Jennifer Hochschild: Academic Extrovert

In their professional as distinct from their personal lives, most political scientists who publish widely are either introverts or extroverts. Introverts research and write mostly for the benefit of their academic colleagues. They are masters of the tools of their trade, whether they be the relative merits of logit versus probit regression or the linkages between Machiavelli’s Prince and his later Discourses. The summit of introverts’ ambition is to publish in the APSR or one of the top-rated specialist journals—those journals read by, but only by, their fellow specialists. Introverts neither hope nor expect the influence of their ideas to extend beyond the bounds of academia.

Extroverts—or at least the best of them—are every bit as scholarly as introverts but altogether more worldly. Whereas introverts tend to select only those research topics that can be tackled by means of their preferred research tools, extroverts usually seek to identify what they deem to be worthwhile research topics and only then attempt to identify whatever research tools may be appropriate. Extroverts are more likely than introverts to choose research topics that they believe to be of broad political, social or economic significance. They are also more likely to hope—though not necessarily to expect—that their ideas will find a receptive audience in the manifold worlds beyond academia. Whereas introverts are content to remain in-group scholars, the more ambitious extroverts aspire to be public intellectuals.

2015–2016 APSA President Jennifer Hochschild Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government Harvard University

Jennifer Hochschild is, and always has been, a political-science extrovert, someone determined to sing songs of social significance (as they used to call them in the 1930s), to choose challenging and controversial research topics, to collect relevant evidence wherever it can be found (ideally, but not necessarily, quantitative), to write clearly and cogently and to address policymakers and private citizens, not only her fellow professionals. Like Aaron Wildavsky, Sidney Verba and others before her, she has also been, and still is, an active and willing collaborator, especially with colleagues whose careers are less advanced than her own. Younger colleagues agree that she never exploits them: instead, she grows them.

The topics she works on attest to the range of her personal concerns and commitments: race, class, education, immigration and, latterly, the roles played by truth and falsehood in American politics. She plans in the future to explore the class divisions that increasingly separate—both physically and psychologically—well-off African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans from the majority of their fellow citizens, most of whom are less well off. In all her research and writing, Hochschild marries rigorous empiricism with an awareness of large ethical and theoretical issues. Moreover, she never flinches from recognizing the existence of conflicting values, inescapable ethical dilemmas and what T.H. Huxley in the 19th century famously called “ugly facts”—facts that confound prejudices and, worse, slay even the most beautiful of theories. Confronted with ugly facts in Huxley’s sense, some scholars choose to avert their gaze. Hochschild may flinch, but she never shuts her eyes.

Hochschild was born in suburban Pittsburgh, the daughter of two immigrant families, though one of the two had been settled in America a good deal longer than the other. Her mother’s ancestors migrated from England to Massachusetts as early as the 1620s. Her father, a German Jew, arrived in the US, via Switzerland and England, rather more recently—in 1938. Her parents’ American contemporaries probably viewed the marriage of the Jew and the WASP as interracial. The Hochschild family was not especially political, but its outlook was undoubtedly liberal. Unlike most of their neighbors, they openly welcomed the first black family to move into the neighborhood. Like so many of her contemporaries, Jennifer became politically conscious in college—in her case at Oberlin—at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. She was a polite but vehement protester against the Vietnam War.

On graduating from Oberlin, she knew that she wanted to do graduate work, but in what field? To check out the possibility of specializing in psychology, she worked for a year at a home for troubled teenagers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. During that same year, she also attended her first APSA Annual Meeting, held in Chicago. She drove a boyfriend’s car from Wilkes-Barre to the big city in the company of Deborah Baumgold, an Oberlin classmate. Baumgold recalls “that her typical strategy [as a driver] was to pass a car, then focus on the next car ahead, speed up to reach and pass it, and so on.” Baumgold toys with the idea that perhaps that is “a metaphor for how she takes on challenges.” Fortunately for the two of them, they survived the journey. Fortunately for our profession, political science trumped psychology in Hochschild’s mind.

