I’m working with a fairly limited connection here at the moment, but I wanted to note the death of Harvard political scientist and author Samuel P. Huntington. Over the last decade, Dr. Huntington took a pounding from his fellow members of the liberal Western intelligentsia; when they wanted to join Francis Fukuyama in celebrating The End of History, he had the guts in his article “The Clash of Civilizations?” (and the resulting book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order), to point out how foolish that triumphalism was. As Mark Steyn put it, Dr. Huntington’s key point was that
the conventional western elite view of man as homo economicus is reductive—that cultural identity is a more profound indicator that western-style economic liberty cannot easily trump.
As a consequence, he argued that the post-Cold War era would not see the end of major conflict, but rather would see a shift from wars of ideology to wars driven by conflicts between cultures—and particularly by the conflict along “Islam’s bloody borders.” He was pilloried for his argument, but it seems to me that history has validated his analysis, where Dr. Fukuyama’s position has fallen by the wayside. For those interested in reading more, Power Line has a good short roundup of pieces on Dr. Huntington, including Robert Kaplan’s excellent profile of him in The Atlantic. For his insight, his capacity for independent thought, and his willingness to follow out his analysis in the face of the conventional wisdom, Dr. Huntington will be greatly missed.