William Huntington Quotes

Maps and Paradigms. This picture of post-Cold War world politics shaped by cultural factors and involving interactions among states and groups from different civilizations is highly simplified. It omits many things, distorts some things, and obscures others. Yet if we are to think seriously about the world, and act effectively in it, some sort of simplified map of reality, some theory, concept, model, paradigm, is necessary. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, as William James said, only “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.” Intellectual and scientific advance, Thomas Kuhn showed in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, consists of the displacement of one paradigm, which has become increasingly incapable of explaining new or newly discovered facts, by a new paradigm, which does account for those facts in a more satisfactory fashion. “To be accepted as a paradigm,” Kuhn wrote, “a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.”4 “Finding one’s way through unfamiliar terrain,” John Lewis Gaddis also wisely observed, “generally requires a map of some sort. Cartography, like cognition itself, is a necessary simplification that allows us to see where we are, and where we may be going.

Thus with a kiss I die.” ​— ​WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ROMEO AND JULIET

Commission is its "Seminal Peace," written for them by Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington in the mid '70s. In the paper Professor Huntington recommended that democracy and economic development be discarded as outdated ideas. He wrote as co-author of the book Crises In Democracy,