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Huntington’s terms, the rise of modern institutions that could
peacefully channel citizen participation.
Socioeconomic development, meanwhile, has proceeded apace:
Between 1990–2010 Tunisia’s Human Development Index (a
composite measure of health, education and income compiled by the
UN) rose 30 percent, while Egypt’s rose 28 percent. Both countries
produced tens of thousands of college graduates with no discernable
future and a lopsided income distribution in which a disproportionate
share of the gains from growth went to a small group of politically
connected insiders. Huntington’s analysis of Egypt in the 1950s and
1960s thus remains eerily relevant today.
In Political Order Huntington was also making a broader point about
the process of development itself. The significance of his book needs
to be seen against the backdrop of post-World War II modernization
theory, which in turn drew on classic 19th-century European social
theory articulated by academics like Edward Shils, Talcott Parsons
and Walt W. Rostow. American modernization theory argued that
development was a single, seamless process. Economic development,
changing social relationships like the breakdown of extended kinship
groups and the growth of individualism, higher and more inclusive
levels of education, normative shifts toward values like
“achievement” and rationality, secularization and the growth of
democratic political institutions, were all seen as an interdependent
whole.
By pointing out that the good things of modernity did not necessarily
go together, Huntington played a key role in killing off
modernization theory. Political development was a separate process
from socioeconomic development, he argued, and needed to be
understood in its own terms. The conclusion that flowed from this
point of view seemed at the time counterintuitive to the point of
stunning: Without political development, the other aspects of

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