Jerry Fincher Hough (April 26, 1935 – May 24, 2020) was an American political scientist. Hough was the James B. Duke Professor of Political Science at Duke University and his research focused on domestic American politics, the Soviet Union, the democratization of Russia, and American efforts at nation-building. Hough is a part of the "revisionist school" on Soviet history, maintaining that the level of terror was much exaggerated and that the Soviet Union was institutionally weak under Joseph Stalin, among other things. He saw the focus of his research and teaching as "the relationship of long term economic development and political institutions". In his final decade he focused on "the American experience in order to better understand the way that states, markets, and democracies develop and the way in which effective and stable ones can be created and maintained."
He had three children from his first marriage. His third wife was the Australian-American historian of the Soviet Union Sheila Fitzpatrick.
Education and career
Entering Harvard on scholarship at age 16, Hough received his A.B., A.M. and PhD from Harvard University. His first teaching positions were at the University of Toronto and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hough taught at Duke from 1973 until 2016, and was professor emeritus at the time of his death. He was a fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center in 1984, where he worked on a project on the administration of Soviet agriculture. He was a nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. From 1990-1996 he founded and directed the Center on East-West Trade, Investments, and Communication at Duke University.
In his autobiographical preface to Changing Party Coalitions: The Mystery of Red State-Blue State Alignment, Hough discussed the impact of historical events and key mentors on this thinking. He wrote, “Stalin died during my first class on the Soviet Union. It was taught by Merle Fainsod, a great Americanist and a great specialist on the Soviet Union who became the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation. Perhaps my greatest debt at Harvard is to William Yandell Elliott, who was given the task of being my tutor in my junior and senior year and who supervised my honors thesis on American policy toward the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1946. At that time Elliott was a close adviser to Vice President Richard Nixon and the dissertation supervisor of Henry Kissinger — and, as such, had a key unrecognized role in bringing the two together. I learned about the problems of nuclear deterrence from Elliott five years before Kissinger was to make the arguments in public. But most of all Elliott delighted in teaching a young boy from the California desert the insider's perspective on how Washington politics really worked. Others also come to mind. Talcott Parsons and Barrington Moore infused Soviet studies at Harvard with a developmental perspective. I took courses from Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, and was the teaching assistant for Marshall Shulman, who was to become the adviser on the Soviet Union to Cyrus Vance, Carter's Secretary of State. Never was I a more confident — or accurate — forecaster than on the problems Carter would have in his foreign policy when he gave both of my former professors a key role in his Administration. Yet, I learned an enormous amount from the conflicting perspectives of the two.”
Legacy
Academic work
Through the 1990s Hough worked extensively to secure large research grants to support the research of the next generation of scholars, many of whom were fellows at The Center for East West Trade, Investment, and Communications at Duke. Those younger scholars, many of whom worked on the issues of Post-Soviet nationalities, included Dominique Arel, Ronald Suny, William Reisinger, Eugene Huskey, Cynthia Kaplan, Gerry Easter, Evelyn Davidheiser, and Susan Goodrich Lehmann. His Center published the "Journal of Soviet Nationalities" and hosted the Nationalities Workshop and the Social Science Research Center Workshop on Soviet Domestic Politics.