Samuel Phillips Huntington (April 18, 1927 – December 24, 2008) was an influential American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 political scientist

Political science

Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...

 who wrote highly-regarded books in a half-dozen sub-fields of political science, starting in 1957. He gained wider prominence through his Clash of Civilizations (1993, 1996) thesis of a post-Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

 new world order.
Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City, the son of Dorothy Sanborn (née Phillips), a short-story writer, and Richard Thomas Huntington, a publisher of hotel trade journals.