. . . she never flinches from recognizing the existence of conflicting values, inescapable ethical dilemmas and what T.H. Huxley in the 19th century famously called “ugly facts”—facts that confound prejudices and, worse, slay even the most beautiful of theories.

For graduate school, Hochschild chose the Yale political science department—one of only four women (two of whom soon left) among thirty-four new student recruits. Most of her teachers were egalitarian and supportive. A minority were at best condescending and at worst predatory (“Don’t be in a room with that man with the door shut,” an experienced female student warned). Hochschild was soon a staunch feminist. A male contemporary was Edwin Dorn, an African-American who later became Bill Clinton’s Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. She and he shared an office in the basement of an old redbrick Victorian house owned by Yale. “There,” he remembers, “we argued hour after hour about the relative importance of race and class in retarding our country’s progress toward a more perfect union.” The substance of their arguments has informed a large part of Hochschild’s writings ever since.

Her doctoral dissertation, based on a body of in-depth interviews in the style of one of her Yale mentors, Robert E. Lane, was accepted in 1979 and appeared, much revised, as her first book, What’s Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice, two years later (Hochschild 1981). In a subtle and nuanced analysis, Hochschild argued that, while a majority of those she interviewed favored equality in the political domain and had positive feelings about equality viewed as an abstract concept, only a small minority believed that wealth and income on any substantial scale should be redistributed from the rich to the poor. Property rights were deeply embedded in the American psyche, in the minds of the poor as well as the rich. In other words, Robin Hood would not attract as large a following in New Haven, Connecticut as he is alleged to have done in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire. This lack of enthusiasm for wealth and income redistribution, and even hostility towards it, Hochschild suggested, helps to explain why socialist ideas never caught on in the United States. Hochschild is robust in defense of her chosen research method, insisting that intensive interviews conducted with randomly chosen respondents over many hours are likely to elicit responses that “engender hypotheses in the minds of social scientists . . . flesh out the skeletal findings of the pollster . . . [and] may even justify rejection of some interpretations of survey results” (p. 25).

The author of What’s Fair? soon moved on, both geographically and intellectually. After relatively brief stints teaching at Columbia and Duke, in 1981—the year her first book was published—she landed at Princeton, where she remained for most of the next two decades. Issues of race and class, lodged conjointly in her mind since at least the time of her verbal jousts with Ed Dorn, and probably long before that, increasingly preoccupied her. Her next book, published in 1984, was entitled The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (Hochschild 1984). Far more than What’s Fair? had done, it directly addressed ethical and theoretical issues but also—boldly and unashamedly—highly controversial major public policy issues. In the 1980s, one of the major issues was legally mandated school desegregation.

The very first sentence of The New American Dilemma encapsulates Hochschild’s entire intellectual approach. “This book,” she wrote, “grew out of a policy observation, an empirical theory, and a normative concern” (p. xi). The policy observation, based on voluminous on-the-ground empirical research, was that localized, piecemeal school desegregation usually turned out to be useless or worse than useless. “Race relations worsen, minority self-esteem declines, black achievement declines absolutely or relatively, white flight and citizen resentment increase” (p. 91). The empirical theory that bit the dust was the notion that step-by-step incremental change, rather than sweeping reform, was the best way forward. On the contrary, Hochschild argued, incrementalism in America’s pluralist political environment made it possible for opponents of desegregation to take full advantage of countless opportunities for obfuscation, delay and the taking of half measures. Her normative concern arose out of the elemental tension between the claims of equality and liberty and the competing claims of majoritarian democracy. The former pointed in the direction of taking all possible steps to promote racial minorities’ interests and status. The latter pointed in the direction of allowing most American communities’ majority white populations, if they so chose (and they mostly did so choose), to obstruct or even veto radical change.

