美国著名政治学家、《文明的冲突》一书的作者塞缪尔·亨廷顿不久前离开了人世，享年81岁，哈佛大学昨天在它的网站上发布了这一消息。
哈佛大学表示，亨廷顿2007年就已经从哈佛教学活动中退休了，12月24日殁于麻省的玛莎葡萄园。但是，哈佛没有提到他的死因。
亨廷顿以他的所谓“文明冲突论”而享誉学术界。他相信后冷战时代国家之间的暴力冲突主要来自文化和宗教的差异而不是意识形态的不同。
亨氏1993年在《外交》季刊上首次发表了这个理论，并于1996年在他的《文明的冲突与世界秩序的重建》一书中拓展了他的理论，这本书被翻译成了39种语言。
“文明冲突论”越来越热地引起学者和大众的争论，尤其是911恐怖袭击之后。
“他是一位让哈佛大学引以为傲的学者。”亨廷顿的老友经济学家亨利·罗索夫斯基如是说。
“全世界的人们都在学习和讨论他的思想。我相信他无疑是过去50年里最具影响力的政治学家之一。”罗索夫斯基评价道。
亨廷顿是17本著作和超过90篇学术文章的作者、合作者和主编。他的主要教研领域是美国政府、民主化、军事政治、文官政府与军事的关系、比较政治学和政治发展学。
作为一名终生的民主党党员，他曾在1977至1978年效力于卡特总统白宫的国家安全委员会。
亨廷顿1927年4月18日在纽约出生，1946年获得了耶鲁大学学士学位，在军队中服完兵役后，1948年获得了芝加哥大学的硕士学位。1951年，亨廷顿顺利攻取了哈佛大学的博士学位，从那以后，他几乎从不间断地在哈佛任教。
他有一位结婚了51年的结发妻子， Nancy Arkelyan Huntington，还有两个儿子。（译自新华网）
下面是哈佛大学官方网站上关于亨廷顿去世的新闻：
Samuel Huntington, 81, political scientist, scholar
‘One of the most influential political scientists of the last 50 years’
By Corydon Ireland
Harvard News Office
Samuel P. Huntington – a longtime Harvard University professor, an influential political scientist, and mentor to a generation of scholars in widely divergent fields – died Dec. 24 on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 81.
Huntington had retired from active teaching in 2007, following 58 years of scholarly service at Harvard. In a retirement letter to the President of Harvard, he wrote, in part, “It is difficult for me to imagine a more rewarding or enjoyable career than teaching here, particularly teaching undergraduates. I have valued every one of the years since 1949.”
Huntington, the father of two grown sons, lived in Boston and on Martha’s Vineyard. He was the author, co-author, or editor of 17 books and over 90 scholarly articles. His principal areas of research and teaching were American government, democratization, military politics, strategy, and civil-military relations, comparative politics, and political development.
“Sam was the kind of scholar that made Harvard a great university,” said Huntington’s friend of nearly six decades, economist Henry Rosovsky, who is Harvard’s Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Emeritus. “People all over the world studied and debated his ideas. I believe that he was clearly one of the most influential political scientists of the last 50 years.”
“Every one of his books had an impact,” said Rosovsky. “These have all become part of our vocabulary.”
Jorge Dominguez, Harvard’s vice provost for International Affairs, described Huntington as “one of the giants of political science worldwide during the past half century. He had a knack for asking the crucially important but often inconvenient question. He had the talent and skill to formulate analyses that stood the test of time.”
Huntington’s friend and colleague Robert Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, called him “one of the giants of American intellectual life of the last half century.”
To Harvard College Professor Stephen P. Rosen, Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs, “Samuel Huntington’s brilliance was recognized by the academics and statesmen around the world who read his books. But he was loved by those who knew him well because he combined a fierce loyalty to his principles and friends with a happy eagerness to be confronted with sharp opposition to his own views.”
Huntington, who graduated from Yale College at age 18 and who was teaching at Harvard by age 23, was best known for his views on the clash of civilizations. He argued that in a post-Cold War world, violent conflict would come not from ideological friction between nation states, but from cultural and religious differences among the world’s major civilizations.
Huntington, who was the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, identified these major civilizations as Western (including the United States and Europe), Latin American, Islamic, African, Orthodox (with Russia as a core state), Hindu, Japanese, and “Sinic” (including China, Korea, and Vietnam).
“My argument remains,” he said in a 2007 interview with Islamica Magazine, “that cultural identities, antagonisms and affiliations will not only play a role, but play a major role in relations between states.”
Huntington first advanced his argument in an oft-cited 1993 article in the journal Foreign Affairs. He expanded the thesis into a book, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” which appeared in 1996, and has since been translated into 39 languages.
To the end of his life, the potential for conflict inherent in culture was prominent in Huntington’s scholarly pursuits. In 2000, he was co-editor of “Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress.” And just before his health declined, in the fall of 2005, he was beginning to explore religion and national identity.
