Every age needs its contrary thinkers, those prepared to challenge the conventional wisdom of the day. As Lexington argues in The Economist, Samuel Huntington—who died on Christmas Eve—was that for the 1990s. While others were triumphalist after the West’s victory in the Cold War, Huntington was pessimistically warning of a coming Clash of Civilizations. Huntington was many things but he was not creature of fashion.
Clash, to my mind, is at least as flawed a theory as The End of History but it has undoubtedly added something to the intellectual debate. We would be in a better state today if more people in the 1990s had not succumbed to the illusion that the challenges to democratic market liberalism were over. Ironically, the phrase ‘clash of civilizations’ isn’t actually Huntington’s. Bernard Lewis coined it.
My first job was working at Foreign Policy magazine, which Huntington had co-founded back in 1970.
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