Hochschild’s response to these dilemmas was to propose, on the one hand, more sweeping and wholehearted programs of school desegregation and, on the other, the refocusing of moves towards greater racial equality away from school desegregation and onto the related issues of housing, employment (with far more in the way of affirmative action) and the promotion of black and Hispanic participation in politics. Hochschild’s words towards the close of The New American Dilemma were cautiously optimistic (“We can, if we choose, significantly change our racial and class structure in a peaceful, evolutionary fashion” [p. 204]), but her tone was gloomy. Whatever the content of her words, she was clearly convinced that effecting radical change in America’s racial and class structures, while highly desirable, was also highly improbable. In 1984, she would not have been surprised to be told that more than thirty years later, although there would have been progress in some areas, including in America’s schools, a large proportion of the issues raised in The New American Dilemma would remain unresolved.

Not everyone applauded Hochschild’s 1984 book. Many among those who would normally have been her natural allies took umbrage. Some African-Americans objected to her tendency—it was never more than that—to bracket them with other racial and ethnic minorities. Others objected to her raising class issues alongside racial ones. A considerable number had come to regard Brown v. Board of Education and the issue of school desegregation as totemic, as having come to symbolize the whole black struggle for equality. To them, any suggestion that there might conceivably be circumstances in which all-black schools might produce better scholastic outcomes for black children than mixed-race schools was anathema. A few of those who regarded Brown as totemic feared that raising issues of housing and jobs along with education might divert attention from their primary objective. Fortunately for her, although Hochschild has never relished controversy, she has never shied away from it. Inevitably, to engage with the real world is sometimes to collide with it.

As it turned out, engaging with the real world included engaging with lawyers and judges. Following the publication of The New American Dilemma, Hochschild spent much of the next two years preparing to testify as an expert witness in the case of Yonkers Board of Education v. the State of New York in which New York’s state government sought to prevent the board of education in the city of Yonkers from implementing an essentially fraudulent school desegregation scheme. Having spent months interviewing, mapping the city (in the days before GIS) and reading school board minutes, newspaper reports and other archival materials, Hochschild spent two days on the stand. She had done her homework well. Yonkers lost the case. The state won. She went on to testify in other school desegregation cases, notably a complex one in Denver. The experience yielded a book chapter and a number of articles (e.g., Hochschild and Danielson 1998a and 1998b), but a projected book-length treatment of the subject never materialized.

Cartoons soon began to figure prominently in Hochschild’s pages—for the first time in her 1985 volume, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Hochschild 1985). A man clad only in pajamas, sound asleep, stands at attention in bed while saluting smartly. “Wake up, Tom,” his wife says, “You’re having the American dream again.” By the American dream, Hochschild meant “not merely the right to get rich, but rather the promise that all Americans have a reasonable chance to achieve success as they define it—material or otherwise—through their own efforts, and to attain virtue and fulfillment through success” (p. xi). Among her principal observations—based, as usual, on an eclectic mix of evidence, including a wide range of survey data, census reports, Federal Reserve Board findings, educational test data, memoirs, essays, ethnographies, personal letters and telling personal experiences—were that black America is becoming more deeply divided than white America along class lines (“well-off and poor blacks live in distinctly different worlds” [p. 4]), that middle-class black Americans, despite their newly achieved higher status, nevertheless believe increasingly that the American dream does not really apply to them and that, while a large proportion of poor black people still do believe in the dream, a significant minority do not, with potentially dire consequences. “So far,” she notes, “most poor blacks resist the temptations of climbing the capitalist ladder through drugs sales, releasing [their] fury through violence, or simply withdrawing from all effort. But there is no reason to expect our nation’s extraordinary luck in that regard to continue” (p. 252).

