Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Things were not, as a result, always so smooth in the quartet of Otto Albert and Ursula and Mark and Lia. For one, while Mark was not as critical of Communists as his father, he was not a fellow traveler. But Ursula was. Indeed, at one point, an agent of the Comintern, which had its eye out on bothersome exiles like Rafael Rein, asked Ursula to spy on the “counterrevolutionary” family for Moscow. Then they offered her money to steal documents related to Vestnik from the flat. This suggestion that she violate her own personal affections, plus the stormy discussions with Mark, had their effects; within months of her moving in with the Reins, she began to sever her ties with the Communist Party. This was a difficult break, which Mark helped cauterize. When Ursula finally told her Comintern handler that she would not do their bidding, she was icily accused of “petty bourgeois prejudices.” This was the beginning of the end of her romance with the party. The Rein’s familial love helped her handle what was for many militants an abyss. Otto Albert, never affiliated, had no need; he was losing any affection for Marxist certainties all on his own.23

  Loneliness and displacement may have fractured some of his bearings, but not all of them, and not completely; Marxism’s appeal did not simply vanish just because Hitler’s opponents had to flee, thereby discrediting claims about the ineluctable power of Theory. Indeed, there was a diasporic movement that sought to rally the defeated scattered around European capitals and breathe new life into radical thinking. The letters to Mutti reveal a young man still understanding himself according to the coordinates of German idealism. And when it came to his political vocations, Marxian social democracy also retained its purchase. In the evenings, after his studies, Hirschmann joined his sister and friends in reading and discussion groups, debating doctrine and prospects for their return. The debates at the congress of the Labor and Socialist International in Paris in late August 1933 focused on the “German question.” Kurt Landau, a charismatic Austrian Marxist, tarred as a Trotskyite (for which, in the end, he would pay with his life at the hands of Stalin’s death squads in Barcelona), had moved to Paris in early 1934 and from there blasted away at the German Communists’ fundamentalism, calling for a new paradigm for the Left. He “had an impressive way of arguing,” recalled Hirschman, who admired the ability “to deduce quite precisely what is to be done and in which phase we happen to find ourselves.… This typical political-revolutionary capacity for analyzing the situation, recognizing the parallelogram of forces and then to make a decision … that seemed very impressive to me.”24

  This was not the first time Hirschmann had a brush with figures like these. The repression of 1933 broke up the old SAJ, pushing its remnants underground or into exile, where it subsisted in semiclandestinity. It was in these circles of displacement that Hirschman nurtured a soft spot for men who applied intellectual prowess to political situations to fathom creative possibilities for the future. Landau’s captivating ability to contour his historical analysis to the crisis was on display more generally in the writings of German émigrés circulating in the diaspora. These included Erich Schmidt—who had mentored Hirschmann, Willy Brandt, and others in the campaign to forge a pan-left coalition against fascism—and Walter Löwenheim (aka Miles), the founders of the ORG. When Löwenheim had to make a fast getaway in the early months of Hitler’s government, he fled to Prague; there he penned a small book that would connect the strategy of alliance-building with a Marxist theory of history by making sense of the world that had been so shattered by the events of 1933. Called Neu Beginnen: Faschismus order Sozialismus and inspired by Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, the book was widely read among German exile groups. To Hirschmann, “Löwenheim formulated the first truly serious analysis of national socialism, especially because he distinguished himself from the orthodox Marxist versions in which Nazism appears only a new expression of late capitalism.”25 Neu Beginnen was the first tract to break with the schematic style precisely because it pointed to a crisis that was much more than a logical, inevitable residual of capitalism. The pamphlet was a centerpiece of a raging debate among Socialists. After the Popular Front period, initiated in 1935, and the start of Moscow’s show trials, it folded into a ferocious debate that transcended theoretical issues. As the fate of the Spanish Republic would show, the stakes were deeply political as well.

