American political ideology, transnational organizations, conservatism, the governability of democracies, processes of democratization, and the comparison of U.S. and Soviet governments. Two of his most important works were Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) and the controversial The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), in which he cautioned against intervention in non-Western cultures. After earning a Ph.D. (1951) from Harvard University, Huntington joined its faculty. He became associate director (1959) of the Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, New York City, but he returned (1962) to Harvard, where he served as chairman of the department of government (1967–69; 1970–71) as well as director of the Center for International Affairs (1978–89) and of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies (1989–2000). From 1996 to 2004 he presided as chair of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Huntington founded the journal Foreign Policy in 1970. He was an adviser to Vice Pres. Hubert Humphrey during Humphrey's unsuccessful 1968 presidential campaign, chairman of the Democratic Party's Foreign Policy Advisory Committee in the mid-1970s, and coordinator of security planning in the National Security Council (1977–79) during the administration of Pres. Jimmy Carter.

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