# Samuel Huntington Harvard political scientist (1927–2008) whose work sits behind three separate conversations this vault tracks, which is unusual for one scholar and is the reason he needs a page rather than a mention. **Civil-military relations.** *The Soldier and the State* (1957) remains the founding text of the field and the origin of **objective civilian control** — the argument that a maximally professional, institutionally autonomous officer corps is the most reliable guarantor of civilian supremacy, because professionalism itself produces the habit of obedience. Every subsequent theorist writes with or against it. See [[Civil-Military Relations]]. **Political order.** *Political Order in Changing Societies* (1968) argued that political *stability* depends on institutional capacity rather than on democratization, and that rapid modernization without institution-building produces disorder — an argument later cited approvingly by people justifying authoritarian consolidation, whatever Huntington intended. **Civilizational and demographic anxiety.** *The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order* (1996) reframed post-Cold-War conflict as cultural rather than ideological. *Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity* (2004) applied the same lens domestically, arguing that Anglo-Protestant culture is the substance of American identity and that Hispanic immigration threatens it. That last book is the one with a direct downstream life on the American right, and it is why Huntington's name recurs in restrictionist and national-conservative argument. ## See Also - [[Civil-Military Relations]] — the field he founded - [[Andrew Bacevich]] · [[Militarism]] [[People Hub]]