  The standard Communist line was altogether too unidimensional and dogmatic for Hirschmann’s tastes. What he had liked so much about Lenin’s 1917 writings was the grappling with actual political events and the seizing of opportunities. Neu Beginnen had the same appeal and became a touchstone in an increasingly acrimonious debate among émigrés. Indeed, as Otto Albert, Ursula, Lia, and Mark discussed the work and identified with its injunctive style, it added fuel to the debates in the Rein household; Rafael was not at all swayed by its voluntarist message. Though well intended, the view that Social Democrats and Communists could bury past enmities was condemned to crash against Stalin’s Manicheanism. For Mark and Rafael, son and father, Neu Beginnen was the source of much discussion.

  It is worth dwelling a bit more on the text because for Hirschmann it was more than a strategic manifesto. It was also an analytical template that reappears with similar overtones in his later writings about crises—his own effort to come to terms with the origins of fascism in Germany, explanations of authoritarianism in Latin America, and his analyses of the crisis of the welfare state. Neu Beginnen was a remarkably astute appraisal of the crisis and at times devastatingly honest criticism of the Left. In many respects no less Marxist than the orthodoxies it sought to challenge, it called upon readers to abandon the pipe dream that Nazism was just some momentary blip of capitalism en route to revolution. Rather, Nazism, as a variant of fascism, was a full-blown model that sought to resolve the underlying contradictions of capitalism, which the Depression laid bare. The result: all hopes for a “spontaneous” uprising of the working classes and a reopening for the refugees to go home were starry-eyed. They had to deal with some realities: Hitler’s regime was pulling capitalism from the crisis, which the Weimar Republic could not. Miles went further, suggesting a “tendency”—evidenced in Hungary, Spain, England, and France itself—to replace democratic forms of the state with fascist ones. This wave had to be taken seriously in order to stop it. The opposition had to start by putting aside all fundamentalist convictions that History was on the side of socialism. It had to defend democracy and restore socialism’s working-class agenda. “Fascist capitalism,” like the “democratic capitalism” it was eclipsing, had to be overthrown; it would not fall of its own accord.26 Scarcely a few months since Hitler’s seizure of power, here was an effort to do more than take stock; it was to take responsibility for a crisis that left progressives far worse off than they were before it began. They could not console themselves with bromides about History being on their side.

  The manifesto was more important to Hirschmann as a model of analysis than as a roadmap for political practice. The organizational following of ORG was never very large (its numbers probably never surpassed 300), though it had chapters in most main German cities; those were eventually exterminated by 1935. Thereafter, ORG survived mainly in exile—Prague, Amsterdam, London, and Paris—and without ballast in Germany, becoming better known as the New Beginning movement, after the foundational booklet. For all the ferment and excitement, politics remained an abstract vocation; there was no party, no militancy for it to sire, and no way of putting this new “theory” into practice. That would change with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936. But for the time being, politics was confined to intriguing about what to do next and with whom to do it; to Hirschmann this “debate” was almost as sterile as his HEC courses. Meetings, especially where Communists were present, invariably began with the ritualistic pieties: “Comrades, let’s talk first sachlich and then persönlich (first objectively and then subjectively).” Invariably, “whether and how to align with Communists” became the end point of many discussions, which spun in circles as long as one
side of the new coalition saw the others through the epigrams of “bourgeois,” “deviationist,” “Trostkyist,” “counterrevolutionary,” and countless other forms of opprobrium.27 The debate was one-sided and endless. In a way, this suited Hirschmann, not because he was fond of being tarred, but because he was already yearning for a new intellectual repertoire. He was tiring of the circularity of émigré ways and obsessions. The language that once seemed so illuminating was starting to feel incarcerating. When it came time for his eighteenth birthday, Paris’ famous grisaille parted to let the sun beam through; Hirschmann preferred to enjoy it alone, finding a spot in the Luxembourg Gardens to remember his father, to digest a letter from Mutti, and especially to read some Dostoevsky “in peace.” He ate lunch by himself at a student bistro on Saint Michel, walked back to the gardens until dinner, when he picked up Ursula and they splurged at a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées.28

