Editing Samuel P. Huntington (section)

===''Political Order in Changing Societies''===
{{Main|Political Order in Changing Societies}}
In 1968, just as the United States' war in Vietnam was becoming most intense, Huntington published ''Political Order in Changing Societies'', which was a critique of the [[modernization]] theory which had affected much US policy regarding the developing world during the prior decade.

Huntington argued that as societies modernize, they become more complex and disordered. If the process of social modernization that produces this disorder is not matched by a process of political and institutional modernization—a process which produces political institutions capable of managing the stress of modernization—the result may be violence.

During the 1970s, Huntington was an advisor to governments, both democratic and dictatorial. During 1972, he met with [[Emílio Garrastazu Médici|Medici]] government representatives in Brazil; a year later he published the report "Approaches to Political Decompression", warning against the risks of a too-rapid political liberalization, proposing gradual liberalization, and a strong party state modeled upon the image of the Mexican [[Institutional Revolutionary Party]]. After a prolonged transition, Brazil became democratic during 1985.

During the 1980s, he became a valued adviser to the South African regime, which used his ideas on political order to craft its "total strategy" to reform apartheid and suppress growing resistance. He assured South Africa's rulers that increasing the repressive power of the state (which at that time included police violence, detention without trial, and torture) can be necessary to effect reform. The reform process, he told his South African audience, often requires "duplicity, deceit, faulty assumptions and purposeful blindness." He thus gave his imprimatur to his hosts' project of "reforming" apartheid rather than eliminating it.<ref>Joseph Lelyveld, Move Your Shadow (New York, 1985), pages 68–69; Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, "South Africa Since 1976: an historical perspective," in Shaun Johnson, ed., South Africa: No Turning Back (London, 1988), pages 28–29</ref>

Huntington frequently cited Brazil as a success, alluding to his role in his 1988 presidential address to the [[American Political Science Association]], commenting that political science ''played a modest role in this process''. Critics, such as British political scientist Alan Hooper, note that contemporary Brazil has an especially unstable party system, wherein the best institutionalized party, [[Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva]]'s [[Workers' Party (Brazil)|Workers' Party]], emerged in opposition to controlled transition. Moreover, Hooper claims that the lack of civil participation in contemporary Brazil results from that top-down process of political participation transitions.