Huntington Will Revise Disputed Paper

Samuel P. Huntington, Thomson Professor of Government, has decided to revise a paper he co-authored that called for more authoritarianism in democratic governments and provoked "sharp debate" among the members of the private commission that had ordered it, the director of the commission said yesterday.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, director of the Trilateral Commission, said that the paper, entitled "The Governability of Democracies," "touched a raw nerve" with its analysis of authority in democratic societies.

The publication of the revised paper may include dissenting opinions written by members of the commission, Brzezinski said, and he added that such action would be unprecedented in the commission's history.

The Trilateral Commission is a private organization of government officials, businessmen, academics, and labor leaders from the United States, Japan and Western Europe that was formed in 1973 by the banker David Rockefeller '36.

The commission members "wanted it to be terribly clear that this was the work of the authors and did not necessarily express the views of the commission," Charles Heck, assistant to the director, said yesterday.

The report, authored jointly by Huntington, Michael Crozier of the University of Paris, and Joji Watanuki of Sophia University in Tokyo, stated that "demands on democratic government have grown, while the capacity of democratic government seems to have shrunk...the United States and Western Europe need to restore a more equitable relationship between governmental authority and popular control..."

Heck said that the paper was "ambitious for treading in such a delicate area."

Cuba

Huntington, who is on leave this year, was in Cuba yesterday and was unavailable for comment.

Huntington, who authored the section on the United States, wrote that allowing American society to become more democratic would amount to "adding fuel to the flames."

"Instead," he wrote, "time of the problems of governance in the United States them from an excess of democracy."

He added that the "democratic surgs" of increased political activism during the 1960s has led to "democratic distemper" in the 1970s, resulting in a weakened presidency, a declaring party system, and popular dissatisfaction with government performance.

Rockefeller created the commission to establish a torum for the discussion of common problems facing industrialized nations, Heck said.

Brzezinski said that the commission sees itself as an "advisory body" that aims to influence policy-making in the countries from which the commission draws its members