Print This Post Print This Post

Dec

28

Haveil Havalim #198 (Carnival of Jewish Blogging)

Filed Under Blogging, Carnivals, Israel, Jewish, Judaism, Religion, Writing | Comments Off

Thank you to Material Maidel (great blog name) for hosting this week’s edition of Haveil Havalim #198, aka the carnival of Jewish blogging.  Hard to believe the next one will be published in 2009 and that in two editions, the effort will be at 200.

Bookmark and Share

By Jill Miller Zimon at 2:30 pm December 28th, 2008 in Blogging, Carnivals, Israel, Jewish, Judaism, Religion, Writing | Comments Off 

Print This Post Print This Post

Dec

28

RIP, Samuel P. Huntington

Filed Under Culture, Debates, democracy, Economy, Foreign Affairs, Government, Politics, RIP, Writing | 10 Comments

I learned of Samuel Huntington’s death from the opening line of this column by Stirling Newberry, which explores the economic oomph behind the status of the Middle East – a fancier but still persuasive explanation of the proxy quality of existence to Israel, Gaza and the West Bank – something which I’ve written about and stated since the mid-1980s.

As a government major with a political theory concentration, Huntington’s books (specifically, Political Order in Changing Societies) were central to the formation of my ideas about global relations and dovetailed extremely well with my double major in sociology. As Stirling Newberry writes in the above hyperlinked piece:

While Huntington warned against America imposing its order on the rest of the world, his paradigm left few other options. His late influence obscures his contributions to political realism, such as Political Order in Changing Societies, which featured perhaps the most concise discussion to its day of modernization which, despite its rationalism does not necessarily mean the rationalization of power, authority, structure, or political participation, because of the difference between modernization as a direction, and modernization as a process.

Ah. I got chills reading that line, while also, like Newberry, in amazement that Huntington’s death occurs at this moment in time.  Maybe he doesn’t want to see what will happen?

The Boston Globe has a nice obit here. It includes this exactly right description:

Despite the brickbats that accompanied his first book, it was an article toward the end of his career that became his most cited, and most controversial, work. “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” centered on how differences between cultures throughout the world would be the cause of most post-Cold War conflicts. It was this premise, said former student Todd Fine, that inspired Dr. Huntington’s argument against the war in Iraq.

“Even though he didn’t make a big to-do about it ahead of time, he was against the Iraq war. [It was] his belief that it was unnecessary to antagonize other cultures and civilizations,” Fine said.

Bolding is mine.

I’ll always remember how, just after a college friend of mine had started on a PhD program at Harvard a couple of years after we’d graduated, she specifically commented on how now, she wasn’t just reading Huntington’s books, she had him as a professor.  I remember how excited she was about that.

Bookmark and Share

By Jill Miller Zimon at 1:29 pm December 28th, 2008 in Culture, Debates, democracy, Economy, Foreign Affairs, Government, Politics, RIP, Writing | 10 Comments 

"));