Hochschild concludes that the American dream, like paper money, will succeed in uniting America only so long as Americans believe in it. “If the gap between praise for winners and blindness to losers, or the [dream’s] contradictory messages about equality and success, become worrisome to all or incapacitating to some, then the dream will lose its power to order social relations” (p. 256). The possibility of the dream’s losing that power would, of course, increase sharply if a larger proportion of poor whites became as alienated as many of their black compatriots already are—especially as, needless to say, there are far more poor white people in the US than poor blacks. But, at the time Hochschild wrote, that degree of alienation among poor whites had not yet occurred, and two decades later it still seems not to have.

In Facing Up to the American Dream, Hochschild concerned herself mainly with similarities and differences among black people and whites; but in one chapter she did her best to compare the attitudes of black Americans towards the American dream in the late 20th century with those of the millions of Irish, southern Italian and east European immigrants who flocked to the United States between roughly 1880 and 1920. Those “new immigrants” were denigrated (note the word) by the host community in the same way as most blacks in America had always been denigrated by the great bulk of the white population. At that time, one restaurant unashamedly advertised itself as “Pure American. No Rats. No Greeks.” But, as their situation gradually improved, the great majority of the new immigrants—and certainly their children—acquired or continued to keep faith with the American dream (in Hochschild’s phrase, “the great national suggestion”). In doing so, they proved themselves distinct from the large proportion of better-off American blacks in more recent generations whose devotion to the dream, as we noted a moment ago, has waned even as their social and economic status has waxed.

Why the difference between the two, given the seeming similarities between their situations? Hochschild suggests it is a consequence of the fact that almost none of the forebears of today’s black Americans came to America of their own volition, that they never had a homeland to which they could return if they wanted to, that they had no leeway in choosing their ethnicity and that, unlike the children of ca.-1900 new immigrants, the barriers separating black people from other Americans, although lower than they were, are still high. Black Americans’ lives were thus never wholly transformed for the better. Their collective past lives on in the individual present of each of them—a fact of which better-off black Americans are likely to be even more acutely aware than poor people who happen also to be black. Ever since Facing Up to the American Dream, immigrants, along with African-Americans and other minorities, have figured largely in Hochschild’s work.

Hochschild’s nearly two decades at Princeton came to an end at the end of the millennium, and, despite Yale’s best efforts to lure her back there, she relocated to Harvard in 2001. One early project in her new academic home involved studying the role of skin color, in addition to race, in affecting the life chances and identities of black Americans and Latinos. She and one of her graduate students, Vesla Weaver, set about analyzing every survey they could lay their hands on and exploring a huge body of data relating to thousands of black Union soldiers during the Civil War. In the course of three years, they trudged through dozens of articles in obscure journals, ran their own survey experiment and published a number of articles (e.g., Hochschild and Weaver 2007a and 2007b). But after a while—a long while—they realized that skin color was ultimately less interesting and significant than they had supposed. Far more important and worth more attention was the way in which the very concept of “race” was redefining itself, and being redefined, in modern American life. They changed course.

Weaver takes up the story. “This is what I love about Jennifer—she is dogged in seeking out the real story. She didn’t mind that we had spent years sinking our teeth into the idea of a color continuum; she knew we had scratched the surface of something bigger. I can no longer remember when we changed direction and largely abandoned the idea for the bigger fish, but I am grateful that we did. . . . The process [of working with Jennifer] made real to me, a young grad student, how much fun research could be. I came to look forward to the hours we would spend discussing in her office, developing new theories. She always had a little book in tow that she would bring out to scribble out some drawings of a hypothetical relationship. In those notes was an intellectual journey, the drawings of a great social scientist in the process of developing ideas.” The product of their joint efforts, together with those contributed by another Harvard grad student, Traci Burch, was Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America, published in 2012 (Hochschild, Weaver, and Burch 2012). The contents of the book’s subtitle testify to the scale of the authors’ ambition.

