Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  No sooner had the ink dried on Strategy than Hirschman was summoned by Norman Buchanan at the Rockefeller Foundation. Buchanan’s desk was piling up with overtures from Raúl Prebisch and Victor Urquidi from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, the ambitious Jorge Mendez, director of the economics department at the University of Los Andes in Colombia, and the troupe of modernization theorists like Max Millikan and Everett Hagen from MIT, who were keen to promote links with peers south of the border. Buchanan wanted guidance and asked Hirschman to draft a confidential report on how North American scholars were approaching development.

  Hirschman offered a census of the field. The early part of the summer of 1958 was spent reading and consulting with colleagues at the World Bank, Harvard, MIT, and other universities. Then he penned his views of the state of the art. “The field of economic development,” concluded Hirschman, “is in danger of becoming stale.” Though prodigious, it ran the risk of covering everything and therefore saying nothing. Most economists in the field were concerned with taxonomies and definitions, when the conceptual work had to begin elsewhere. The missing piece was rather a “dominating analytical structure, of some ‘General Theory’ of development which could provide a focal point for theoretical discussion and empirical verification.” Second, it needed a lot more description and empirical evaluation. He called for a combination of new theoretical exploration and deep familiarity with cases.3

  Hirschman was positioning himself as an exhibit without making it evident. He concluded by volunteering “Some Suggestions for Research on Comparative Development.” In laying the groundwork, in the form of reports to his benefactors, for an extended, ambitious, personal research agenda, he hoped it would guide him through the coming years. If anyone had doubts about what he wanted to do, these were laid to rest. The unemployed economist concluded that it would take only one economist and two assistants with “two to three years for a research team” to compile the data and conduct the analysis. “Few universities professors can obtain this kind of leave,” he nudged. “Many would consider it undignified to ‘bury’ themselves for a considerable period of time in any single underdeveloped country.”4 The method appealed to his taste for the heroic field-worker, a character coming into full bloom with the anthropologist who observed processes in the open (as opposed to the closed laboratory).5

  It the end, it was all mothballed. Hirschman’s booster, Norman Buchanan, died suddenly that summer. Still, the field beckoned, at the very least to resist familiar academic temptations of “la rage de vouloir conclure” as Flaubert put it, the urge to theorize and explain all for its own sake.

  As the academic year 1958 drew to a close, Hirschman was staring unemployment in the face. It looked like the family would have to pack their bags and return to Bogotá. Instead, they packed their bags for California. At Yale, Hirschman had gotten to know the brilliant, iconoclastic political scientist, Charles (Ed) Lindblom. Lindblom saw a kindred spirit in Hirschman. Not without some hustling abilities of his own, Lindblom had arranged with the RAND Corporation for Albert to join him for the summer of 1958 as a scholar in residence. The Hirschmans installed themselves in a dark apartment with oppressive green walls. At least it was Santa Monica, distant enough from Sarah’s parents to avoid familial intrusions but close enough to indulge their passion for the beach and Albert’s handstands for his daughters.

  Founded after World War II as a research group to advise the Air Force, the RAND was conceived as a means of retaining its intellectual advisors after the war. With a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation, it became a model private, nonprofit research and evaluation enterprise living off government contracts and based in Santa Monica. The idea was that researchers should devise projects and collaborate to meet a burgeoning market for technical expertise when universities were only slowly shifting to large-scale research and applied analysis in the social sciences.6

  The horizontal office building surrounded by waving palm trees was open twenty-four hours a day for analysts to work around the clock. Interdisciplinarity was a key factor and a source of some pride, inside and out. Even its detractors, such as Harvard social scientist David Riesman, acknowledged its success at truly interdisciplinary work. As its studies increasingly stressed the complex interplay of factors in Cold War military strategy, the RAND developed a reputation for pioneering systems analysis. Perhaps the most famous work was conducted by Hirschman’s close friend, Thomas Schelling, who pushed the use of complex game theory into the field of war and peace and worked on his Strategy of Conflict (1963) at the RAND right on the heels of Hirschman’s final edits to The Strategy of Economic Development. In the era of the organization man, what the RAND could dedicate to research was, compared to most universities, very substantial.7

