Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
There is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Samuel Huntington. He is perhaps the most brilliant, articulate, versatile, and creative living political scientist. He has written the most authoritative work on the consequences of social change on political order. Besides his own analyses, he has often usefully denounced the simplifications and contradictions of the theorists of "endism" and "declinism"; or, in earlier times, of the "state-centered" and "transnational" schools in the debate over multinational corporations; or of the theorists of modernization and political development who were compelled to take refuge from their own miasma of confusion in the innocuous term "change."
Yet Huntington's taste for generalization, his gift for striking formulations, his knack for provocation and, one must say, his lack of political common sense and responsibility, lead him time and again to commit the very sins of excessive simplification that he has so well castigated in others. He has by such excesses generated serious intellectual misunderstandings and, ultimately, moral and political misdirections.