Creating a New Racial Order differs in one striking respect from most of Hochschild’s previous writings. Those were mostly characterized by a muted but pervasive pessimism. Although rays of sunshine might occasionally break through the lowering clouds, the skies over American society, seen through Jennifer Hochschild’s eyes, were almost invariably dark and appeared destined to remain so. But now the outlook, still seen through her eyes, seems a good deal brighter. In The New American Dilemma, published in 1984, Hochschild took it for granted that “Blacks and Hispanics are not . . . elected president” (p. 199). Now, a generation later, she and her co-authors in Creating a New Racial Order cheerfully acknowledge the election to the presidency of “a man plausibly understood to be either multiracial, Black, or a second-generation immigrant” (p. 4). Hochschild’s thoughtful pessimism has by no means been replaced by a simple-minded, thoughtless optimism; she and her colleagues draw attention to—and make no attempt to downplay the significance of—the gross wealth and income disparities in America, the grossly disproportionate numbers of blacks and Latinos who suffer incarceration and the possibility that new pariah groups, such as illegal immigrants, may emerge. As the events of 2015 have shown, black people in the US are still far likelier than white people to be shot dead by police officers. But the authors of Creating a New Racial Order clearly believe that creating a new and better racial order in America is possible and, indeed, is already happening to an extent. In the absence of positive equality-promoting measures, the existing disparities of income and status within individual racial and ethnic groups may well widen. Nevertheless, in the emerging new racial order “the better-off majority of each group will enjoy more freedom to define oneself, more geographic and economic mobility, a broader array of friends and colleagues, [and] greater political influence” (p. 18). In a word, race in America will matter less—and already matters less than ever before in the nation’s history.

According to Hochschild and her colleagues, one factor driving the most recent changes in the existing order is the massive influx into the US of immigrants from all four quarters of the globe, notably from eastern and southern Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico and other countries in Latin America. A large proportion of the new immigrants are impossible to define in terms of America’s traditional racial categories, and many of them are well-educated, prosperous and upwardly mobile. The simple old-fashioned dichotomy between blacks and whites makes less and less sense in a country where, in a cartoon image reproduced in the book, an imaginary restaurant called Akhbar’s can boast of having “Kosher Chinese Cajun falafels” on the menu. Long-time residents and new immigrants alike are contributing to another change pointing towards the emergence of a new racial order: a massive increase in the number of Americans who are genetically multiracial instead of monoracial and who therefore, like many of the new immigrants themselves, are impossible to allocate—and who adamantly refuse to be allocated—to one of the traditional racial groups. The US government now permits individuals, asked about their racial identity, to tick more than one box, and the US president in 2015, with a black father and a white mother, declares himself a “mutt.”

Only somewhat more speculatively, Hochschild and her co-authors go on to suggest that the science of genomics—once peripheral, now mainstream—has the potential to further undermine America’s traditional racial categories and the prejudices that go with them by demonstrating that for most purposes “race” itself is a useless or worse than useless concept. “What we’ve shown,” they quote one geneticist as saying, “is [that] the concept of race has no scientific basis” (p. 83). But, as the authors freely admit, the long-term consequences of today’s genomic research—and whether, cumulatively, those consequences are desirable or undesirable—are impossible to predict. They are on firmer ground when they draw attention to the fact that younger generations of Americans are significantly less likely than their elders to hold racist views, to think in terms of racial stereotypes and to avoid coming into contact with people of other races and ethnicities—a development marked among both young whites and young blacks, whose attitudes towards race and race-related issues increasingly converge. The authors, in a rare burst of almost unqualified optimism (their optimism is never totally unqualified), predict with considerable confidence that as young Americans grow older they will carry with them the racially liberal attitudes that they presently hold and that succeeding age cohorts will inherit these younger generations’ liberalism. Younger Americans, the authors assert, “inevitably engage with members of different groups whether in friendships and marriage or through jobs, school, and simply walking down the street.” “The impact of all this change,” they add, “will play out over the next few decades” (p. 138).

