Samuel P. Huntington

Zane notes that Samuel P. Huntington, the grand old man of Comparative
Politics, died at age 81 on the 27th of December. I'm a little
behind--spending time with Emily and all while here in the states (also
getting my fill of fast food and skiing, among other things)--so I only
read about it today.

If you're so inclined, Huntington's (terrible) Wikipedia entry is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington

The page really focuses on critiques of Huntington, leaving out almost
entirely his most important ideas (in my opinion), which are really in
his earlier work. Still, it has some useful links.

I'm especially fond of _Political Order in Changing Societies_, which
was something of a rebuttal to the Modernization theory popular in the
United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Huntington essentially argues
that "modernization" doesn't always produce desirable results. Instead,
if it isn't accompanied by an increase in the strength and capacity of
government, the result can be violence.

Broadly (and that's the way to look at Huntington's work), I think he
was right. "Modernization" produces demands on government, and if the
government isn't capable of fulfilling those demands, the result can be
civil war, insurgency, or other un-pretty things.

Huntington's work is what I like to call "macro-historical analysis"--I
didn't come up with that phrase, I picked it up somewhere else along the
way--but essentially, he tries to interpret the major trends of
history. It isn't always pretty, methodologically rigorous, or right,
but this is a guy who started writing before most Political Scientists
alive today were out of elementary school (at least), and the fancy
methodologies we sometimes use today hadn't been developed, or hadn't
been adopted to Political Science when he started publishing.