In the past few years—and especially in the past year—American conservatives have passed through a particularly challenging and perplexing time. First, the failures of the Bush administration’s ambitious democratization projects seemed to discredit the neoconservative definition of foreign-policy conservatism. Similarly, the recent debacle of the American financial system seemed to discredit the free-market version of economic conservatism. Finally, the presidential and congressional elections of November 2008 seemed to repudiate the Republican Party’s brand of political conservatism. Clearly, American conservatives are going to have to rethink—and perhaps recreate—just who they are and how they should relate to the rest of the world and its realities. For wise guidance on how to do this—guidance based upon the most thorough scholarly knowledge, the most penetrating social analysis, and the most profound grounding in American values and traditions—American conservatives can do no better than to draw upon the work and the wisdom of Samuel P. Huntington, whose exemplary career and inspiring life came to an end this past Christmas Eve.

Samuel Huntington spent most of his life and did most of his work in places where conservatives are rarely found and where conservatives rarely look. Indeed, those places—New England, Harvard University, the American Political Science Association, and the Democratic Party—have been centers of liberalism and progressivism for most of the past century. Yet it was by being in this liberal world, while not being of it, that Huntington developed a kind of American conservatism that was particularly tempered and resilient, strong and solid, and consistent and enduring. Throughout his scholarly life, he was an inspiring model of intellectual courage.

For fifty years—from the publication of The Soldier and the State (Harvard University Press, 1956) to the publication of Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Simon and Schuster, 2004)—Huntington produced a series of great books—roughly one in every decade (in this essay, we will be able to discuss only four)—with each developing a distinctive conservative position on an important issue of its time but also of today. Each was met with a chorus of liberal criticism, but each became the center of the intellectual debate on its topic, a lion in the path which every other serious scholar had to confront. Huntington’s professional colleagues in the American Political Science Association continuously criticized his arguments, but they nevertheless recognized his greatness, not only by selecting him to be the association’s President but also by repeatedly identifying him in their polls as the most distinguished member of their profession.

Huntington’s career began in the early 1950s with a number of innovative and definitive articles on American politics, including a seminal piece on American conservatism. His intellectual perspective was shaped very much by the political conflicts which issued from the legacies of the New Deal and the Second World War and by the challenges of the Cold War. On the one side, there was the liberalism of the Democratic Party, which had been exemplified by the liberal internationalism of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and which was still prominent within the party in the 1950s. On the other side, there was the putative conservatism of the Republican Party (which European conservatives saw as just another kind of liberalism), one version being the defensive isolationism of Senator Robert Taft and the other being the assertive nationalism of General Douglas MacArthur. Each of these Democratic and the Republican approaches had led to some kind of American debacle in the course of the previous two decades.

These approaches were criticized by a new kind of American conservative, exemplified by George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr. These conservatives sought to construct more solid and successful American policies upon a basis of central and enduring American national interests, with these interests in turn representing central and enduring American national values which went back to the balanced and realistic conceptions of the founding generation of America statesmen, e.g., Washington, Madison, and Hamilton. The result was a distinctive kind of American conservatism, a conservatism dedicated to conserving fundamental American interests, values, and traditions in a world of hostile powers and ideologies like the Soviet Union and communism, and in an America which all too often had lurched from one unrealistic ideology and reckless policy—indeed an adolescent and self-indulgent mentality—to another.