A giant died recently. His name was Samuel Huntington. The Harvard professor's gigantism was intellectual. His ideas left huge footprints on our intellectual landscape, the way giant storms can impact the Earth. Minds were shaken, sometimes stirred and never left untouched.
His two most famous books burst on the scene decades apart: The Soldier and the State was published in 1957, Clash of Civilizations in 1996. The former offered a theory of how a strong military can and should function in a democratic system: it needs to form a professional caste and operate all but autonomously, yet remain always under civilian control.
The latter book offered a theory about the basic nature of future conflicts in international relations. Huntington put it this way: 'It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.
'The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilisations. The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.'
Critics insinuated that Huntington was a militarist perhaps because of the deeply respectful way he wrote about the military, as well as a crypto-racist, because of his emphasis on points about gigantic cultural, religious and racial fault lines that threaten to smash the globe into viciously competing civilisations.
But, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the question arose: how right might the professor be? Today, we would all have to admit that his basic vision may yet prove more right than wrong.