Talk:Samuel P. Huntington

What subject(s)? In what subject or department were his BA; MA; and PhD conferred?--68.97.35.145 (talk) 22:41, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

recent edits

• I included the part about Political Order and the Brazil story, both of which I think are highly relevant.
• I added some links, including to the two famous and controversial articles
• I took out the references section, as it was an exact duplicate of the selected works section. It would be desirable to have some critical literature, or literature about Huntington in the references section. Maybe Serge Lang's Challenges could be a starter?bastel 05:51, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

I don't know... I looked through that Hooper article and it seemed to contain a lot of speculation to me. Tfine80 06:02, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Of course it's partly speculative - it's the fate of the counterfactual. I used it as a source mainly for Huntington's role in the transition, which is well established. As a link Hooper is interesting as he is a fairly typical voice of liberal/progressive criticism that is uncomfortable with H's insistance on stability at the cost of other democratic values. If you find a better article than Hooper's with a similar thrust I won't object to replacing it. bastel 06:19, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

add the references back, it makes the article look unsourced. Take out the external links, if you must. --Lophoole 16:34, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Unverified things I would like to verify and then include

• According to a former Harvard grad student, Huntington received death threats in the late 1960s and had grad students assigned to him as body guards. (Two of them are now tenured professors at the Government department of Harvard). ANswer: I can attest to the fact that this rumor is utter nonsense. Huntington did not receive death threats, and no students were assigned to him as bodyguards. What institution would assign students as bodyguards anyway, ather than hiring professional bodyguards if the danger was so great??
• I wrote that POCS is required for most grads in the U.S. - I assume that is true for many other countries, but I don't know.

bastel 05:51, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Biographic Info

I would like to see information on where Huntington was born (in what country) and other bibliographical facts. dpol 06:22, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC) I looked around - it's kind of hard to get any biographic info that's pre-grad school. Any ideas? bastel 17:38, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Answer: Huntington was born in New York City in 1927, attended NYC public schools, Stuyvesant High School, Yale University (BA), University of Chicago(MA), and Harvard (PhD).

Huntington was not born in Minneapolis and we don't want to be responsible for him, please change

False Distinction: Superior Violence vs. Ideas/Values

I first admit I'm not yet well read on Huntington's work but rather am reacting to the quote:

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

This point pre-supposes that the superior values and ideas vs superior military power are independent variables as we consider civilizations.

Some may assert that the superior ability of western civilization to apply organized violence stems directly from the productivity and technological creativity, and that these in turn manifest from its ideas and values.

Huntington rather seems to want to ignore this important point, and treat qualities of a culture as objective properties rather than interacting dynamic variables.

As a pragmatic matter, superior military power derives from superior technology and superior economic productivity. In comparing cultures then one cannot treat military proficiency as independent of economic, ideological and political values. --JBaugh 16:35, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Huntington has made a major turn towards culture recently, but when he wrote Political Order he probably didn't believe in culturalist explanations.

As for your second point - I think that Huntington understands organized violence more broadly then military proficency. It is about the entire concept of the Weberian state as the holder of the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence/force, which enabled Western states to become outward looking in the first place (according to H's logic that is). bastel 05:51, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

You could have a superior culture that deliberately avoids the application of organized violence. Mcgm 20:00, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Reference re-added

A reference was removed without explanation. It has been re-added, as it was used to add content to the article on August 26th. Per Wikipedia policy, a reference must be provided when information is "gleaned from an external souce." As that is the case here, to remove the reference would put the article in copyright violation. Uriah923 17:16, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

The reference was removed again without explanation. Re-added again. Uriah923 19:50, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

Value of ON content and quality of reference

The content added from the ON reference remains in this article, but the reference has been removed. This action is disputed and a conversation is ongoing here. Uriah923 06:17, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

I don't want to play a part in the larger ON dispute, but for this page, I'd suggest to leave it at the status quo: The idea of references is to enable readers and other authors to verify information. The information taken from ON is a summary of the book Clash of Civilization. It can be verified with the book itself and can thus be left included without further reference (there might be a copyright issue, as it is almost verbatim and not marked as a quote, I don't know about that kind of stuff). The ON article, as it a) only contains one small section on Huntington and b) is, regardless of its quality, not from a major publications, should thus not be included, neither as reference, nor as source, further reading or anything else. Generally, of course, it would be preferable to take such information from the book instead of secondary sources, but I am aware that that's a lot of work and not always feasible. Thanks for your work on the article. bastel 22:55, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

Quote

""The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."
Hello. May I have the origins of this quote. lb:User:Cornischong Thank you. --Cornischong 14:04, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

it's from Clash of Civilization, p. 51. bastel 05:13, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Better Describes?

