Sam Huntington's works were taken seriously by political leaders and informed publics around the world. He served in government and advised administrations, both Republican and Democratic. But if you asked Sam who he was, professionally, he would have said, I am sure, “I am a social scientist.”
His total commitment to social science was visible in many ways. He was tremendously proud that Political Order and Changing Societies was for many years the most frequently cited work in political science. I remember him working for weeks to perfect the message of his speech as president of the APSA that social scientists have an obligation to truth and to the larger political communities they belong to, because their ideas can have great importance. While open to and interested in the work of historians, he strongly believed that historians and political scientists had different callings. He engaged one of the leading historians of the American Revolution in a (barely) polite but unrelenting public debate, because the historian challenged, not only the historical accuracy of the argument made by Louis Hartz in his book The Liberal Tradition, but also the legitimacy of making generalizations across time and space to explain the origins and consequences of that revolution.
The importance of making such generalizations and testing them was overwhelming for Sam. It was not enough to know the particular, however important that was. He told with pride a story about an argument he had had with a policymaker, about the incidence of future coups in a country that had just had its first coup. The policymaker said, “I know this country, I have lived here and worked here for years. People want things to settle down.” Sam, recounting the incident, said, “but I knew empirically that across countries at this level of institutionalization, the first coup leads to an increased expectation that coups can succeed, so that after the first coup there will be a second coup and a third coup. And I was right.” Up until the end of his working days, the highest praise he could think to bestow on a book or an article was, “this is a first class work of social science.”
Because he was so committed to social science, he could be stern towards those less disciplined. One brilliant academic was being considered for a university position on the strength of his written work. Sam was opposed. “Will he train graduate students in social science?” he asked, throwing up his chin, and raising his eyebrows, implying that the academic in question would never do so in a million years, and so should not be hired. And woe to any academic, young or old, in whose work Sam found any intellectual sloppiness. Sam would not tolerate it, as he did not tolerate it in himself. I know of at least one 250-page manuscript that Sam wrote and never circulated because it was not up to his standards. He dropped another fascinating research project when, after a year or more or work, he judged that his arguments simply did not stand up to his own critical scrutiny.
I can think, therefore, of nothing I could say that would please Sam more than to call him the greatest American social scientist of his generation.