“His contributions ranged across the whole field of political science, from the deeply theoretical to the intensely applied,” said Putnam, author of a lengthy appreciation of Huntington in a 1986 issue of the journal PS: Political Science and Politics. “Over the years, he mentored a large share of America’s leading strategic thinkers, and he built enduring institutions of intellectual excellence.”
And Putnam added a personal note. “What was most rare about Sam, however, was his ability to combine intensely held, vigorously argued views with an engaging openness to contrary evidence and argument. Harvard has lost a towering figure, and his colleagues have lost a very good friend.”
Timothy Colton, the Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies at Harvard, remarked on his old friend’s breadth of intellectual interests. He used the American political experience as a pivot point (Huntington’s doctoral dissertation was on the Interstate Commerce Commission), but soon deeply studied a globe-spanning range of topics.
“He was anchored in American life and his American identity, but he ended up addressing so many broad questions,” said Colton, who had Huntington as a Ph.D. adviser at Harvard in the early 1970s. “His degree of openness to new topics and following questions where they take him is not as often found today as when he was making his way.”
Huntington’s first book, “The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations,” published to great controversy in 1957 and now in its 15th printing, is today still considered a standard title on the topic of how military affairs intersect with the political realm. It was the subject of a West Point symposium last year, on the 50th anniversary of its publication.
In part, “Soldier and the State” was inspired by President Harry Truman’s firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur – and at the same time praised corps of officers that in history remained stable, professional, and politically neutral.
In 1964, he co-authored, with Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Political Power: USA-USSR,” which was a major study of Cold War dynamics – and how the world could be shaped by two political philosophies locked in opposition to one another.
Brzezinski, a doctoral student at Harvard in the early 1950s who was befriended by both Huntington and Rosovsky, was U.S. National Security Adviser in the Carter White House from 1977 to 1981. In those days, said Rosovsky, the youthful Huntington, though an assistant professor, was often mistaken for an undergraduate.
According to his wife Nancy, Huntington was a life-long Democrat, and served as foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert Humphrey in his 1968 presidential campaign. In the wake of that “bitter” campaign, she said, Huntington and Warren Manshel – “political opponents in the campaign but close friends” – co-founded the quarterly journal Foreign Policy (now a bimonthly magazine). He was co-editor until 1977.
His 1969 book, “Political Order in Changing Societies,” is widely regarded as a landmark analysis of political and economic development in the Third World. It was among Huntington’s most influential books, and a frequently assigned text for graduate students investigating comparative politics, said Dominguez, who is also Antonio Madero Professor of Mexican and Latin American Politics and Economics. The book “challenged the orthodoxies of the 1960s in the field of development,” he said. “Huntington showed that the lack of political order and authority were among the most serious debilities the world over. The degree of order, rather than the form of the political regime, mattered most.”
His 1991 book, “The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century” – another highly influential work – won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and “looked at similar questions from a different perspective, namely, that the form of the political regime – democracy or dictatorship – did matter,” said Dominguez. “The metaphor in his title referred to the cascade of dictator-toppling democracy-creating episodes that peopled the world from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, and he gave persuasive reasons for this turn of events well before the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
As early as the 1970s, Huntington warned against the risk of new governments becoming politically liberalized too rapidly. He proposed instead that governments prolong a transition to full democracy – a strand of ideas that began with an influential 1973 paper, “Approaches to Political Decompression.”
Huntington’s most recent book was “Who Are We? The Challenges of America’s National Identity” (2004), a scholarly reflection on America’s cultural sense of itself.
Samuel Phillips Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City. He was the son of Richard Thomas Huntington, an editor and publisher, and Dorothy Sanborn Phillips, a writer.
Huntington graduated from Stuyvesant High School, received his B.A. from Yale in 1946, served in the U.S. Army, earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1948, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1951, where he had taught nearly without a break since 1950.
From 1959 to 1962, he was associate director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. At Harvard, he served two tenures as the chair of the Government Department – from 1967 to 1969 and from 1970 to 1971.
Huntington served as president of the American Political Science Association from 1986 to 1987.
Huntington was director of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs from 1978 to 1989. He founded the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, and was director there from 1989 to 1999. He was chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 1996 to 2004, and was succeeded by Jorge Dominguez.
Huntington applied his theoretical skills to the Washington, D.C., arena too. In 1977 and 1978, he served in the Carter White House as coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council. In the 1980s, he was a member of the Presidential Commission on Long-Term Integrated Strategy.
Huntington is survived by his wife of 51 years, Nancy Arkelyan Huntington; by his sons Nicholas Phillips Huntington of Newton, Mass. and Timothy Mayo Huntington of Boston; by his daughters-in-law Kelly Brown Huntington and Noelle Lally Huntington; and by his four grandchildren.
There will be a private family burial service on Martha’s Vineyard, where Huntington summered for 40 years.
In the spring, there will be a memorial service at Harvard. Details are pending