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Comments on Professor Dallin’s “Bias and Blunders in American Studies on the USSR”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

John A. Armstrong
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In his article on Western studies of Soviet power, purpose, and policy—which I shall call Sovietology—Alexander Dallin has brought us to a timely reconsideration of the needs and prospects of our area field. Part of the problem is whether the “remarkable catalogue of hypotheses later abandoned or disproved” really indicates that specialists in Sovietology have been relatively ineffective. Still more important are the real reasons for our failures—and surely they are numerous.

Type
Notes and Comment
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , September 1973 , pp. 577 - 587
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1973

References

1. “Military Regime for Soviet Seen,” Neiv York Times, Sept. 22, 1957.

2. Isaac, Deutscher, Stalin (London, 1949), p. 566.Google Scholar

3. Maurice, Duverger, Les partis politiqucs (Paris, 1951), pp. 286 ff.Google Scholar

4. Deutsch, Karl W., Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, Mass., 1953).Google Scholar

5. Alex, Inkeles, Public Opinion in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1950)Google Scholar; Moore, Barrington Jr., Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1950)Google Scholar; Moore, Barrington Jr., Terror and Progress USSR (Cambridge, Mass., 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Inkeles, Alex and Bauer, Raymond A., The Soviet Citizen (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I believe that the last work, the principal outgrowth of the Harvard Interview Project, had been conceptualized some years earlier.

6. Hannah, Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), esp. chap. 13Google Scholar; Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1956).Google Scholar

7. Myron, Rush, The Rise of Khrushchev (Washington, 1958)Google Scholar; John A., Armstrong, “Toward Personal Dictatorship or Oligarchy? Soviet Domestic Politics Since the Twentieth Congress,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 2 (1958): 345–56.Google Scholar

8. Kuhn, Thomas S., Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1970), p. 182.Google Scholar

9. See the discussion of variant meanings of “historicism” in Eugene F., Miller, “Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry,” American Political Science Review, 66 (1972): 797.Google Scholar

10. David A., Hollinger, “T. S. Kuhn's Theory of Science and Its Implications for History,” American Historical Review, 78 (1973): 382.Google Scholar

11. See, for example, Marcuse's, Herbert Soviet Marxism (New York, 1958)Google Scholar. In his more recent semi-Freudian works Marcuse departs from this dominantly immanent approach.

12. “Russian Imperialism or Communist Aggression?” New Leader, June 4, 11, 1951, reprinted in Goldwin, Robert A., ed., Readings in Rtissian Foreign Policy (New York, 1959), pp. 662, 666.Google Scholar

13. Andrei, Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Aspaturian, Vernon V., The Soviet Union in the World Communist System (Stanford, 1966).Google Scholar

14. Following such writers as Roland, Roberts, “The Sociocultural Implications of Sociology,” in Rossiter, T. J. et al., Imagination and Precision in the Social Sciences: Essays in Memory of Peter Nettl (London, 1972), p. 88 Google Scholar, I prefer “sociological realism” to “behavioralism,” which (like “totalitarianism”) has unfortunately acquired an excessive polemical baggage.

15. Chalmers, Johnson, Revolutionary Change (London, 1968), p. vii.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 22.

17. While his approach is complex (“a synthesis of the so-called ‘coercion’ and ‘value’ theories of society,” ibid., p. vi), it is apparent that Johnson basically presents a structural functionalist theory of development: “Taking a cue from the biological sciences, social science has attempted to overcome this dilemma [lack of nomological laws or historical laws] by reintroducing a modified form of teleological reasoning—namely the logic of ‘functionalism.’ Using the concept of function, we can talk about the purpose of a system even when we do not know, or doubt, that it has a conscious purpose” (ibid., p. 46). For my substantive critique of this type of development theory see “Communist Political Systems as Vehicles for Modernization,” in Monte, Palmer and Larry, Stern, eds., Political Development in Changing Societies (New York, 1971), pp. 127–58.Google Scholar

18. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 33 ff.

19. Braybrooke, David and Rosenberg, Alexander, “Comment: Getting the War News Straight: The Actual Situation in the Philosophy of Science,” American Political Science Review, 66 (1972): 824.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Alex, Inkeles, “Models and Issues in the Analysis of Soviet Society,” Survey, no. 60 (1966), p. 3.Google Scholar

22. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 87. Hollinger, in the article cited earlier, advances essentially the same argument in relation to the “proto-science” of history.

23. Wolfe, Bertram D., Communist Totalitarianism (Boston, 1956), pp. 25–26.Google Scholar

24. “Political Science,” in Fisher, Harold H., ed., American Research on Rtissia (Bloomington, 1959), p. 65 Google Scholar.