  What shaped the disenchantment with old ways of thinking was above all the growing sense that Communists made more than just uncomfortable bedfellows; they made bad ones. He had seen enough duplicity and tolerated enough dogma; Rafael Rein’s wisdom was seeping through. But so was Hirschmann’s recognition that Communists were happy to live with a yawning gap between their claims to revolutionary purity and their ability to muster resistance. Ursula’s memoir recounts that her brother had less and less patience for the party’s hard line. Hugo, a fellow student in her Parisian cell and a Stalin devotee, depleted everyone’s forbearance with his ad hominem and ritual tales of heroic deeds by the true believers in Germany. One day, a slighter older man—also a German émigré—met with the cell and witnessed one of Hugo’s performances, as well as Otto Albert and Ursula’s skeptical queries and criticisms. After the meeting, this man introduced himself as Heinrich and asked them about their “bellyaches” (the euphemism for doubts about the party line). Otto Albert, familiar with the expression, feigned ignorance; he had no interest in pursuing the discussion further. So, Heinrich indulged the teenager and asked point blank if both of them had difficulties with the party. They both replied, “Yes.” Heinrich nodded charitably and explained that he could “help comrades” restore their faith in the party with “prolonged conversations.” He was one of the party’s intellectual fixers. Ursula was less bothered by the patronizing attitude and was still at that stage of struggling with her beliefs. Her brother, however, was never retrievable, and the supposition that he was a young, impressionable naïf, struck him as offensive; thereafter, he referred to Heinrich disdainfully as The Man.

  The Man persisted, so the siblings agreed to accompany Heinrich on long walks and endured his sermons on the Russian Revolution, Lenin, the role of exile militants. Otto Albert’s patience eventually ran out—and he stopped appearing, sending in his vote of no confidence in absentia. This, as it turned out, suited The Man fine, since he was more interested in Ursula anyway. Alone with her, he was prepared not only to share his party pieties but also to profess his love for her. Once again, Ursula got herself caught up in an awkward romance of entangled love and ideology, which ended, like so many precursors, with a distraught, heart-broken suitor. Many years later, Heinrich surfaced once more in New York, as Heinrich Blücher, the husband of Hannah Arendt; the years had passed, but the outward affection for didactic certainties had not. In Paris, Blücher had succeeded in confirming many of Hirschmann’s doubts about Communism; three decades later, it struck Hirschman that the air of conviction that hovered over Blücher and Arendt, and to which Americans were flocking in search of answers, had still not lifted.29

  At this point, a determinate force entered his life. It came via Ursula, who, as Otto Albert turned more reclusive, became more and more his sole source of companionship. In the spring of 1935, two years into Otto Albert’s sojourn in Paris, Ursula was clearly at a fundamental crossroads. Her romance with Mark Rein had never been a stable one, and it eventually gave way to a close friendship, though Mark himself never quite relinquished hopes of a rekindled love, which made Ursula feel awkward living under the same roof. Then the affair with Blücher was knotty and short-lived. Through friends, Ursula was introduced to Renzo Guia, a flamboyant and ebullient leftist from Turin, who in turn was introduced to OA. Guia became their tutor in Italian. But it was more than language he taught; Guia immediately disarmed Ursula with his humor and irreverence. He made fun of her Communist pieties, which brought forth his peals of laughter. This infected her—and she could not go back to the sobriety and certainty of her cell meetings and their rituals without smiling and shaking her head. Guia also told her about his own political affiliations, which he also conveyed to Otto Albert, who found them much more appealing than the old Germanic wardrobe he was shedding. At first, Guia struck Ursula as unserious—but Otto Albert found the humor—the dismissal of leftist conventions of highbrow moralism, “false activism,” and sterile polemics—instantly liberating. When Ursula once insisted that individual acts of resistance violated the norms of being “useful to the movement,” that it was better to wait for “objective conditions” to be ripe for action, Guia laughed back: “How important your language is for you! There is more value in one who rises and speaks out than in all your wise net of illegals [referring to refugees] who don’t open their mouths but murmur the news into each other’s ears.” Then came a fatal jab. When Ursula explained that the working class was defining the premises of revolutionary actions, he reminded her of the history of passivity wrapped in theory: “To hell with your working class! It seems to me the moment has come to lose a bit of faith.… Twelve million organized Socialists and Communists, the most powerful working class movement in Europe … then comes Hitler and all stand still, nobody moves! Is that your discipline? What is it worth?”30

