Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Thus renamed, the twenty-five-year-old German refugee ventured into America. Stateless again, he reached out to his contacts or kin. Not knowing it, he owed an immense debt of gratitude to his cousin Oscar, who had been his advocate from New York and had ensured that the Rockefeller Foundation was on top of his case. The train from Elizabeth carried him to Penn Station, and from there Hirschman took the subway to his cousin’s apartment on Park Terrace, at the very tip of Manhattan. There was also some business to wrap up. He cabled Fry in Marseilles to tell him that he’d safely reached New York and that he’d paid a visit to the Emergency Rescue Committee offices to defuse some of the tension between the headquarters and Fry over his recurring demands for more money and visas. No one had been able to explain the problems of the French side with such insight. When the meeting was over, Hirschman’s cable assured Fry “COMMITTEE FULL CONFIDENCE IN YOU. AVOIDANCE CLASH WELCOME. LOVE: OTTO ALBERT.”1

  While Hirschman was grateful to his kin and shared what news he had of the family’s various fates in Europe, he was less keen to make of his New York kin the basis of a life in the New World. While joining the many German intellectuals who would have such a decisive effect on American pastimes like Hollywood and on American science, music, and philosophy, he was less anxious to do so as a German; as in his first departure to Paris, Hirschman did not heal the incision from his past by gazing backward, fixated on the “German question.” New York was filling with intellectuals with just this obsession. Rather, once more, exile provided grounds for reinvention. Hirschman did not dwell on the traumas he left behind—and was determinedly tight-lipped about it with others. Rather, he sought out new opportunities. In America, he could become the intellectual he’d dreamed of being in Europe.

  America would yield mixed results—and not a bit of frustration.

  In the meantime, he was eager to learn more about the terms of his miraculous fellowship. A few days after his arrival in New York, Hirschman visited Kittredge at the Rockefeller Foundation. He was delighted to learn that his first stipend payment would be available by the end of the month. He would receive $120 per month for two years, and the fellowship would cover all his tuition at the University of California as well as travel costs getting there. A month later, Kittredge raised the monthly stipend by $50, so that Hirschman could remit funds to his mother, his dependent, in London.2

  Delighted at his good fortune, Hirschman also began the quest for opportunities beyond his two-year fellowship. Kittredge was only the first of a series of contacts Hirschman would make. This was clearly becoming something of an aptitude, not to say instinct: dealing with dislocation with a flurry of efforts to meet new people and size up the landscape, leaving behind trails of acquaintances he might later pick up; in short, creating opportunities for himself that might later come in handy. He spent three weeks in New York, went to see Washington, and renewed contacts with some Germans who had relocated there. He returned briefly to New York, then set off for California.

  The word opportunistic can carry the wrong connotations to describe what Hirschman was doing. He was not scoping the landscape preparing to mold to it by seizing the best of his chances. If this is what opportunistic means, it does not capture Hirschman at all. But if opportunism means creating chances, spinning good fortune, this is more appropriate. Some might say that Fortuna was on his side. Hirschman knew Machiavelli well enough to know that good fortune was also something to cultivate. Among other things, Hirschman had ideas for himself as well as ideas of himself, both of which had been gestating for years. None of these were going to bear fruit naturally. By the time he was bound for the West Coast, he had some fairly clear notions of what to do with the precious two years at his disposal. The Rockefeller Foundation budgeted for a second-class ticket to California. Hirschman preferred to make a bit of money by travelling third class and pocketing the difference. In addition, the foundation agreed to give him the kind of ticket that would allow him to get off and on board at will, so that the refugee could get to know the United States better and make contacts. Hirschman’s first destination was Chicago. He resurrected ties with Abba Lerner, under whom he had studied while at the LSE. An unorthodox thinker from an unusual background, Lerner was someone with whom Hirschman had a certain affinity; he was eager to get intellectual advice. Most important, he wanted to consult someone he admired about an idea he had been secretly harboring. Lerner was only too happy to oblige. Sitting in Trieste, Hirschman had examined Italian trade balances. He had also been watching German trade with Yugoslavia: Yugoslavia’s share of German trade was small, but Germany accounted for a large share of Yugoslavia’s. Then, in Paris, he followed the ill-fated attempts of the Intermarium coalition to thwart Berlin’s commercial ambitions. What role did disparities between countries play in international economics? Did large countries display a preference to trade with small ones, or were they neutral? Was this—as he implied in his reports for Condliffe before the war—a predeterminant of conflict and war? By the time he caught up with Abba Lerner, his concerns had billowed: was there an effect between commercial trade and political power? As Lerner listened to these ideas, he nodded. He urged Hirschman to explore them.3

