A Political Animal

New York Times

December 27, 2008, 2:25 pm
Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard Dies at 81
By Sarah Wheaton
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.

著名美國政治學家杭亭頓去世
中央社
Published: 2008-12-28 05:37 AM

（中央社紐約27日法新電）哈佛大學網站今天宣布，美國極有影響力的政治學家、「文明的衝突與世界秩序的重建」（The Clash of Civilization and theRemaking of World Order）一書的作者、哈佛大學教授杭亭頓（Samuel Huntington）已於24日去世，享年81歲。

杭亭頓在哈佛大學任教58年後，2007年退休。哈佛大學說，杭亭頓是在本月24日在麻薩諸塞州瑪莎葡萄園（Martha's Vineyard)小島去世。它沒有說明杭亭頓去世的原因。


杭亭頓曾與人共同合寫或編過17本書，大部份是有關美國政府、民主化、軍事政治、軍民關係和政治發展等。


杭亭頓最著名的是他相信，冷戰後的世界暴力衝突將來自於文化和宗教的歧異，而不是國家間的意識型態差異。


1996杭亭頓所出版的書「文明的衝突與世界秩序的重建」充份解釋了他的這項看法。這本書曾被翻譯成39種語言。971228