Political Order in Changing Societies.

• Author: Aves, Vsevolod
• Position: Book Review

POLITICAL ORDER IN CHANGING SOCIETIES Samuel P. Huntington (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), 488 pages.

Never a stranger to controversial and sometimes politically unpalatable pronouncements, Huntington argues that stability, not democracy, is the paramount goal of societies wracked by rapid social change. The difference between developing and developed states, he claims, is not ideology but the degree to which they are able to maintain public order. Thus the US and the USSR, instead of representing extreme ends of a political spectrum, are more similar than we usually suppose: Both, according to Huntington, "command the loyalties of their citizens and thus have the capacity to tax resources, to conscript manpower, and to innovate and execute policy." The modernizing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, on the other hand, are relegated to a separate category--lands torn by violence, chaos and institutional weakness.

Time has not...