Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity.

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) was a highly influential American political scientist, adviser, and academic whose work fundamentally shaped modern understandings of political order, civil–military relations, and global conflict. Over a career spanning more than fifty years at Harvard University, where he served as director of the Center for International Affairs and held the title of Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor, Huntington produced a series of groundbreaking and often controversial works. His early book, The Soldier and the State (1957), redefined the study of civil–military relations in democratic societies, while Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) challenged prevailing modernization theories by arguing that rapid social and economic change could generate instability rather than democracy in developing nations. Later, his Clash of Civilizations theory (1993) proposed that post–Cold War conflicts would be driven not by ideology or economics but by deep cultural and religious divisions, particularly between Western and Islamic civilizations. Beyond academia, Huntington served as White House Coordinator of Security Planning during the Carter administration and co-founded the journal Foreign Policy.