Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Horseback riding in Boyacá, December 1955.

  By the time the Hirschmans began exploring, the worst of La Violencia had passed. But tension still prickled the air. Most people preferred not to talk about the carnage—it was “hush hush” time, Lore Friedman recalled. Sarah worried for the kids’ safety on the streets of Bogotá. Travel on country roads could present dangers. Before visiting friends’ country homes or farms, Hirschman would inquire among those who knew more about security issues and the state of the war. Occasionally, he had to deliver the bad news that travel plans had to be deferred. For the most part, partisan violence left foreigners alone—but not always. On one occasion, as the family ate a picnic in a field by the side of a road, a group of machete-wielding men approached. The girls huddled with Sarah as Albert poured on the charm to explain that they were simply sightseers. The men bowed and left. It was a reminder that not all Colombians were spared. More often the threats came from the bad state of the roads than human menaces. The indomitable Chevy would occasionally run into landslides, ditches, and washed-out roads. Passengers would pile out and locals would help the family push the car past the roadblocks. Albert admired Colombian resolution in confronting such obstacles. Daunted but undeterred, they would find a way across. One of Albert’s favorite sayings as everyone heaved at the Chevy’s bumper was “Échele con todo!” to the driver—“Give it all you got!” as the car bounced over the rocks and plowed through the mud. With the car on the other side of the impasse, the family would shake hands with their local saviors, dust themselves off, and climb back in the car to continue on their voyage.

  From Colombia, Europe seemed further away than ever. It was in these years that Albert and Sarah let the idea of returning to Paris go for good. The only real lifeline to the past was Ursula and Eva, with whom Albert kept up a faithful, if occasionally intermittent, exchange of letters. To Mutti, who had moved to Rome, Albert allowed his letters to his sisters suffice; she could get her son’s news secondhand—though it was not as if she put herself out as a correspondent, and the one (and possibly only) letter that survives the postwar years is an epistle filled with details about her penury. Albert, however, remained a dutiful son and sent her regular checks.42

  Europe may have been out of mind, but not so the United States. From the blue came an invitation to participate in a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sponsored by the Social Science Research Council about scientific solutions to problems of economic planning in the tropics. Five economists with firsthand “experience” in the field were asked to share their thoughts with “scholars.” Other than its surprising effects on Hirschman’s career, it was an occasion noteworthy mainly for its emblematic dichotomy between field experience and scholarship. At the time, MIT was the hub of a lot of thinking about development, especially by Max Millikan and Walt W. Rostow. Hirschman had come to Millikan’s attention when he sent him the draft of his research proposal on Colombian successes in early 1954. Hoping his research idea could be parlayed into a grant, he accepted the invitation to deliver a paper as a consolation; it spurred him to formulate more general thoughts. He plunged into it with a verve he had not mustered since his Marshall Plan days. He read as widely as he could, given his miniscule library. He got his hands on some recent theories on growth and pored over David (Mr. TVA) Lilienthal’s history of the Tennessee Valley Authority. “In my free time,” he told George Jaszi, “I am now reading mostly background material for the paper I am supposed to write for the MIT-SSRC conference,” on which he was pinning more and more hopes. This was a paper he was writing for his “mental health.”43

  Millikan’s conference in October 1954 was decisive because it brought Hirschman face-to-face with a scholarly field for the first time, only to discover how “off” he was. At the time, although development was on the lips of so many social scientists, few still had the kind of direct experience that Hirschman had. More often, ideas about development conformed to what was soon called modernization theory and its foreign policy implications, which suffused the pores of MIT’s Center for International Studies. An outgrowth of an effort to design counter-Communist models of social change for poor societies—Rostow was committed to promoting ways to roll back the appeal of the “Communist disease” in underdeveloped countries—the center had close ties to the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. Eradicating poverty was supposed to diminish the appeals of radicalism. When Rosenstein-Rodan joined MIT in 1952, he brought more economic rigor to the group. His famous 1943 essay about backwardness and industrialization in eastern and southern Europe led Rosenstein-Rodan to urge a Big Push to overcome the entrapments of poverty. A liberal anti-Communist, he believed that a comprehensive and concerted assault was the only way to prevent specific advances from being swallowed up by the inertia of tradition. His thinking was to mark Rostow’s later writings and recommendations to various White House occupants.44

  Hirschman had only a partial grasp of the quickly emerging field. What he did get he found tedious. Beside, there was precious little empirical work of the sort he valorized. Too much of it smacked of more “theoretical” takes on what he was observing in the council. In retrospect, it was perhaps inevitable that the MIT paper was going to run into trouble. But we can see how it would anticipate a much broader debate and controversy about how best to tackle poverty and growth in the Third World, a debate that had precursors in the 1950s. But for now, Hirschman’s was a solitary, not fully developed cry for a different kind of key. On hand were some of the gurus of the field, such as Rosenstein-Rodan, Hollis Chenery, and Robert Solow. It is not clear whether Rostow was present. None were impressed. What they heard were doubts about investment planning and the economics of development, doubts that did not shy away from uneasy questions about aggregated analysis and unflattering words about the role of foreign “experts.” As career-defining papers go, this one was a flop.