  Otto Albert did not need a direct challenge to be moved by Guia’s action-oriented philosophy. Though Guia’s voluntarism would lead him to the tomb of the Spanish Civil War, where a Falangist bomb would kill him, there was a whole philosophy and movement behind it, called Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty), founded by Italian exiles in Paris in 1929 and whose intellects would soon occupy the space for Hirschmann that was once reserved for German idealism. But it was not Guia himself who would prove the determining influence.

  To begin with, what prompted this interest in Italian? It was Ursula. Stuck in a morass of romantic and ideological impasses, she was withdrawing from the émigré circles. The prospects for returning to Berlin were dimming completely. At least her brother could immerse himself in Dostoevsky and his studies. These were not options for Ursula. In the spring of 1935, she wrote a confessional letter to Eugenio Colorni, in whose Berlin hotel room she and Otto Albert had composed their clandestine broadsheet in their final days of resistance to Hitler. Colorni was now in Trieste, a professor in a lyceum for women. This afforded him the time to write his major work on Leibnitz while frequenting the city’s cafes to join in the discussions with antifascist friends and colleagues, such as Bruno and Gino Pincherle and Giorgio Radetti. Behind the scenes, he was also active in the Italian Socialist Party, which was having some of the same kinds of debates as its German cousin. He was also engaged to marry the daughter of a well-to-do local Jewish family. Ursula’s letter, whose precise motives remain unclear, was potent enough to overturn Colorni’s plans. He replied with an invitation for her to visit Trieste, which she accepted immediately. By April, she was on his doorstep; within days they were in love and Colorni’s wedding was off. Ursula eventually returned to Paris, and from there a torrid exchange of letters ensued; Colorni visited Paris and introduced Ursula and Otto Albert to his exiled friends. OA was swept away by Eugenio’s warmth, liveliness, and the fresh air he brought to what was becoming an increasingly stultified milieu. Ursula wrote Eugenio upon his return to Trieste to convey how much “OA would like to be with you, it is strange how he says this and not I.”31

  Colorni quickly became the colligative force in the Hirschmanns’ lives—Ursula’s, Otto Albert’s, and even the young Eva’s.
Attractive, full of joy, a dispenser of uplifting and positive advice, a contrast to the gloom that prevailed over German exile circles, he was the person to whom they turned, as Eva put it.32 That summer, Ursula and Otto Albert joined Colorni at the family resort at Forte dei Marmi on the Tuscan coast, a two-story villa with marvelous gardens, tennis courts, and giant fig tree under which siblings, cousins, and their children would gather to eat and talk. There were also a lot of meetings: friends—as well as political coconspirators—would converge from Milan. Some of these gatherings would retreat from the fig tree to meet behind closed doors. Eva also joined the vacationing circle briefly, seeing her brother and sister for the first time after so many years apart. A photograph shows a teenage Eva shouldering her beaming brother. It was over the course of the summer vacations, on the Tuscan beaches and in the town’s small cafes, that Otto Albert and Eugenio would spend hours in conversation. Around the same time, Colorni proposed to Ursula; they were married in Milan in December. The family was acquiring a new centripetal force. In the course of a few months, Colorni gave the Hirschmanns a whole new set of personal, political, and, for Otto Albert, intellectual coordinates.33