  With the globe moving beyond the two-world order, the RAND was quick to keep its edge and moved its sights to the tropics. Hirschman’s sponsor, Charles Wolf, a veteran of the Point Four Program ushered in by President Harry S. Truman in 1949 to promote technical assistance in newly independent countries of what would be called the Third World, was given resources and range to spot talent as the institution branched into security beyond NATO and into economic realms.8 Wolf, who had read drafts of Strategy, would go on to head the RAND’s Economics Division and author the influential Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in 1965, by which time the organization was cleaved between anti- and pro-war groups and acquiring a reputation it could not shake off as a think tank for the government’s security apparatus.

  For a brief, formative moment, the RAND was the setting for an intense dialogue between Hirschman and Lindblom. This would be a fertile, if at times fraught, partnership. They had begun to work on an essay together in New Haven. What materialized was a curious blend. Hirschman laid out his approach to economic development, and Lindblom outlined his approach to policy making as distinct sections. Then the pair coauthored their converging and diverging views; what they shared were doubts about the quest for the rational and completely informed policy maker as the cure for problems. They wanted to revive ways of thinking and modes of behavior too often dismissed as irrational, “wasteful, and generally abominable.” The collage of separate and combined voices first appeared as a working paper for the RAND in the spring of 1960 and later was published in Behavioral Science in 1962. A curious work, it is best seen as a bridge to Hirschman’s growing awareness of policy making and ideas guiding the development process.

  It was a bridge engineered of intellectual influence. What started in Santa Monica continued across an itinerant schedule of trips around Latin America over the ensuing years. Lindblom accompanied the Hirschmans on a long trip to Mexico in the summer of 1960 to conduct research for what would become Journeys toward Progress. After this, he found a way to join trips elsewhere, to northeast Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, often writing up extensive interpretive impressions en route.

  Already famed for defrocking the high priests of the state and their affection for technical components of making a policy or a plan, Lindblom targeted “the widespread tendency to assume that to solve a problem one needs to know its causes.” It made policy makers feel confident about their prescriptions but did little for the predictability of success. But it presumed an impossible degree of intelligibility. Like Hirschman’s urge “to prove Hamlet wrong” by showing that doubt could lead to better learning, Lindblom argued that the world’s problems were sufficiently complex that many could not be fully intelligible as a condition for tackling them—but tackle we must. When Hirschman and Lindblom got to Chile, they got an earful from rival social scientists and policy makers wrapped up in knotted debates over the basic causes of inflation. Solving this big riddle was treated as a necessary step to the “right” policies; in the meantime, the situation worsened and the debate ground to a heated impasse. It was a textbook case of how the grail of complete understanding could make the problem worse.9

  Albert and Ed Lindblom in Colombia, 1960.


  A “wrong-way-around” style drew the two together. One can see Hirschman, from 1958 onward, complementing his insights about disequilibrium and imbalance with an understanding of the role of perceptions and policies. It helped that Lindblom was as detached an observer as one could find; he had never been to the Third World and he didn’t speak a word of Spanish. Inquisitive to a fault, he came to the partnership bereft of preconceptions and eager to soak up what he could—from the profound to the banal. Throughout their trips, Lindblom pushed and prodded Hirschman to step back, to be more analytical, to develop and test hypotheses. Often, on the heels of an interview, Albert would be greeted by an extensive memorandum of analytical insights. Midway through the project, Ed wrote up seventeen “miscellaneous hypotheses” about problem solving in Latin America, bits and pieces of which one can see developed in the book that would emerge from the flow between the two social scientists—one the careful observer, the seeker of surprises; the other endowed with a sharp and restless conceptual mind.10

