Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Working for the Institut de recherches économiques et sociales gave him his first taste of success. It also opened more doors. Henri Piatier, one of France’s leading statisticians read the essays, met Hirschmann, and brought him to the attention of John Bell “Jack” Condliffe.15 It is likely also that the Rockefeller Foundation’s contacts with the Institut also helped, for Condliffe was also a grant recipient. Condliffe, a New Zealander who’d studied economics at Cambridge, had become a leading figure in the Institute for Pacific Studies, based in Honolulu, and from there joined the economic secretariat of the League of Nations in 1931, where he wrote the first World Economic Survey. He was a vocal proponent of policies that favored a liberal, multilateral trading system as a necessary bulwark for global peace. As far as he was concerned, protectionist responses to the Depression were a return to the dark ages. One scourge was the tendency for countries to resort to “bilateral” deals favoring signatories at the expense of everyone else: the end of the gold standard and the cycle of competitive devaluations compelled more and more countries to two-way clearing systems and exclusive trade pacts.

  To economic liberals, this was a menace. The intellectual crusade to reveal its dangers afforded Hirschmann his first opportunities for paid research—and commissioned writing. They came thanks to the coattails of the practical, easy-going, and well-connected Condliffe, an important figure at the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, a fund-starved network of academics who were committed to working across national borders toward solutions for global conflicts, and an intellectual arm of the League of Nations. While it never lived up to its architects’ hopes of creating a global class of scholars committed to pooling their talents to solve problems, it did sponsor meetings and research. Some of these sowed the seeds for later partnerships. One meeting was the Conférence permanente des hautes études internationales, dedicated to the study of “economic policies of peace,” which was scheduled to meet in Bergen, Norway in 1939. The Rockefeller Foundation set aside funds to support research in areas of public policy that Condliffe considered as hurdles to peaceable international economic relations. One such hurdle was the controls slapped on exchanges of currencies, a device relied upon more and more since the collapse of the gold standard. In this practice, Mussolini’s policy makers had been creative artists since their exchange control system was devised in 1934. Condliffe asked Hirschmann to prepare a report for the Bergen meeting to analyze Italy’s policies and its consequences as well as a statistical profile on the tendency toward bilateralism. Delighted, he plunged into his research and drafted the memoranda. For the first time, he was receiving a regular, and not unsubstantial, paycheck. “I have found good work preparing something for the Conférence des Hautes Etudes Internationales,” he gushed to Ascoli. In the meantime, “my article on Abyssinia has just appeared just as I was not expecting any more from the Europe Nouvelle. Too bad because it would have certainly yielded ten times more in The Nation.” This was a little far-fetched but reveals a young economist already setting his heights very high in the world of letters. But these were not the only reasons for pride; Condliffe’s request for a profile of foreign trade allowed Hirschman to build his first statistical simulation of foreign trade, using his training in Paris and Trieste and applying it to international economics. “Étude statistique sur la tendance du commerce extérieur vers l’équilibre et le bilatéralisme” was the prolegomenon to what would eventually become his first book. It represented the fulfillment of Barrett Whale’s prediction about Hirschmann’s inclination to economic intelligence.16

  The looming war forced the Bergen organizers to cancel the event, but for Hirschmann the report was an opportunity to display his talents for Condliffe and to explore further the thorny relationship between foreign trade and economic policy making in a fascist country. Managing foreign exchange favored the importation of only certain kinds of industrial products. It also drove private domestic spending into state coffers. It was a system, Hirschmann showed, that worked. The lira stopped its slide and scarce reserves flowed into the military-industrial project of the government. But there was a price. The model did not solve the underlying riddle of how to square massive militarization and public-works spending when the export sector was too weak to sustain them. And the price was rising. Inflation rose, consumer shortages worsened, and Italy was solving more and more of its imbalances by relying on “clearing” systems (like special notes—bollettos—usable only to pay a trade partner its dues) that fostered trade blocs that shut out third countries. At the heart of Hirschmann’s analysis was a basic insight: exchange controls were not just technicalities or neutral responses to economic pressures, but also part of a more general tendency to “corporative control by the fascist government to submit all sides of the Italian economy to the State and its multiple para-state organizations.”17 His conclusion echoed Condliffe’s reasons to convoke the conference, to show that the model was sustainable at the expense of Italy’s trade partners, especially its colonies—which only bent Italy more toward expansionism and aggression. Autarky “inspires, in the first place, military considerations;” economic policy making furnished a premise for empire.

  The essay thus pointed to a direct connection between the economics of the Italian dictatorship and expansionism into Africa. It appears in his first articles, but here Hirschmann took his analysis a step further, to argue that Italy was not exceptional. The invasion of Abyssinia was part of a more general propensity for industrial dictatorships to solve their economic problems by oppressing trading partners near and far. In this sense, policies were more than technicalities “provoked by some kind of endogenous tendency for trade controls, [they] were controls to serve as an instrument to realize policies decided outside and above them (en dehors et au-dessus de lui).”18 This analysis of Italy’s exchange management system contained kernels he would develop in future years about the monopolies in international trade, national democracies, and world peace—parts of an intellectual bridge between economic thinking and political practice. We also see the early elements of a style—the pursuing of trails of small yet revealing indicators, an affinity for an experiential and practical economic analysis that was never far removed from political and ethical moorings.

