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Clash of Civilizations
The most argued-over book in modern international relations, and the one most often cited by people who have not read it. Huntington asked what would organise the world once ideology stopped organising it.
What It Is
A work of political science published by Simon and Schuster in 1996, grown out of an article Huntington wrote for Foreign Affairs in 1993 under the title The Clash of Civilizations? The question mark was dropped for the book, which tells you something about how the argument hardened.
Huntington was a Harvard political scientist of enormous range, the author of Political Order in Changing Societies, and a Democrat who had served in Carter's White House. He wrote this into a specific argument: the post-Cold War moment, when Fukuyama's end of history was the fashionable idea and Western elites broadly assumed the rest of the world was converging on their model. He wrote against that consensus, and the book is his account of what would organise world politics once ideology no longer did.
It is a big book, clearly written, with maps and tables. Academic in method, journalistic in ambition.
Why It Matters
After September 2001 it was read as prophecy by people who admired it and as a self-fulfilling one by people who did not. Edward Said replied with an essay called The Clash of Ignorance. Neither camp was reading it very closely.
The durable part is not the prediction. It is the challenge Huntington put to a confident West, aimed squarely at assumptions most Western readers do not know they are making. Read carefully, he turns out to be a poor fit for the causes he is most often conscripted into.
Be equally clear about the weaknesses. Civilization is too coarse a unit to carry the weight he puts on it, and his boundaries are drawn where his argument needs them. Most of the killing since 1996 has happened within his civilizations rather than between them, and the quantitative work that has tested his thesis has largely failed to support it. The book is more useful as a set of questions than as a map.
Before You Read
Around 370 pages, ten to twelve hours. Nothing technical. The prose is clear, occasionally dry, and heavily signposted.
Read it as an argument to be tested, not a forecast to be marked. The chapters on demography and on what he calls kin-country rallying make their point early and then keep making it; a brisk pace through the middle costs you nothing.
Bring one thing with you: the habit of asking, at each claim, what evidence would count against it. Huntington rarely tells you.
Which Edition to Read
- Simon and Schuster, 2011 edition, with a foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski — recommended. The same text, in print, with a foreword from a former National Security Adviser who worked in the world the book describes and takes it seriously without swallowing it. The best available reading copy, and the one to buy. The cost: nothing is updated beyond the foreword, so a book written in 1996 is still answering 1996's questions, and you are on your own for everything since. View on Amazon →
- The original Touchstone paperback (1997). Identical text, no foreword, and it can be had secondhand for the price of a coffee. Fine if you only want Huntington's words. The cost: no framing at all, which this book badly needs.
- The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate (Foreign Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations). The original 1993 article together with the responses it provoked and Huntington's reply. The fastest way to see the thesis attacked by serious people. The cost: it is a companion, not a substitute. The article is the sketch; the book is the case.
Buy the 2011 edition and read the Foreign Affairs debate alongside it. Skip the study guides and summaries that have grown up around this book; they reproduce exactly the caricature that has made it so easy to misuse.
Getting the Most From This Book
Mark the difference between prediction and recommendation as you read. Huntington slides between them, and almost every misreading of this book, hostile or admiring, comes from collapsing the two.
Read the final chapter closely. That is where he stops describing the world and says what he thinks should be done about it.
Read a critic afterwards. Amartya Sen on the poverty of single identities is the sharpest, and Said's essay is worth the twenty minutes even where it is unfair.
The commonest mistake is to arrive already knowing what you think of it. Huntington is easiest to misuse by the people who agree with him.
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