  What came of all this was not the once-envisioned book. Lindblom’s notes reveal the limits of the partnership. “In my last afternoon and evening here in Rio, we may or may not get around to talking about the overall plan of the book,” Lindblom noted, “so let me put down for what it is worth the feeling I now have that five narratives and a concluding chapter, such as you have been proposing, seems to me to underplay the analytical material that would go into the final chapter.” What Ed wanted was less storytelling for each case—which had been Albert’s preference—and rather a strong opening set of conceptual chapters, with subsequent short portrait chapters, followed again by systematic comparison and analysis. During the Chilean leg, he dictated a running commentary and had his tapes typed up and sent to Albert, urging a theoretical treatment that “free [the chapters] from the charge of being journalistic, how they can engage a social scientist’s interest rather than ask him to defer his scientific interest until the concluding chapter.”11 The two eventually parted ways, but not before Lindblom helped Hirschman to think hard on the delusions, illusions, and ironies that riddle the policy maker.

  While the pair sorted things out, Hirschman had his own concerns to labor on. One was the on-going effort to convert the principles embedded in Strategy into mathematical equations, something he had tried when he first arrived at Yale but suspended. Evidently, he still felt the need to prove some bona fides to his profession. Hirschman’s arithmetic was good, but not advanced, as measured by the standards of increasing numbers of his peers, and certainly compared to the way the RAND mathematicians and economists were formalizing propositions about the world in complex formulae. In fact, going to the RAND brought him even more face-to-face with the quantitative turn in the social sciences and revealed this gap. Hirschman consulted his new colleagues for months and experimented but could never satisfy himself that he could capture nuances better in numbers than he could with words. Once again, he abandoned the challenge.12

  The RAND also wanted Hirschman to contribute more directly to their security concerns in Latin America. Nixon’s 1958 “goodwill tour” of the region was an embarrassing fiasco, and the vice president skulked home from Caracas after nearly being lynched. Massive railway workers’ strikes paralyzed Mexico. Civilian unrest toppled military regimes in Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela, giving way to populist and increasingly nationalist governments. Finally, the triumphs of the Cuban revolutionaries over the course of 1958 prompted Wolf to ask Hirschman to return to an old concern: how international trade affected political loyalties, specifically evaluating Soviet trading interests in the region and the implications for US policy. Hirschman submitted his report in September 1959, by which time relations between Havana and Washington were spiraling downward and Khrushchev had opened trade negotiations with Castro. Hirschman urged American policy makers to take the long view: consider the potentially beneficial effects of what looked like setbacks. Why not let Latin Americans trade with whomever they wished and the region’s new generation of leaders develop voluntary ties with Washington? Otherwise, Americans would be seen as meddlers. Noninterference would also allow Latin Americans to see Soviet promises and rhetoric for what they were firsthand—inflated. The bottom line was not just antialarmist: gains from trade to Latin America from commerce with the Soviet bloc would promote development, and development would raise incomes and therefore imports from other countries, including the United States.

  What looked like a simple loss could be a complex gain. Examine the meaning of influence very carefully, urged Hirschman, and see that even an increment of Soviet sway might have the paradoxical effect of augmenting US influence. Fortuna est servitus, he concluded.13

  Seeing his prophesies ignored did little to endear him to American policy makers oozing with bravado. When Kennedy advisors tried to enlist Hirschman to the Alliance for Progress, he greeted them with interested skepticism. After a day at the White House with Richard Goodwin, the man in charge of US relations with Latin America who made the pitch for an Operation Latin America, Hirschman said no; he was wary of its “simplistic optimism.” Washington’s grand schemes brought back unpleasant memories. “It must be admitted,” he told his brother-in-law Altiero Spinelli, “that it is not easy to escape from the Establishment in this country; for example, after my rather critical article on Latin America last year I was flooded with offers to take on this or that job in connection with the Alliance for Progress.”14