Until early in the present decade, Hochschild’s thinking, research and writing had focused overwhelmingly on issues relating directly to matters of race, class, education and their interrelationships. However, a few months ago she published a book that was relevant to those topics but not focused on them. It is a book that everyone remotely interested in American politics should take notice of. It is called Do Facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in American Politics (Hochschild and Einstein 2015), and Hochschild’s answer to the question posed in the book’s title is an emphatic “Yes.” Characteristically, Hochschild quickly promoted Katherine Levine Einstein, who had begun merely as her research assistant, to being her full co-author.

As always with any book or article in which Hochschild is involved, the argument laid out in Do Facts Matter? is subtle, nuanced and scholarly in the best sense; she and her colleagues always adduce voluminous evidence and seldom, if ever, cut corners. But in this instance the two authors’ argument can easily be summarized and has a certain brute simplicity. Like most of Hochschild’s other writings, it addresses directly, and then goes on to answer, the crucial “So what?” question.

According to Hochschild and her colleagues, one factor driving the most recent changes in the existing order is the massive influx into the US of immigrants from all four quarters of the globe, notably from eastern and southern Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico and other countries in Latin America.

Two groups of citizens are of particular interest to Hochschild and Einstein. One—the informed/inactive—comprises people who have in their heads correct information but who fail to act on that information in the sense of not aligning their other views and preferences with that information even though it is correct. A good example are those who accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change but refuse to support policies designed to combat that change. The influence of the informed/inactive may contribute to positive or negative policy outcomes depending on the issue. Hochschild and Einstein clearly have no problem with the fact that large majorities of voters knew all about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky but chose to use other criteria when rating his overall presidential performance. They are saddened, however, by the presence in the electorate of so many people who are aware of climate change but refuse to act on that awareness. They take comfort only in the fact that the informed/inactive have at least some incentive to align their attitudes and behavior with their (correct) knowledge. They are at least open to persuasion.

Far more worrisome are the misinformed/active, those who hold false beliefs—who believe they know that which they cannot possibly “know” because it is not true—but who nevertheless draw inferences from and are disposed to act upon the basis of those false beliefs. Such people, according to Hochschild and Einstein, are dangerous. It is hard for politicians and other opinion-formers to get them both to abandon their old beliefs and acquire new, more accurate ones and then to adjust their thinking and behavior on the basis of those new beliefs: “People tend to keep going in the direction in which they have started, and they appreciate and pay attention to people who agree with them more than to those who disagree” (p. 66). More to the point, widely held misinformation in the form of “false facts” is liable to contribute to the making of bad policy and to the faulty implementation of it. The criminal justice system is likely to become more punitive if citizens believe—and policymakers believe that they believe—that the incidence of serious crime is rising when it is actually falling. During the debates over President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, voters who were misinformed about some or all of the proposed law’s actual provisions were much more likely than those who were well informed to say that their views on the issue would intensify their opposition to those incumbent members of Congress who had backed the law. In the view of the authors of Do Facts Matter?, the misinformed/active “actually threaten democratic governance” (p. 86). The misinformed/active, they claim, are numerous, rigid and too often influential.

Moreover—and this is one of the authors’ principal contentions—politicians in a democracy, and certainly in the United States, have a powerful incentive to focus their campaigning efforts on the misinformed/active. The reason is simple. With regard to broad-gauged political issues, inertia usually trumps change; and, whereas it may be possible to persuade informed/inactive individuals to bring their specific policy preferences into line with their acquired factual knowledge (for example, to persuade those who believe in the reality of climate change to back legal restrictions on carbon emissions), it is far harder to persuade people who are misinformed that they are indeed misinformed and then to persuade them to adjust their policy preferences accordingly (for example, to persuade confirmed climate-change deniers to morph into avid recyclers and cyclists). Preaching to the converted is always easier than trying to persuade adherents of other faiths to convert to one’s own, and activating people who are not already activated can be difficult. And, as the authors show, preaching to the converted is liable in practice to involve topping up their misinformation—offering them, subtly or blatantly, additional dollops of misinformation. President Obama’s enemies propagated for many months the myth that he had not been born in the United States and was therefore not qualified to be president. They found ways of alluding to it even after Obama had published his birth certificate.