  None of this took place in a vacuum. With his family scattered in different corners of Europe and harder and harder to reach, political events were hard to miss. In September 1938, when the concessions of the Munich Pact (which allowed Germany to take the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia) were announced, a pall descended over Paris. At the time, Hirschmann was working out of an office supported by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace near Vincennes, close to an army installation. Hirschmann remembered listening to Premier Daladier’s voice crackling over the radio as he announced the Munich provisions. Outside, the French army seized Hirschmann’s office building and ordered all employees to leave. Hirschmann had to sweet-talk an officer to allow him to retrieve his coat, briefcase, and materials; he was then escorted from the premises. As he returned to the center of Paris by train, he gazed out the window wondering what awaited Europe.19

  The inevitability of war marred the pleasures of personal success. But it was also a development he found fascinating and that pushed Hirschmann to broaden his observations about the economics of dictatorship. The spring of 1939 filled Parisian radios and newspapers with news of spreading fascism. Governments of the Intermarium (the lands between the Baltic and the Adriatic) tried to create a counterweight. The alignment of Poland, Romania, and possibly Yugoslavia could represent an economic and commercial zone that linked the Baltic to the Adriatic, in an alliance of Polish armies, Romanian wheat and oilfields, and Czech and Yugoslav patriotism, to cut Hitler off at the German-speaking frontiers. It was futile. Betrayed by Hungarian expansionists, in late February Hungary negotiated the Anti-Comintern Pact, which included Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Royal Hungarian army invaded Ruthenia, and on March 15, German motorized infantry swept into
Prague and barreled on to the Slovakian border. While it snowed on the Reich’s invaders, Hirschmann went out in the Parisian rain to buy his newspapers. He was concerned about peace, but he was also watching carefully the unfolding struggle for European trade and commercial power in the middle of continent; as the fate of an economic Intermarium buffer collapsed under the weight of fascist imperialism, the commercial and territorial struggle for the region intensified. Poland became the next target. To reintegrate the Baltic port of Danzig into the Reich and to make room among non-German lands for Hitler’s Lebensraum, the Führer declared “Danzig or War!” In May, Stalin dropped his long-time foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov. On August 24, Stalin shocked the world and announced a nonaggression pact with Hitler. Included was a protocol dividing northern and eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. While the full details would not come out until after the war, the partition of Poland between the two signatories only redoubled Hirschmann’s growing interest in the entwined relationship of trade, diplomacy, empire, and dictatorship. It also confirmed his suspicions about Moscow.

  France went on alert. On April 12, an act decreed that foreign men between eighteen and forty who had resided in France for over two months were allowed to join French army, as opposed to just the Foreign Legion. The same promulgation subjected “stateless” foreign men from twenty to forty-eight to the same duties as Frenchmen—a two-year term of service. Alarmed at German bellicosity, Hirschmann enlisted in the French army now that foreigners were not restricted to the Legion. He was a soldier in training when German and Russian armies invaded Poland in September, and France and Britain declared war on the Reich on September 3.20

  He readied for his second war.

  This one would prove to be a different experience from the Aragonese front, up to a point. On September 18, he wrote his mother to say that “all is well with me from a physical and moral point of view. The training is moving forward to make us into verifiable soldiers.” Two days later, the French government ordered that all male German refugees be interned, with the exception of those serving in the army: it was either a detention camp or a training camp. Hirschmann found himself stationed east of Paris, dispatched to a platoon of German and Italian émigrés, where “I am making some new friends,” he wrote to Mutti. His commander was “very nice and intelligent,” he added. They were allowed off the camp on Sundays. From London, Mutti sent new copies of La Statesman, which the soldiers shared. A photograph of Cadet Hirschmann has him posing with twenty others in his group. The German and Italian copains—mainly Jews and intellectuals who had fled fascism to find themselves trained to fight them—are wearing different uniforms, some none at all. They are relaxed and friendly, looking more like a young faculty meeting. OA closed his note to his mother telling her that they will be celebrating Yom Kippur. “I feel just as I used to in the good days of the Collège Français!”21

  When France went to war, it did so under some strong precepts. Military planners had been above all obsessed with a surprise attack from Germany and had plowed resources into formidable systems of fortification. The result was the famous Maginot Line, named after the war minister in 1932, who had died of typhoid fever caught while eating oysters. After receiving its basic training, Hirschmann’s company, a Bataillon d’Ouvriers d’artillerie, was nothing more than a work gang sent off to maintain a rail line connecting to a munitions factory in the Loire Valley, “manual labor” that reminded him of his “profound conviction of his ineptitude with this kind of work.” Hirschmann remembered that his officers had no sense at all of Germany’s military preparedness or strategy; his training resembled the one he had received in Barcelona—their guns did not fire, their boots did not fit, and their overcoats did not match.22 There was, however, some solace: given the short days of winter, he had plenty of time in the evenings to read Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir and to plan a “whole literary program ahead of me.” His favorite pastime was rereading Montaigne’s Essais. He told Ursula that “this is perhaps the bedside book—livre de chevet—par excellence, the one that would probably be my choice to take if I had to choose only one book.”23

  Postcard of Otto Albert’s French company.

