Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  This marginality was tightly bound to Hirschman’s attitude to teaching. It was a necessary but almost entirely aversive task. From the day he took the position, he fretted, “How to do this?” One of his first steps was to find an empty classroom. He locked the door and essayed a dry-run lecture to vacant seats. The result made him groan. Practice makes perfect for some, but not for Hirschman. Teaching was a source of anxiety he would never dispel. There was something insufferable about the sermonic style that dominated the pedagogy of the American academy. The capsule of a one-hour lecture in which one was expected to bundle truths on a topic, leave the hall, and repeat the performance later in the week on some other topic violated his inclination to present students with enigmas, paradoxes, and ironies and to mull them as he did his petites idées. As a largely self-taught intellectual, the very idea of “teaching” was utterly foreign. Try as he might, he never got the knack. And he tried mightily, often rushing to a bathroom before a lecture to vomit his anxiety into a toilet. To students, the angst came across as distraction. He rambled. He mumbled. Mid-sentence he would pause, his right hand supporting his chin, his eyes drifting upward to fasten on a spot on the ceiling. Students would shuffle uncomfortably in their seats for what felt like an eternity. Sarah, meanwhile, knowing of his misery, would wait at home in a gloom she kept to herself.

  His lecture scripts provide some insight into what was going on. He would type out long phrases and paragraphs, possibly in the hope that writing out the lecture longhand would spare him the agony of having to improvise—that handy technique of the cocky professor. But then he could not resist the temptation to revise; he filled the double-spacing with scribbled edits, relentlessly striking out words and clauses and wedging his revisions between the lines. If the editing got too heavy, there would be supplemental passages on separate sheets—themselves full of strikeouts and revisions, which would condemn him to flipping back and forth between pages of scrawl. A paragraph of a lecture could be an interminable, winding affair. One of his favorite development examples was coffee as an export crop. After so many years in Colombia he should have been able to explain the case effortlessly. But no, a simple example consumed ten technical lines without a pause, embellished with multiple insertions and modifications. Then came a digression, as if Hirschman were engaged in a private conversation with himself. “True, but: …” he continued.19 All this with an old world accent did not help.

  Was this lack of preparation sheer uninterest? To students like Colin Bradford, who did pay close attention, something else was going on. Bradford felt like he was watching someone try to write out loud, editing his words as he delivered them, searching for the right turn, le mot juste. Indeed, many of Hirschman’s literary hallmarks were in the lectures: the call for new perspectives, the affection for overturning verities, a delight in inverted “stages” and turning liabilities, as students learned about Brazil, into assets. And lots of metaphors and aphorisms. Hirschman was, in effect, trying things out and giving voice to his twists and misgivings, which left truth-seeking students bewildered. Here was a man of letters thrust into the wrong milieu.20

  Those who saw past the style revered him. Richard Bird, a young Nova Scotian interested in the economics of poverty, took his course in the spring of 1959, devouring Strategy in preparation. When he entered the seminar room, a smiling, slightly absent-minded Hirschman greeted him at the front of the table, and it soon became clear that everyone had their copy of Strategy and had enrolled in the course to hear from the master of unbalanced growth only to discover that his charisma got poured into his text and not his talk. Perhaps his closest student was Judith Tendler, who entered Columbia in 1961 and would go on to become a close friend and collaborator. Even her experience completes a picture of a boring instructor, but nevertheless a devoted supporter and inspirer with ideas. Her memory was that she and many other students, held Hirschman in awe. They—Bird, Bradford, Tendler—took no time to realize that they were in the presence of a singular scholar with mysterious world experiences who preferred to explain himself with allusions to Flaubert or Brecht. Bradford was so smitten that he wanted to imitate Hirschman’s sartorial style. Little did he know that Hirschman himself disliked the button-down shirts and starched collars almost as much as the pontificating professorial bravura. But Bradford went to Brooks Brothers to get a suit of his own. One of his classmates, Robert Packenham, noticed that Bradford was starting to look an awful lot like Professor Hirschman! As Hirschman settled into the profession, he soon found ways to hunt down alternatives to the staid look without giving up any panache.