False beliefs are undesirable in themselves, and they are likely to have unfortunate consequences. Hochschild and Einstein ask how the large amount of misinformation that undoubtedly permeates political discourse in America could be minimized. They do not imagine it would be easy. One possibility—undemocratic on the face of it but likely to improve the quality of democratic governance—is for public officials to “seek ways to work around, ignore, or reject public opinion” (p. 142). During the postwar period, public officials across the US found ways of circumventing widespread public opposition to the fluoridation of water. Another possibility is to change the structure of politicians’ incentives, so that they no longer see any political profit in propagating misinformation. The authors suggest a variety of means towards that end, from publicly shaming politician-liars through making fun of them to the promotion of disinterested fact-checking as well as actually disbarring patently dishonest lawyer-politicians (as has sometimes happened). But under these and other headings the authors tacitly acknowledge that they write more in hope than expectation. They cite a variety of heartening examples. “Nevertheless,” they add, “we know of no systematic evidence on how much, how well, and under what conditions public actors change in response to efforts to reshape their incentives about facts in politics” (p. 164). Hochschild’s idealism has never been of the starry-eyed sort.

Jennifer Hochschild has produced an enormous amount of work in addition to the five volumes discussed here, and it would be tedious to cite all of it—rather like producing one of those theater programs that list all the roles an actor has played without telling the reader anything about either the actor or the roles. Suffice it to say that, according to Hochschild’s curriculum vitae, she has published twelve single- or co-authored books and monographs (including the five mentioned above) and that she has contributed forty-three chapters to edited volumes as well as publishing forty-three journal articles, with another five in the works. In addition, since 2000 she has delivered some eighty set-piece lectures in France, Austria, the UK, Italy, Poland, Canada and Australia as well as the US. Hochschild is not someone who ever rests on her oars. (That is just about true literally as well as figuratively. She is, among other things, an enthusiastic rower, often to be seen—alone or as part of a crew—on the Charles River separating Cambridge, Massachusetts from Boston.)

Professionally, Hochschild is the archetypal extrovert. She does not do political science in order to impress other political scientists. While upholding the highest possible scholarly standards, she does it to inform the thinking of as many non-scholars as possible: women and men who may be in a position to influence events, to moderate the prevailing climate of opinion in the US and to improve the manners and morals of America’s politicians. She gives the impression of being out of sorts with some of the latest political-science fashions, which appear to her to be more “scientific,” possibly pseudo-scientific, than political in the broad sense.

Given that view of the discipline, it might be supposed that Hochschild would not take much interest in the political-science profession and its institutions. She might even steer clear of them. But the opposite is the case. Hochschild has been unstinting in her efforts on behalf of the profession in general and the APSA in particular. She has chaired or been a member of some twenty APSA committees and served on the APSA Council in one capacity or another for seven years. She co-chaired the program committee for the 1996 Annual Meeting. Above all, she was the founding editor—many would say the founding genius—of Perspectives on Politics, a risky-seeming venture at first, now one of the Association’s most highly esteemed publications and a quarterly riposte to those who claim that political science has become hopelessly technocratic and inward looking. In 2006 she received the Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in that journal—which had so recently been her journal—during that year.

Unsurprisingly, Hochschild has been the recipient, in addition to the Heinz I. Eulau Award, of umpteen other honors and awards, where “umpteen” is some very large number. A decade ago the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association awarded her its Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, its highest honor, for her outstanding contribution to academia and society. The Yale citation committee described her thus:

Leading scholar

Gifted teacher

Promoter of justice.

Those few words say most of what needs to be said. They say a great deal.