  These were prophetic words.

  The high command was unprepared for a new type of war, especially in the rapid deployment of large-scale forces and the use of aircraft. In the end, German forces avoided the Maginot Line altogether and perforated the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes forest. The distinguished historian, Marc Bloch, a captain in the army intelligence, was still thinking about his lectures at the Sorbonne when “the storm of 10 May burst over our heads;” eighty-five German infantry and ten armored divisions swarmed into Belgium and Holland, and by May 13, they were already crossing into France.24 Two weeks later, they were rolling swiftly onto Paris. The government began to make plans to evacuate the capital; four days later the Germans rolled down the Champs-Élysées. On June 10, smelling an opportunity for spoils, Mussolini declared war against France. The next day, Hirschmann—not knowing just how badly the war was going for his fellow French troops—wrote about the sadness of finding his family divided by enemy lines. “Knowing now that we are completely cut off,” he wrote to his mother the morning after Mussolini’s announcement, “knowing that these êtres que j’aime que j’adore are living in enemy country this leaves my heart broken in ways I cannot even tell you.” Completely ignorant of what was happening on the front, he concluded: “I am doing very well here, and I figure I will be staying here for a while longer.”25 A week later came another shock: on June 17, Marshal Pétain, the new premier, issued a radio address telling France’s citizens that the fighting would stop. Then came an endless, apprehensive week of waiting to hear the terms. The armistice took effect June 25 with the Nazis holding 1.6 million French soldiers as prisoners of war. France would be severed into an occupied north and an “unoccupied” south, based in the city of Vichy.

  The sudden collapse of the French defenses sparked a mass upheaval. Eight million people took to the road. First came the waves of Dutch, Belgian, and Luxembourg citizens fleeing the German onslaught. They brought with them rumors of German raping and pillaging. Then, as the Reich’s troops poured into France, civilians bundled their belongings and fled in advance. Hirschmann and his fellow soldiers stood at the side of the road and watched the waves of frightened families. “Columns of refugees pass us by and we do what we can to relieve them of their lot—but these are sad images.” To make matters worse for Hirschmann’s company, word arrived that the families of some of the fellow German soldiers were being herded into detention camps. This led to a desperate scramble to get them released.26 “In this mass of people,” remembered one witness, “nobody could find anybody else. Nobody knew where they were going. People just moved on, and that was it. Towards the south, far from the ‘others.’ They fled.”27 Pétain’s speech on the seventeenth sent riptides through the French army, still scrambling to organize itself or conduct an orderly retreat. The war was over, but there were no orders from the high command as to how to proceed. Demobilize? Recongregate? Go home? What home? When it became clear that France was to be partitioned, many soldiers joined the mass trek southward to the unoccupied zone.

  Pétain set up his Revolution nationale government in Vichy and proceeded to salvage a bruised national pride, broadcasting pieties about “work,” “family,” and “national sovereignty.” But the realities of the National Revolution were all too clear—this was a puppet government. There was little safety to be had in the unoccupied zone, especially for Jews. Pétain picked up where his Third Republic predecessors left off—herding non-French refugees into detention camps originally erected as pens for Spanish Republicans in 1939. Radio Vichy spewed a bilious campaign against Jews and “traitors” over the airwaves. By September 1940, there were thirty-one detention camps in the southern zone. Then came Article 19 of the armistice agreement—a mockery of Pétain’s rhetor
ic about French sovereignty—which required Vichy to “surrender on demand” all Germans named by the Reich to its officers. The Nazis sent the Kundt Commission to scour the detention camps hunting for their enemies.28

  An even worse fate awaited the Germans and Italians fighting on the French side. Hirschmann and his comrades convinced their lieutenant to release them with fake military passes. Each got to choose their new avatar. Hirschmann chose Albert Hermant—it stripped away the aura from Otto and kept the H-r and man syllables. Later, this choice became embellished with the fancy that Hermant was a French Romantic poet—if so, he is so obscure that he was unknown. But it had a nice ring and under pressure was easier to sign with a natural flow of the pen. “Sauve qui peut, il faut se débrouiller,” the commander told his soldiers, and with that they disbanded, blending into the millions heading southward. Hirschmann procured a bicycle in Le Mans, ditched his uniform, and bought some clothes from a peasant. He followed the country lanes en route to Bordeaux. At Niort, he went into a backyard and buried his German papers in a tin can; now he was undocumented except for his bogus military pass—which was not going to get him far. The trick was to get into the Vichy zone, but to do so, he had to get past German checkpoints. A German officer stopped Hermant and ordered him to the nearest POW camp to rejoin his company. Hermant agreed, saluted his captor, and set off in the right direction, only to vanish into a crowd. Slipping out of their hands, he crossed into the Vichy zone, where he reached out to his only contact: Doctor Cabouat, who knew Hirschmann from his summers teaching German on the Normandy coast. Cabouat invited the runaway to take refuge with his family in Nîmes, a small town near the Mediterranean coast.29