  This was a seal of approval enough for Hirschman, who boarded the train for California. The arrangement with the Rockefeller Foundation placed Hirschman in International House, a dormitory for foreigners, “a home for male and female students.” He was struck immediately by the Bay Area’s beauty, the hills, the huge bridges, and the lights. Coming from Europe’s darkness, the sparkling lights of the three cities clustered around the bay were an endless source of fascination. But most of all, what swept him away were the libraries, especially Doe Library, whose great stone edifice, magnificent windows, long desks, and reading lamps indulged Hirschman’s years of thirst. Its collection “is stupendously good and complete,” and the stacks were open. Hirschman spent endless hours wandering through them, running his fingers on the rippled spines of shelved books. Interestingly, he did not rush to read the latest. He made for the classics. There he discovered Adam Smith and Werner Sombart and set aside time for more Machiavelli. “Of books I have nothing with me except for Montaigne in the beautiful Pléiade edition,” he told Ursula.4 Doe Library compensated for this sole, prized, possession.

  In Berkeley he became a curio, a condition that made him squirm. At International House, Sunday dinners featured tablecloths and candles; it was a special occasion at which those in attendance were supposed to participate in enlightened discussion. At one of Albert’s first attendances, someone asked him to talk about the situation in Europe; soon there was a chorus of calls “to talk about your personal experiences.” The newcomer sat there, with his handkerchief twisted in his fingers, nervously waiting for the calls to pass. “Everybody wanted me to tell my story.… They wanted to get out a notebook and began to write down things, you know,”he told an interviewer in 1985. “I moved out of International House right away because I couldn’t stand being considered as sort of a wonder of the world or something like that. I just wanted to be myself and … not to have too many contacts.” California was isolated from the tragedies in Europe. Here was a young man who was not just a direct witness, but a protagonist! “There was so much, too much, wide-eyed wonder about how it was all possible,” he recalled. Rumors swirled about the new arrival. He had come from a world of intrigue and plotting and arrived in academic paradise. He wanted to read; others wanted him to talk.5

  Albert and Sarah at International House, Berkeley, 1941.

  Not long after his arrival at International House, Albert queued up for lunch one day at the cafeteria. He filled his plate with stuffed peppers and went to join a friend who was sitting with a student of literature and philosophy. Her name was Sarah Chapiro. Petite, beautiful, smart, and with a bright, magnetic smile, she immediately captivated Albert. Her charm and intelligence would have been enough to catch his attention. But she was French, Russian, vaguely but irrelevantly Jewish, displaced like him.
From that day forward, they were mates, bonded in this new land.