The end of the first paragraph of the 'Clash of Civilizations' sections contains un-attributed opinion on Huntington's method:

"This cultural organization better describes the world than the classical notion of variegated sovereign states."

Could someone familiar with the text somehow caveat this statement?

• It seems clear to me that the article is attributing that view to Huntington...nevertheless I will clarify. Christopher Parham (talk) 18:15, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Medici link

The link on the page is not to the Mèdici rulers of Brazil, but to the Medici family of florence. That could confuse some.128.138.169.90 19:25, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I changed it to Emílio Garrastazu Médici, who I assume the article is referring to. MorrisGregorian 03:46, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Irrelevant information

and is still required reading for most graduate students in political science in the U.S. - well, this may be required for most graduate students in political science anywhere in the world; I cannot understand why this must necessarilly be related to American students... Tonyjeff 03:22, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

He is an anti-Chinese guy!

Samuel P. Huntington is absolutely an anti-Chinese right-wing White American Chauvinist!YOU ARE WRONG! I was a grad student and visiting fellow under Huntington for several years. It is incorrect to label him as "anti-Chinese" or as a "American Chauvinist." Other than his own works, Lucian Pye's works best represent many of his views on Asia, and the only thing that he against in China is the Monolithic Communist Party that does so much violence to the human rights of those poor people who sadly must live under the bloody hammer of the PRC.

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BetacommandBot 23:12, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Coinage: The Clash of Civilization

Before I interfere directly in the article, I better put my "revelations" here. Maybe one of the article's main authors will take care of it?

The Israeli clinical psychologist [Avner Falk] mentions in his book Fratricide in the Holy Land. A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004 that the term "Clash of Civilization" was initially a coinage by the historian Bernard Lewis.

Falk:Bernard Lewis (1990) in seeking "The Roots of Muslim Rage" towards the West, coined the phrase "clash of civilizations".

Lewis, Bernard . (1990, September). The Roots of Muslim Rage. The Atlantic Monthly, 266 (3), 47-60. quote below from page 4 of the online edition

A Clash of Civilizations

The origins of secularism in the west may be found in two circumstances—in early Christian teachings and, still more, experience, which created two institutions, Church and State; and in later Christian conflicts, which drove the two apart. Muslims, too, had their religious disagreements, but there was nothing remotely approaching the ferocity of the Christian struggles between Protestants and Catholics, which devastated Christian Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finally drove Christians in desperation to evolve a doctrine of the separation of religion from the state. Only by depriving religious institutions of coercive power, it seemed, could Christendom restrain the murderous intolerance and persecution that Christians had visited on followers of other religions and, most of all, on those who professed other forms of their own.

Huntington, Samuel P. (1993)The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72 (3), 22-28)

LeaNder (talk) 12:02, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Header

The main problem with the first paragraph of the article seems to be the missing link to the "Clash of Civilization" article. That means that the possible influence of Feliks Koneczny which misses a source strictly belongs there. Readers interested in exactly that publication should be given the chance to directly move there. I think a very bold action is needed.

Whoever was the author that added Koneczny, please understand and take your information there. Ideally with the necessary sources. The header confused me, a couple of days ago. LeaNder (talk) 12:58, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

NPOV

I've got some major problems with the Huntington, Racism, and Nativism section. It's inflammatory and a random blog is not a reputable source. I'm not going to yank the section yet, because I'm willing to hear people out. Redoy (talk) 05:57, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

-edited for spelling

I agree with this comment. The article states that the book "Clash of Civilizations" has a "pointed nativist ideology against Hispanics". I do not see how anyone reading the actual text of the book can substantiate this claim. I would like to see either page numbers from the book to back this accusation or that references to the book in this section be removed.

Astroceltica (talk) 02:32, 2 May 2008 (UTC)Astroceltica

I pulled the entire section. According to WP:BLP, it's not appropriate. Inflammatory language, using a blog for the source, I can't see rationale for keeping it. I would like to see a serious discussion of the topic, if someone has one from a credible source. Redoy (talk) 07:30, 13 May 2008 (UTC)