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A few moments ago I opened the Arts & Letter Daily website - one I try to read almost every day - and found a link to a Samuel Huntington obituary written by Francis Fukuyama. "Huntington is dead," I mumbled for a moment, amazed, and then remembered the recent encounter with his name, long after having read his Clash of Civilizations as an undergraduate student of IR. The encounter was on the pages of The Israel Lobby, a very warm reference to Huntington by the authors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who dedicated the book to him:
For more than twenty-five years, we have been fortunate to enjoy the friendship and support of one of America's most accomplished social scientists, Samuel P. Huntington. We cannot imagine a better role model. Sam has always tackled big and important questions, and he has answered these questions in ways that the rest of the world could not ignore. Although each of us has disagreed with him on numerous occasions over the years - and sometimes vehemently and publicly - he never held those disagreements against us and was never anything but gracious and supportive of our own work. He understands that scholarship is not a popularity contest, and that spirited but civil debate is essential both to scholarly progress and to a healthy democracy. We are grateful to Sam for his friendship and for the example he has set throughout his career, and we are pleased to dedicate this book to him.
In the obituary, Fukuyama calls Huntington "easily the greatest political scientist of his generation," and attributes to him the creation of "the subfield of strategic studies, an area that was not seriously researched by most universities until he came along."
It is a pity to lose Huntington, who contributed to IR and political science a great deal. Death is one thing that we cannot escape; and in death some of the greatest people and their works acquire a different aura.