  Sarah Chapiro, like Hirschman, had washed up in California an émigré from the same clash that had torn Europe since the First World War. Her route to Berkeley, where she arrived in the fall of 1940, was not quite as winding, but it was not quite American. A transfer student from Cornell, where she had spent a semester studying French literature and philosophy, she was beginning to learn some rudiments of English. While in Ithaca, she learned of Paris’s fall to the Nazis. She wept. Other students asked her why? “It’s only a city,” they consoled. But it was when she watched half of her classmates—a nontrivial portion of the Cornell football team—struggle through their courses that Sarah realized this sojourn was not going to work. She decided to leave the snow drifts of upper New York State for California, in part to be closer to her family, which had resettled in Los Angeles, and in part because she wanted to be in a larger and more diverse setting. Her extended family of well-to-do Jewish merchants had left Kovno, Lithuania, in 1925 when Sarah was four years old, settling in Paris, where she grew up in the lap of the sixteenth arrondissement. Like the Hirschmanns, the Chapiros were completely assimilated into a secular, bourgeois culture. They were part of the affluent Russians fleeing the revolution. Being an only child, there was no shortage of comforts. In the summer, the family went to beach resorts on the Baltic or in Belgium. In winter it was skiing in the Alps. Sarah’s parents put a premium on her education. At first she had nannies. When Sarah contracted scarlet fever, her parents hired a nurse, Ekaterina Lioubimovna, a highly educated White Russian who became her closest companion growing up and would supervise her activities and studies. There were also the special tutors, like the Russian literary critic who guided young Sarah though Russian classics and had a great influence on her. When it came to school, Sarah was enrolled in the Lycée Molière, not far from her flat: an institution made famous because it was there that Simone de Beauvoir, not yet the famous author she would become, taught philosophy. Sarah had the good fortune to be one of her few prized pupils. Exciting and charismatic, she rubbed off on Sarah; de Beauvoir bequeathed a lifelong interest in philosophy and existentialism, an influence that would later rub off on Sarah’s husband. Sarah was not, however, among those enmeshed in the complex personal labyrinth that de Beauvoir spun around herself. Needless to say, these compound influences widened the generational gulf between an exploratory daughter and her more conservative parents.

  Sarah’s parents struck a glamorous pose: her mother was beautiful enough to compete in pageants, and her father was dapper. Sarah’s father and uncle, business partners and best friends who took their daily stroll through Paris streets, rebuilt the family fortunes, with a special affection for the shady paths of the Bois de Boulogne and the alleys of the Quartier latin. But as war approached, Sarah’s father had a premonition; having endured pogroms and war in the Russian borderlands, he did not want to face more. In 1939, he gathered his family and belongings and set sail for New York. He loathed it from the start. All that noise and dirt! All those crowds! This was nothing like the elegance of their apartment and arrondissement in Paris. So he and his brother pulled up stakes again and headed for Californian sunshine; there they found a house large enough to accommodate two families in Beverly Hills. It also came with a swimming pool, where a future son-in-law would practice his headstands. In that quiet suburban paradise they stayed put.

  In Sarah, Albert found a kindred spirit. They spoke French with each other, finding in language some refuge from a culture of which they were a part but with which they did not identify. They shared a love of French and Russian literature, and Albert was only too willing to induct her into an appreciation of “the Germans,” especially Kafka and Goethe. Between them, they could heal the dividedness of being European in America. He also found a complementary spirit. If Albert was reserved, Sarah was outgoing; if he was “a little in the clouds” (as Fry put it), she was engaged. It did not take long for them to appear as a couple, to become, as one old friend noted, “toujours les Hirschmans!”6

  Within eight weeks of meeting her, Hirschman proposed marriage. She accepted. They arranged to travel to Los Angeles to meet her parents in April. There was other business to take care of, too. Shortly before the wedding, Hirschman contacted the Rockefeller Foundation to apprise them of the news and inquiring about an additional family allowance, which yielded a further $30 monthly installment to his stipend.7 He also wrote to Ursula, with pictures of Sarah, and got her endorsement. At first, she refused. Ursula was alarmed that he should so quickly set up a home in the United States and was not just a bit suspicious about this unvetted woman. Determined, Albert sought a rapprochement, slyly observing that “you begged me not to get married with an American woman—the accent it seems to me was rather on the American woman than on married life itself.”8 Luckily, Sarah was not American, a point which he stressed. Ursula was only too pleased to appreciate her brother’s distinction: “She has a baby face of such sweetness and kindness and such a surprising grace in her composure that I felt instantly like friends and related to her, and I wish you are always good to her and never make her suffer.”9

  The wedding, held on June 22, 1941, was a modest, civil ceremony. The best man was Albert’s old friend from Berlin, Peter Franck, now relocated to the Bay Area. Sarah’s parents, uncle, and aunt also attended. They all piled into several cars and headed for the Berkeley town hall. As they drove, they could see the newsstands with papers blaring the latest headlines: “GERMANY INVADES USSR!” Albert pleaded to stop the car so they could get the newspapers: “I just wanted to get out and read the news!” The wedding was suddenly a lesser detail. Sarah was more confused than upset—her parents prevailed upon Albert to focus on the ceremony. When it was over, they all went to dinner at an old inn in Oakland. The next day, Albert caught up with the events in Europe.10

