Professor Samuel Huntington: Political scientist who wrote 'The Clash of Civilisations'

Huntington's book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order seemed to have offered an early warining of the 9/11 terrorist attacks

In fact, however, he had established himself as one of America's most influential political scientists long before that work and its prediction that after the ideologically driven Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, cultural and religious differences among major civilisations – in particular between the West and Islam – would drive the conflicts of the 21st century.

In the course of a career of nearly 60 years, almost entirely spent on the faculty of Harvard University, Huntington wrote or co-wrote 17 books and more than 90 academic articles, on topics ranging from national security and the place of the military in a civil republic, to the problems of democratisation in the third world and the riddle of America's national identity. He also helped found, in 1970, the bi-monthly Foreign Affairs, to this day the most influential foreign policy magazine in the US, serving as co-editor until 1977.

Politically, Huntington was a lifelong Democrat, who advised the unsuccessful White House candidate Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and spent two years as a top official on the National Security Council of President Jimmy Carter. But he was a Democrat of a now largely extinct breed, liberal on domestic policy but a supporter of an assertive and unflinching use of US power abroad.

The mix rankled some, who saw him as a hawkish nationalist – especially in the distinction he drew between adversaries with whom the US could negotiate, and "unrelenting enemies who will try to destroy us unless we destroy them first". Such criticism, however, did not disturb Huntington, who despite his gentle manner loved the cut and thrust of intellectual argument.

His brilliance was evident early on. The son of parents who were writers, Huntington graduated from Yale at 18, and at the age of just 23 was on the faculty at Harvard. To the end, teaching remained his passion. "It is difficult for me to imagine a more rewarding or enjoyable career than teaching here, particularly teaching undergraduates," he wrote in a retirement letter to Harvard's president in 2007.

The enthusiasm was reciprocated. Over the years, Huntington inspired generations of scholars and foreign-policy makers, many of them conservatives and neo-conservatives like Francis Fukuyama, Stephen Rosen and Eliot Cohen. But their mentor's hawkishess had its limits. He did not, for instance, support George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Controversy accompanied Huntington from the outset. His first book, The Soldier and the State: the theory and politics of civil-military relations (1957), managed to infuriate both liberals and conservatives – the former because of its open admiration of the military, the latter because he nonetheless insisted on total civilian control of the armed forces.

Other books followed, including Political Power: USA/USSR, a 1964 study of international relations during the Cold War co-authored with Zbigniew Brzezinski, later to become President Carter's national security adviser. In 1968 Huntington published Political Order in Changing Societies, which drew fire from the traditional development lobby by arguing that what mattered most for a third world country's advancement was not necessarily democracy, but strong political authority.

Nothing however quite matched the storm generated by The Clash of Civilisations, published in 1996 and translated into 39 languages. Based on a 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, it challenged the comfortable belief that with the collapse of Communism, the triumph of Western-style liberal market capitalism was assured.

Huntington warned that any vacuum would be quickly filled by cultural tensions. He divided the world into seven basic "civilisations": Latin American, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Islam and the West – with an especial risk of friction between the last two. For critics, the theory was at best a gross oversimplification, at worst a manifesto for enduring Western supremacy.

Be that as it may, the prescience of certain paragraphs was extraordinary. Huntington declared that the West had "won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do". Thus a lingering, potentially deadly resentment, especially in Muslim countries: "Somewhere in the Middle East," he wrote, "a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap and, between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner". In September 2001, less than two dozen such young men carried out attacks on not one, but four American airliners.

True to form, Huntington's final book, Who Are We?: the challenges to America's national identity also stirred the pot. Published in 2004, it expressed doubts that the US could assimilate Hispanic immigrants – legal and illegal – at the current pace, and suggested that the country was best off as a Protestant, English-speaking nation.

Once again, right-minded progressives were outraged. But the reaction to Who Are We, like the furore created by its predecessors, merely bore out the judgement of Jorge Dominguez, a friend and Harvard's vice-provost for International Affairs. Huntington, said Dominguez, was "a giant of political science world wide," with "a knack for asking the crucially important but often inconvenient question".

Rupert Cornwell

Samuel Phillips Huntington, political scientist: born New York 27 April 1927; married 1957 Nancy Arkelyan (two sons); died Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts 24 December 2008.