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Huntington's Prophecies: A Tribute to an Outstanding Political Genius
Harvard educator Samuel Huntington, the most controversial political scientist of the past two decades, breathed his last on 28 December 2008, aged 81. A prophetic genius to some and an evil war-mongering ideologue to others, it is an opportune time to revisit the controversial works of Huntington.With Marxist-Communist regimes collapsed ending the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama argued in his influential thesis, The End of History, in 1989 that liberal democracy may signal the end-point of humankind's ideological evolution and the final form of governance, which would eventually be adopted globally. Fukuyama's thesis had two seminal assumptions: a) Triumph of civilized liberal democracy globally, and b) Emergence of a nonconflictual world civilization. Huntington's Civilizational Clash theory (1993) challenged both assumptions of Fukuyama. Regarding Fukuyama's presumed triumph of civilized liberal democracy globally, Huntington emphasized that "Law and order", "the first prerequisite of Civilization", were evaporating or under threat everywhere--China, Japan and the United States included. Globally, "Civilization seems in many respects to be yielding to barbarism... a global Dark Age possibly descending on humanity," he wrote. Posted by: Besoeker 2009-01-05 |
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