  Being non-American in America was bonding; their secession from Europe resolved itself not by their imagining themselves in exile, not as castaways, but rather as partners of, and in, the world, who happened to be in America. Though they stabilized and comforted each other, the question of where they belonged in the world remained an open one—and became a current of their relationship. In the meantime, marriage affected how they related to their milieu. The union of these two displaced persons who found themselves almost arbitrarily dropped down in Berkeley reinforced the isolation that Hirschman was creating for himself. “I shut myself off from the immediate contact with the American world by becoming married to a European, and so I associated mainly with other Europeans.”11 “The first weeks of our marriage,” Albert told Ursula, “were spent in the most splendid isolation.” “With nature, Sarah, and books, I feel very autarkic.”12

  One thing Albert did not do was seize upon their union to disgorge memories of the past. In their isolation, Albert chose not to share many of his trials. Sarah detected his distinct reluctance to talk about his past and quickly learned not to press him hard. One might have thought that the privacy and intimacy would give him the security to open up; he felt no such compulsion. Though Sarah remained curious and mystified, the darker parts of his past were memories he would share—if at all—only with time. Some did, in increments, come to the surface, often prompted by reminders from Europe. When Albert received his first letter from Eugenio since his arrest in September 1938, he was both euphoric and dispirited. Writing to Sarah, who was visiting her family in May 1941, he exclaimed, “What a letter!” and told her of his longing to talk with Eugenio once more: “I have the impression that his intellectual activity has recovered completely … and he is formulating his ideas in physics and is sure that he is on a fertile track.… He then writes to me about Nietzsche, Kafka, Huxley and also a book on economics [Lionel Robbins] that he wants to discuss with me! Do you understand how much this consoles me, how much this delivers me from certain anxieties and yet revives the pain I feel for being separated from them?” He confessed that he was left feeling �
�enraged sentimentally and depressed intellectually.”13

  But if Albert was reticent to unload his personal experiences, he was not so about sharing his love of books. Sarah, who was studying philosophy, brought what she was learning to their home. And Albert—while leaving his political economy at the office and library—reciprocated with poetry. He would read or recite Goethe by heart in German and then translate it for Sarah’s benefit into French, the lingua franca of their marriage. Sarah had the distinct feeling that this was part of her preparation for being his wife, like the Russian doctor who could not find a wife and so became a lady’s man, justifying his dalliances with nurses by claiming that he could only have affairs because none of them had read War and Peace. Sarah would laugh, “So Albert took a terrible chance because he got married to me and I had not read Faust!” Listening to his adoration of Goethe, she did, however, get the sense that he was sharing a more precious disclosure than self-centered stories of his deeds and dangers. And whether it was Gustave Flaubert’s depiction of the curves of Emma’s body, or the psychic vocabulary of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary Dan gerous Liaisons, she was also getting an immediate immersion in Albert’s fascination with words; not just any word, but rather the mot juste.14 Among the authors they shared, a special place belongs to Gustave Flaubert; he was in many respects, their author. Between the Correspondences and the novels, Flaubert’s psychological realism and stylistic insistence on the mot juste deepened the exilic bond between Sarah and Albert. And for bringing Flaubert back into his life, Albert was grateful to Sarah. “I acknowledge you,” he wrote to his bride on the eve of their wedding, “for having fortified in me a rationalist element … for I have returned all your books [to the library] except for Flaubert, who excites me once more.” He explained, a bit elliptically to someone reading the epistle decades later, that Flaubert had helped Albert get over a difficult past: “The subject of the eruption of irrational elements (in the form of superstition) in the life of a young man raised in a species of skeptical rationalism (a rationalism that is neither solution nor panacea but the most relatively effective way of orienting), a position towards which one returns, more or less, after the crisis.”15