American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony

This is an important contribution to American political thought. The disharmony results from what Huntington calls the "IvI" gap-the gap between American ideals of moral perfection and the inevitable imperfections of institutions. American ideals, he says, are ultimately at war with all government. Like Reinhold Niebuhr, who said much the same thing in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Huntington believes that a nation which refuses to understand this gap will destroy itself.