With his famous book ''Political Order in Changing Societies'', published in 1968, the American political scientist and Harvard professor
Samuel P. Huntington is considered to be one of the ”Founding Fathers” of neo-institutionalism, the historical institutionalism. The book is dealing with the role of political institutions in changing
political system
In political science, a political system means the type of political organization that can be recognized, observed or otherwise declared by a state.
It defines the process for making official government decisions. It usually comprizes the govern ...
s. Huntington stated that ”the most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government”.
As stated by
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (; born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer.
Fukuyama is known for his book ''The End of History and the Last Man'' (1992), which argue ...
, Huntington argued that political decay was "at least as likely as political development", and that neither "economic nor social development" could proceed without political order, the actual experience of newly independent countries being "one of increasing social and political disorder".
For Huntington, ”the capacity to create political institutions is the capacity to create public interests”. Huntington argues that changes are caused by tensions within the political and
social system
In sociology, a social system is the patterned network of relationships constituting a coherent whole that exist between individuals, groups, and institutions. It is the formal structure of role and status that can form in a small, stable group. ...
, and criticizes
modernization theory
Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and a partial reading of Max Weber, ...
, contending that its argument for economic change and development being the prime factors responsible for the creation of stable, democratic political systems is flawed. Focusing on other factors like
urbanization
Urbanization (or urbanisation) refers to the population shift from rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. It is predominantly t ...
, increased
literacy
Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, huma ...
,
social mobilization, and
economic growth
Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of ...
, he stresses that those factors are not significantly related to political development; in fact a major part of his argument is that those processes are related but distinct. For Huntington, ”political order depends in part on the relation between the development of political institutions and the mobilization of new social forces into politics”.
The existence (or lack) of order should not be confused with the issue of the type of that order (both on political level -
democratic,
authoritarian
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political ''status quo'', and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic votin ...
, and on economic level -
socialist
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the e ...
,
free-market
In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any ot ...
, etc.) While modernity equals stability, modernization is actually a cause for instability, due to urbanization, rising expectations due to literacy, education and the spread of media, etc. In order to explain the decline in political order throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the late '50s and the early '60s, Huntington stated: ”What was responsible for this violence and instability? The primary thesis of this book is that it was in large part the product of rapid social change and the rapid mobilization of new groups into politics coupled with the slow development of political institutions”.
Influences
Controversial on first release, and not only in the west, the book is favored by
Chinese Neoconservatives. The events of the
1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre
The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident (), were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing during 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or in Chinese the June Fourth ...
seemed to confirm to them their belief in a strong state, considering it important in economic growth along the lines of Asian "tiger" economies, and considering China's autocratic model to actually be weak and ineffectual. They continued to draw ideas from a distorted reading of Samuel Huntington and his Political Order in Changing Societies in particular; whatever his use as a foreigner who advocated limiting the scope of democracy, his ideas seemed to have merit on their own.
Reviews
Writing in 1997,
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (; born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer.
Fukuyama is known for his book ''The End of History and the Last Man'' (1992), which argue ...
believed that the book "shaped the understanding of a generation of students on the nature of party systems", though he considers the "characterization of the Soviet Union and other communist states as highly developed polities" odd in retrospect, since "their surface institutional calm masked a high degree of internal rot and illegitimacy."
Writing in 2011, Fukuyama considered that Political Order in Changing Societies "appeared against the backdrop (of) and frontally challenged" the assumptions of "the Americanized version of modernization theory", which included "the sunny view that all good things went together: Economic growth, social mobilization, political institutions, and cultural values", all "changing for the better in tandem." Fukuyama considers the book Huntington's "(most important) contribution to the study of politics", and "probably the last major attempt to write a general theory of political development", though its "significance needs to be placed in the context of the ideas that were dominant in the 1950s and early 1960s. "
References
External links
Reviewed by Francis Fukuyama, Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997Review author[s]: A. F. K. Organski, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 63, No. 3. (Sep., 1969), pp. 921–922. Gordon C. Ruscoe, Comparative Education Review, Vol. 14, No. 3, Papers and Proceedings: Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, Atlanta Georgia, March 22-24, 1970. (Oct., 1970), pp. 385-386.
1968 non-fiction books
Books about revolutions
Political science books
Works by Samuel P. Huntington
Yale University Press books
{{polisci-book-stub