HUNTINGTON ON A ROLL :

Looking the World in the Eye (Robert D. Kaplan, The Atlantic Monthly | December 2001)

The most memorable review that Samuel Phillips Huntington, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, ever got was a bad one. "Imagine," Huntington recalled recently, sitting in his home on Boston's Beacon Hill. "The first review of my first book, and the reviewer compares me unfavorably to Mussolini." He blinked and squinted shyly through his eyeglasses. Huntington, seventy-four, speaks in a serene and nasal voice, the East Bronx modified by high Boston. He described how the reviewer, Matthew Josephson, writing in the left-wing opinion magazine The Nation, had ridiculed the militarism and "brutal sophistries" of The Soldier and the State and had sneered that Mussolini's sentiments had been similar though his words had more panache: "Believe, obey, fight!"

The review was published on April 6, 1957. The Cold War was scarcely a decade old. The Soldier and the State constituted a warning: America's liberal society, Huntington argued, required the protection of a professional military establishment steeped in conservative realism. In order to keep the peace, military leaders had to take for granted—and anticipate—the "irrationality, weakness, and evil in human nature." Liberals were good at reform, not at national security. "Magnificently varied and creative when limited to domestic issues," Huntington wrote, "liberalism faltered when applied to foreign policy and defense." Foreign policy, he explained, is not about the relationship among individuals living under the rule of law but about the relationship among states and other groups operating in a largely lawless realm. The Soldier and the State concluded with a rousing defense of West Point, which, Huntington wrote, "embodies the military ideal at its best ... a bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon.

Chalk up another one for Samuel Huntington, who has already claimed the award for correctly predicting the zeitgeist with his book The Clash of Civilizations. As Robert Kaplan wrote several months ago, in this very fine profile (far better than anything in Warrior Politics) of Mr. Huntington, the book The Soldier and the State provides an ideal guide to understanding how the essentially conservative military can frequently serve as a better guarantor of the liberal democratic state then do self-avowed liberals, an assertion which recent events in Venezuela have once again proven true.

Perhaps no idea is more difficult for folks to wrap their arms around than that the imposition of order--most often by the military, as in Spain, Chile, Turkey, etc.--may be more important to the eventual triumph of liberty than is the continuation of a freedom which is deteriorating into chaos. Distrust of state power is a healthy thing in a democracy, but the hysterical opposition to its ever being used, as has greeted some of John Ashcroft's measures, is just as dangerous in the long run, if not more so. The Venezuelan military might have earned the plaudits of liberals by staying on the sidelines even if it meant allowing Hugo Chavez to destroy the country, but they'd not have served Venezuela nor its people well.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 13, 2002 2:30 PM