Samuel P. Huntington

Samuel Phillips Huntington spent most of his career at Harvard, where he directed the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and held an endowed chair. During the Carter administration, he left campus briefly to coordinate security planning for the National Security Council. In 1993 he published the "Clash of Civilizations" theory, arguing that post-Cold War conflict would unfold along cultural fault lines rather than ideological ones, with Islamic civilization posed as the chief challenge to Western dominance. The framework became one of the most disputed ideas in modern political science. By the time he died in 2008, Huntington had shaped American thinking on civilian-military relations, political development, and comparative government - and the Open Syllabus Project would eventually rank him the second most frequently cited author on U.S. political science syllabi.