Foreign Affairs: "In Memoriam: Samuel P. Huntington"

Foreign Affairs has made available the late Samuel Huntington's essays at the magazine: "In Memoriam: Samuel P. Huntington":

To commemorate the passing of Samuel P. Huntington, the preeminent political scientist of the second half of the twentieth century, Foreign Affairs has made available this selection of writings by and about him from our pages.

The compendium includes one of my favorites, which I read years ago as an undergraduate, "The U.S. - Decline or Renewal?" The article's powerfully relevant today, with all the fashionable talk of an impending American decline amid our current economic troubles.

I wrote on Huntington's death last Saturday, before Fouad Ajami's commemoration appeared at the Wall Street Journal. Ajami offers an excellent summary of Huntington's major themes, especially Huntington's most important article in the last couple of decades, "The Clash of Civilizations?"

What I found most interesting in Ajami's piece was his personal reflections on Huntington, and the latter's fading scholarly model as the traditionalist political scientist:

If I may be permitted a personal narrative: In 1993, I had written the lead critique in Foreign Affairs of his thesis. I admired his work but was unconvinced. My faith was invested in the order of states that the West itself built. The ways of the West had become the ways of the world, I argued, and the modernist consensus would hold in key Third-World countries like Egypt, India and Turkey. Fifteen years later, I was given a chance in the pages of The New York Times Book Review to acknowledge that I had erred and that Huntington had been correct all along.

A gracious letter came to me from Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, his wife of 51 years (her Armenian descent an irony lost on those who dubbed him a defender of nativism). He was in ill-health, suffering the aftermath of a small stroke. They were spending the winter at their summer house on Martha's Vineyard. She had read him my essay as he lay in bed. He was pleased with it: "He will be writing you himself shortly." Of course, he did not write, and knowing of his frail state I did not expect him to do so. He had been a source of great wisdom, an exemplar, and it had been an honor to write of him, and to know him in the regrettably small way I did.

We don't have his likes in the academy today. Political science, the field he devoted his working life to, has been in the main commandeered by a new generation. They are "rational choice" people who work with models and numbers and write arid, impenetrable jargon.

More importantly, nowadays in the academy and beyond, the patriotism that marked Samuel Huntington's life and work is derided, and the American Creed he upheld is thought to be the ideology of rubes and simpletons, the affliction of people clinging to old ways. The Davos men have perhaps won. No wonder the sorrow and the concern that ran through the work of Huntington's final years.