Samuel Huntington, the American political scientist famous for writing the essay “A Clash of Civilizations,” has died. He was often invoked in the wake of 9/11. Known for his analysis of the relationship between civilian government and military power, his studies of coups d’état, and his theses on the key political actors of the twenty-first century (the civilizations that tend to replace nation-states), Huntington was ideologically born into the group of Leo Strauss’s students who launched the neocon movement: Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and James Q. Wilson. In his essay “A Clash of Civilizations,” he argued that, under the pressure of modernization, politics is restructuring itself along “cultural fault lines.” He also identified the West and Islam among the great civilizations facing an impending conflict.