  Two weeks later, the CIA uncorked a misbegotten plan to overthrow Castro with a barely clandestine invasion botched at the Bay of Pigs. Hirschman was horrified that the Kennedy administration would offer aid with one hand and covert operations with the other. Worse, the Cuban debacle could not help but make efforts to refurbish US-sponsored reform even more difficult. He sat down to pen his criticisms of the Alliance for Progress for the Reporter, edited by an old friend, Max Ascoli. He argued that the alliance improved on the mindless interventionism of previous years, but it still represented another case of the “misreading of the mood of Latin America.” Just as Soviet cozying to Latin America was bound to reveal some truths about Moscow’s peddled illusions, so too Washington’s lofty rhetoric stood a better chance at tarnishing itself. Do not be surprised, Hirschman warned readers, if Latin Americans are less pleased with a promised “alliance” (whose military overtones did not escape him) than its architects supposed. Faced with a wave of nationalist governments in many Latin American capitals, “we may well have to choose between alianza and progreso,” he concluded.15

  Before all this, Hirschman’s worries about his personal future began to mount. His leads at Rockefeller and Yale were running out. He had worked hard to get Strategy into the hands of influential readers, but the book would not appear until the fall of 1958. Now the RAND holding operation was ending. As far as North American universities were concerned, he was still a little-known author of a few suggestive essays with an unpublished PhD from an obscure Italian university. With two daughters facing high school and finally acclimated to the United States, he faced the prospect of dashing more than his own hopes.16

  Behind the scenes, Yale moved slowly to turn his fellowship into an appointment in the Department of Economics. Meanwhile, a prospect opened up at Columbia University. The economist Ragnar Nurkse went on leave from Columbia for the academic year 1958–59. In May, he accepted a position at Princeton, only to die suddenly of a heart attack. In desperation, Columbia approached Hirschman to teach international economics in September. With no other option, he accepted. Never having taught a class, he prepared to take up his first academic appointment with but a few weeks’ notice. That fall, Strategy appeared, followed by the volley of attention. Without much ado, Columbia rushed to convert his sessional appointment into a permanent one.

  One might have thought that this stroke of good fortune would have led to exaltation. It was Montaigne who noted that some of life’s greatest pleasures are those for which one is least prepared. Certainly, landing a positi
on at Columbia finally enabled this peripatetic thinker, laboring at the edges of being an intellectual, finally to combine a career and a passion and aim them both in the same direction. Hirschman was delighted. And yet, from the start of his passage into academe, we face evidence that he was not altogether resolved to equate being an academic with being an intellectual. Hirschman greeted his first faculty appointment with deep ambivalence about being the “professor.” At best, it was a job. When he got the news he would be going to Columbia for a year, he told Ursula that “I [will be] a visiting professor, but this time I will have to teach—international economics, international capital movements, seminars etc.—at Columbia University. I don’t know how that will be. I have never done that before, and I am currently preparing my lectures (Just started with it and think it’s utterly boring!).” A few months later, his mood had changed a bit: “I myself am quite excited about life here,” he said, confessing to being “still quite worried about my ability to give a lecture every week.”17

  Hirschman made few friends at Columbia, in part because his sojourn there was brief and interrupted by frequent trips. One was Dankwart Rustow, a Middle East specialist interested in democracy. At the time, Samuel Huntington was also at Columbia, and the two of them organized seminars together. Another friend was James Tobin, in the economics department, who, after he learned that smoking cigarettes was cancerous, convinced Hirschman to join him in quitting. Hirschman, not much more than a social smoker, took another decade to kick the habit completely. On the whole, however, Hirschman was marginal to Columbia; there was a miss-match between the institution and their new star. He was hardly mainstream to the discipline, so Hirschman opted out of the economics department’s activities; his closest colleagues were in other social sciences units. He did not even like his office; Albert switched styles and began to write at home, setting up a small study in the bedroom of their flat in 350 Central Park West. Though the seventh-floor, two-bedroom apartment was small, it was uncramped because the family had left so much behind in Colombia. But it was bright, cozy, and adjacent to Central Park, perfect for long walks. A photo of Albert taken in the fall of 1961 has him at a cluttered desk with his bibliographic necessities on shelves behind him, a scene of solitary comfort in the nest of a master bedroom.18