  “Economics and Investment Planning: Reflections Based on Experience in Colombia” is the work of an author in a transition of which he was only becoming aware because he was coming from obscurity in the field and had not been stamped by what passed as academic orthodoxy. But these were part of the reason why his thinking was so orthogonal. His opening words must have burned the ears of his listeners as he warned that too little was known to draw big conclusions of the sort the MIT organizers sought. “Our abilities will sooner or later invite reactions of the type ‘But the Emperor has nothing on!’ ” The economist, he noted, suffers from the universal “desire for power” and often fails to “admit that there are limits to his prowess.” The result was “an optical illusion that economics as a science can yield detailed blueprints for the development of underdeveloped societies.” Hirschman did not disavow the economist; he simply cautioned against the allure of overaggregated analysis and the siren calls of “over-all, integrated development programs” of the type that brought him to Colombia in the first place. They might do better with a commitment to reality content based on observation from the ground up, precise understandings and models instead of a blind faith in general statistics.45 Doing so might reverse the insidious relationship between foreign experts and their hosts, one which was doomed to compound problems. Like any marriage, the misunderstandings came to light when ideas ran into the messy nuisance of practice. The expert blamed the government for sloth, corruption, and more. The host, in turn, binged on self-incrimination for being unable to live up to the “rigid rules of conduct” and lofty expectations of the planners. It was all doomed because both sides bought into romantic dreams spun of a Platonic plan that could not help but fall short of expectations. Not surprisingly, planning orthodoxies ended in mutual stereotypes about foreign expertise and local futility. Hirschman threw down a verbal gauntlet. Instead of a “propensity to plan,” Hirschman advocated a “propensity to experiment and to improvise”—a spirit missing from the council and whose absence deprived all sides from actually learning from experience precisely because the
planners were so convinced that it was not they who had to be converted. After all, they were “experts.”46

  With words like these, whose Hayekian harmonics flew over the heads of those present, it is not surprising that Hirschman’s foray into the academic world was greeted with icy politeness. But this was no tragedy. Though Hirschman flew back to Bogotá with hopes of future invitations to collaborate with scholars, he was not prepared to abandon his views in favor of more acceptable theories. In fact, the next few years rewarded him with mounting evidence for his dissenting hunches. Sarah captured it most personally in a letter to her best friend. Her father had been hounding them to leave Colombia for a “more civilized place,” as he had done when he took the family out of Lithuania for Paris. But Sarah confessed that “I wish we had such clear cut aims. We both realize that you should think of the future—make plans for the children etc. But I think we both somehow feel that it is impossible to know what is best and that the present is so much more important—because if the present is solid and good it will be a surer basis for a good future than any plans that you can make.” It does not take much to hear the echoes of Albert’s unease about economic planning in Sarah’s attitude to family prospects. Beside, and perhaps more important, “we have been very happy here.”47

  CHAPTER 11

  Following My Truth

  All human error is impatience, a premature breaking-off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing in of what is apparently at issue.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  Shortly after moving to Bogotá, Albert and Sarah set up a shortwave radio to keep up with world news. They huddled over the crackling set to listen to Adlai Stevenson’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 1952, where the candidate gave a memorable oration about patriotism based on tolerance and humility. It was through this radio that they followed the ensuing election—one of the most appalling in modern American history. From far away, Albert and Sarah flinched when the vice-presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, led the anti-Stevenson crusade, smearing the Democrat with dirt about Communist influences. Senator Joseph McCarthy piled on, armed with FBI memoranda about Stevenson’s alleged Marxism and homosexuality. The night Dwight Eisenhower trounced Stevenson, the Hirschmans joined some American friends and the Aldors to hear the election results scratch through the radio. Albert struggled to put an upbeat spin on the results as they came in—maybe Eisenhower’s victory will fortify the liberal wing of the Republican Party? Even he knew it was a stretch; the sojourn in Colombia, while exciting, would be prolonged.1

  While life in Bogotá was a pleasant adventure, Albert Hirschman’s mind grew restless. Work was rewarding, its practicalities stimulating. Colombia was also endlessly fascinating. Sarah and the girls were happy. And yet, the nature of work posed little time to reflect; as a consultant he was forever on the lookout for new contracts and practical solutions. But he knew that his activities lent themselves to a different approach to development than that emanating from the disciplines of the American academy. As time passed, he could only surmise that his audience before MIT’s notables had sealed off any further contact with North American social scientists and condemned him to a career of practice, not theory.

