Jerry Hough and the Challenge to Area Studies

Abstract

Jerry Hough and the Challenge to Area Studies David D. Laitin (bio) Jerry F. Hough, beyond his immense contributions to our understanding of Russia and the Soviet Union, was a pioneer in the transformation of area studies into a modern-day social science. To document this claim, I highlight five themes. First, he demanded that, however theoretical or mathematical our studies became, excellent social science had to rest on a bedrock of contextual understanding of the polities we were studying. Second, based on his area expertise, he revealed quantitative opportunities to measure social and political outcomes that had earlier rested on good judgment. Third, he demanded that area specialists broaden their outlook to answer questions that non-area specialists asking fundamental questions about politics would want answered. Fourth, he exposed the normative biases that drove much of the social science of his day, ones that hindered serious comparative analyses. Fifth, through his conceptual arsenal, he demystified the workings of a polity that many analysts treated as unique and outside the political categories informing research elsewhere in the world. To be sure, many other scholars share credit for the transformation of area studies into a theoretically informed comparative discipline, but Jerry Hough's corpus stands out as a model for its value. Commitment to Area Expertise Jerry Hough earned his credentials as a committed specialist in Soviet studies. The archival work he conducted brought new facts about the Soviet system to light, and these facts spoke directly to debates that engaged area specialists. On the question of a replacement for Hannah Arendt's categorization of "totalitarian," brought to the attention of the Soviet field by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sovietologists offered new models—"directed society" (a concept that Hough suggests is nicely summarized by Jeremy Azrael), Brzezinski's "oligarchic petrification," and the rule by a "new class" having an [End Page 585] administrative monopoly described by Milovan Djilas.1 Hough assiduously accumulated evidence to show the weaknesses of these approaches. Indeed, he revealed a transmission of policy debates that was both bottom-up and horizontal. Hough showed how many top-down models claiming that bureaucratic society allows for totalitarian control (standing above the bureaucrats is a monist authority sending down orders) missed the point. The new science of bureaucratic organization, Hough reported, focused not on mindless clerks following the same script every day but on technical specialists. In fact, his research in the Soviet Union lent confirmation to this view of modern bureaucracy, as its bureaucracies were already (at the time of his research) highly technical, requiring adjustments to objective realities, and staffed with new technical personnel who rarely accorded "blind obedience" to their superiors.2 Thus, even though hierarchical, the Soviet bureaucracy, as was the case in all modern states, was reliant on information from below, with informal groups throughout the organization in a continuous bargaining/learning process with consequences for (typically but not in all cases incremental) policy adjustment. Furthermore, organization theory insisted that modern bureaucracies were not hermetically sealed hierarchies. Hough again saw confirmation of this point in the Soviet Union. As he argued, "if the leadership wants a check on the work of bureaucrats, it must encourage a good deal of citizen participation on the local level, and if this participation is to have the effect the regime wants, then there must be citizen input."3 As I show below, he provided abundant examples of such input. On the question of the relationship of the Party to that of the state, a topic that consumed the attention of specialists in Soviet politics, Hough demonstrated, through the careful accumulation of data on career patterns (dug out from a wide variety of sources), that the institutional boundaries between the two were far more fluid than previously believed. The purported inefficiencies of "Reds" overseeing "experts" missed the point that new generations in the party apparatus were technically educated and moved back [End Page 586] and forth from managerial to party roles. This work provided a new vision of everyday Soviet politics. Although Hough received unending critical commentary from Sovietologists over the course of his career, reviewers of his many works never questioned his credentials as a deeply knowledgeable expert...