Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) (Opinion‪)‬

Samuel Phillips Huntington, who passed away on December 24, 2008, was the most influential U.S. political scientist and one of the world's most prominent public intellectuals of the past fifty years. Unlike his two early contemporaries on the Harvard University faculty, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Huntington did not leave academia for the policy-making world. Except for two years (1977-78) in the Carter Administration's National Security Council staff (at Brzezinski's invitation), Huntington remained essentially a scholar. He occasionally offered advice directly to public officials, including to the U.S. government in the 1960s on how to build civic support in Vietnam, and to Brazil's military government in the 1970s on how to liberalize gradually and open the way back toward civilian government. But Samuel Huntington's main contribution was as an analyst, writer and teacher, not as a policy maker or policy advisor.