  In mid-July 1956, Hirschman went to the office one day and opened his mail. In it was a letter from Lloyd Reynolds, the chairman of Yale University’s economics department. “The Department has asked me to inquire whether it would be possible for you to consider an appointment as Visiting Research Professor for part or all of the academic year 1956–57,” wrote Reynolds. At such a late date, just over a month from the start of classes, this was a hurried offer. But there was no teaching involved: “Visitors are entirely free to work on any piece of research or writing which they may have on hand.” One need not stretch one’s limits to imagine Hirschman’s reactions. The timing alone is revealing. Albert immediately called Sarah, who was in Beverly Hills with her parents. The call bore an uncanny resemblance to the one that preceded the departure from Washington four and a half years earlier. This time she was less shocked than tentative. She felt at home in Bogotá. The girls were happy. They had a wonderful life. But Albert’s career had reached a plateau. Sarah knew, not for the first or last time, that this was a unique opportunity to revive the closeted métier of an intellectual. There does not appear to have been much negotiating: Reynolds had sent his letter to Bogotá on the 13th, and Hirschman accepted within a week. While this meant he would delay opening a branch of his consultancy in Mexico or Venezuela, he was “truly exhilarated.” The terms were quickly sorted out, and the Hirschmans began to pack for the year. Albert wrote to Tom Schelling to ask if he and Corinne could help find something to rent in or near New Haven, and the Schellings went house hunting. “It’s going to be a pleasure to have you here,” wrote Schelling, “and a highly exploitable opportunity. I’m awfully glad you accepted.”2

  Many years later, Hirschman acknowledged the significance of Reynolds’s invitation. It arrived as Hirschman was fighting local traffic, dealing with his clients, and “hanging around hotel lobbies trying to land new contracts,” he told his first chairman. With the fullness of hindsight, he added that “the letter of yours has turned out to be a principal turning point in my life. For me, it typifies what Machiavelli has called the influence of fortuna on one’s fate in contradistinction to that of virtù. Of course, looking at the matter from your point of view, writing that letter and making things work out were part of the daily performance of your work and duties—it was part of your virtù. From which circumstances we can derive an important generalization: one man’s virtù is another’s fortuna.”3

  Among the steps and contingencies in Hirschman’s reinvention, moving to Colombia was one opportunity for a new start. But in no way did it point to a life as an intellectual, though Hirschman was itching to do more than write investment memoranda. The Yale letter thus represents another such step, this time, albeit for just one year, to leap from utter obscurity on the periphery to the heart of the American academic establishment. No wonder hindsight seemed to string each opportunity together with a cord of good fortune; fortuna did indeed appear to be smiling on him. A common biographical device relies on turning points and epiphanies as pivots. But plenty of chances are squandered. Others come with expectations that never ripen. And most acquire significance only after the fact, which reminds us that it is what comes later that makes the turning point visible. As Machiavelli instructed his prince, it is equally important to seize opportunities and align the forces of virtù and fortuna on one’s side in order to convert an opportunity into achievement. It was with this Machiavellian esprit that Hirschman relocated once more.

  The family moved to North Haven, where they would live for two not-always-easy years. Certainly compared to the adventure of Bogotá, leafy American middle-class suburbia, whose social awakening from the blanket of 1950s conformity was still over a decade away, was doomed to be a letdown. By contrast, New Haven, where Albert had an office in the Yale economics department, was an altogether different setting. Such were the clefts between life and work that the Hirschmans had to cope with. But it was clear what this was meant to service: Albert had to write a book. Acutely aware that his previous effort to author a passport to influence, the by-now forgotten National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, did not curry Fortuna’s favor, he knew something had to be different about the second effort. One subtle determinant was timing. If National Power was written to explain a world whose problems had appeared to have passed, the trick now was to write something to intervene in an emerging problem.

  What came of this was his landmark The Strategy of Economic Development, written in no less of a fevered hurry than his first book, which thrust him to the forefront of intellectual debates about economic modernization, social change, and policy making in the Third World as it was erupting. France’s war in Algeria was bogging down into a savage struggle, and Indochina was the next frontier of Communist expansion. Meanwhile, ni
nety miles off the coast of Florida, insurrection was spreading in Cuba. Timeliness almost understates how Fortuna pressed her thumbs on the scales for Hirschman this time.

  That was one difference. Another was that his first book was written without an intellectual field with which to engage or parry. Eventually, a field would emerge to wrestle with lopsided trade relations, but at the time, National Power was an orphan even before it was published. By the time Hirschman settled down to write Strategy, an orthodoxy steeped in Cold War anxiety stared him in the face, and he disagreed with it vehemently. The beginnings of the failure of this orthodoxy, combined with escalating international tensions, gave Hirschman’s ideas some traction among North American social scientists and policy makers looking for alternatives as Washington found itself bogged down in conflicts in Africa, Indochina, and neighboring Latin America.

  Orthodoxy may be too strong a word to describe what was, after all, a new field; but it did enjoy the privilege of some basic consensus among some influential thinkers. With the rollback of Europe’s formal controls in Asia and Africa and growing nationalism in Latin America, it became harder and harder to pin the Third World’s problems on tropical climate, demographic growth, or inadequate resources, which had variously justified colonial interventions and policies in the first place. Nor, it was clear, did the Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund or the safeguards for a liberal trading order under multilateral commercial treaties provide the sufficient conditions for “development.” It was one thing to prevent the world from sliding back into depression; it was quite another to lift societies out of poverty. The result was a groping for explanations for backwardness and the search for policies that would lure emerging nations away from radical alternatives, including Communism.