I was saddened to see the brief obit by Tamar Lewin on Sam Huntington in this morning’s New York Times. The photo that accompanied the piece was taken some years ago, which was probably just as well, because Sam had been quite unwell in recent years. The likeness reminded me both of the young Sam Huntington I knew as a student at Harvard in the 1950s, and of his widow, Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, then a Radcliffe undergraduate and a close friend of mine.
One of the great virtues of Harvard for undergraduates in the years shortly after World War II was the presence of an extraordinarily talented group of resident graduate students and junior faculty who had served in the war and thus were delayed in both completing their graduate work and starting families. There was a particularly strong group of such men in the Government Department at Harvard —Judith Shklar and Susanne Rudolph were among the few women in the cohort — and Sam Huntington was one of the brightest and most attractive of them, graduating from Yale at 18 and beginning his teaching career at Harvard at the age of 23. Sam was (or at least so I thought) the descendant of the Connecticut signer of the Declaration of Independence of the same name, and he had the same moderate radicalism as his eponym — Huntington the elder was a member of the revolutionary Sons of Liberty, but also, subsequently, a middle of the road judge and statesman.
Sam’s Ph.D. dissertation was published in 1957 as The Soldier and the State, a classical study of civil-military relations, deeply respectful of the separate but entwined relationship of the military and the government in America. Alas for Sam, the final chapter appeared to idealize the serenity and orderliness of the United States Military Academy, proposing West Point as a paradigm for the relationship between the military and government. According to the legend of the time (I was only a graduate student then), one of the senior members of the government faculty, a German by birth and upbringing, opposed Sam’s promotion to tenure on the grounds that he underestimated the potential danger of militarism. The result, in any case, was that Sam was denied tenure at Harvard. He moved to Columbia to begin his prolific teaching and scholarly career, but was soon brought back in triumph to Harvard, where he taught brilliantly for decades.
But the misunderstanding engendered by Sam’s first book turned out to be characteristic of his scholarship, as he took strong positions on questions of international relations, foreign policy, and national identity that frequently seemed contradictory. Although, as Lewin’s obit points out, Sam was a lifelong member of the Democratic Party and a classical liberal in domestic policy, he was also sometimes thought to be hawkish and even reactionary on foreign-policy questions. Some of this, or so it seemed to me 50 years ago, was that Sam was inherently a contrarian who loved taking and defending unpopular positions. Some of it, I suppose, derived from Sam’s characteristic determination to work things out for himself. In 1986 (apparently because he was thought insufficiently adept at quantification), the National Academy of Sciences pointedly refused to elect him to membership. This was no doubt intended as an attack on qualitative social science, but once again Sam found himself inadvertently in the cross hairs.
So, while his 1968 book on Political Order in Changing Societies still seems to me the baseline account of why political institutionalization matters in democratization, his 1996 volume on The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order seems to me perverse at best and misguided at worst — and the same might be said for his last book, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity. These latter volumes seem the epitome of Anglo-New England exclusiveness, but they also seem utterly uncharacteristic of the open, attractive, liberal scholar I earlier admired.
Sam Huntington was one of our most published, most quoted, and most controversial political scientists. But on the personal level, at least in the years I knew him well, Sam was never less than quietly charming, gentle, and thoughtful. Few of us will have made such a profound impact on public attitudes toward our academic fields in our lifetimes. I am pretty sure that must have pleased Sam. I liked him, he made me think, and I am very sorry to see him go.