  Awe can distance. Even in the intimacy of a seminar room, Hirschman was a remote figure. His colleague, Peter Kenen, an assistant professor and rising star in the field of international trade, cotaught a graduate course in international economics with his elder and noted that “there was always a curtain—transparent—but nonetheless a curtain” between Hirschman and the rest. Kenen was voluble; Hirschman was not. Kenen spoke; Hirschman nodded, smiled, and let the students fill in the gaps.21

  The style was also wrapped up in Hirschman’s lack of interest in disciplinarity and one of its reproductive mechanisms, “training.” Un-“trained” himself, he felt he had little to pass on that was not in his books. Hirschman had no method to instill, no idée maîtresse to impart. This would not change with time. As he became more famous, he was downright hostile to the idea that he might be the leader of a Hirschman “approach,” much less a school of thought inspired by his ideas. It is possible that the time such a venture would take was not time he wanted to spend; the breakneck speed with which Hirschman was generating research projects and writing suggests that he was more eager to make up for lost personal scholarly time. But there was also a principle at stake, for Hirschman never felt that his ideas enjoyed the properties of an encompassing model or an explanatory theory. At most, they were ideas meant to be mulled, overturned, reconsidered, and even rejected in pursuit of better understanding and keener insight. Some years later, a World Bank director, Robert Picciotto, would write to Hirschman about his encounter as a fledgling economist with the master in 1964 and confessed that “among all the pioneers, the wisdom, elegance and cogency of your writings are unrivaled.” Picciotto included a copy of a manifesto calling for a change in the bank to conform to what he called the Hirschman Doctrine. The master, by now in his early seventies and given to accept praise happily, was flattered but clear: “Unfortunately (or, I rather tend to think, fortunately) there is no Hirschman school of economic development and I cannot point to a large pool of disciples where one might fish out someone to work with you along those lines.” He could really only count one “student,” Judith Tendler.22

  Meanwhile came the Cuban Revolution, followed by the media circus that accompanied Fidel Castro’s visit to the United Nations General Assembly in the autumn of 1959. His detour to Princeton and Columbia brought him to crowds of students and a few professors, including Hirschman. Castro’s style, endearing to some, had no charm for the veteran of ideological wars of the 1930s. Ultimately, Hirschman was a reformist. Castro was not. Hirschman was never, despite the folk-hero status of the Cuban commander, a fan of the Cuban Revolution—and it would affect his engagements with Latin American intellectuals. His skepticism was confirmed when he met with Felipe Pazos, a democrat, an influential Cuban economist, and Central Bank president, escorting Castro. Hirschman and Pazos stepped aside for a brief private meeting, probably in Hirschman’s office, during the whirlwind. We can only speculate about how much Pazos told Hirschman. What we do know is that shortly after the Cubans returned to Havana, the conflict between Pazos and Castro erupted. Pazos resigned. Castro’s brother, Raúl, thought the banker should be shot. Instead, he was allowed to leave for exile. There was no question of Hirschman’s sympathies, which redoubled his determination to make a case for reform to defy the rigid, categorical, thinking in Washington as well as Havana.23

  The same rising tide of revolution in Latin Amer
ica alerted the Twentieth Century Fund. Created in 1919 from the philanthropy of Edward A. Filene, a successful Boston merchant, the fund was especially concerned with public education and world affairs. By the end of 1957, the trustees were concerned that the fund should raise its attention to Latin America to be on par with that to Asia, Western Europe, and Africa. They had sponsored major projects under a remarkable group of luminaries, such as Gunnar Myrdal, Jacques Maritain, Robert Lynd, and Carl J. Friedrich. By 1959, the trustees were “anxious to submit a project in this field.” Hirschman’s appointment at Columbia was like manna. Adolf E. Berle, the chairman of the fund’s board and former member of FDR’s brain trust, arranged a conversation with the new arrival. Berle emerged beaming. Hirschman was the man the organization needed. He had extensive experience in Latin America, spoke Spanish fluently, was a recognized figure, and was brimming with ideas. Berle took his idea of having Hirschman spearhead a new venture to the board, which comprised heavyweights such as Francis Biddle, John Kenneth Galbraith, David Lilienthal, and Robert Oppenheimer. The fund’s president, August Heckscher, raised his eyebrows in recognition; he had known the enigmatic Hirschman when they were residents at the International House at Berkeley in 1941.24

  Hirschman found himself in much demand, shuffling back and forth between New York and Washington to indulge proliferating requests for him to “explain” Latin America to alarmed and underinformed audiences. “His services are widely sought,” noted a fund staff report, and his publications have “received widespread and favorable attention.”25 After so many years of obscurity, Hirschman enjoyed the attention—to a point. But it was not very satisfying; he itched to get back to his research program. Now, as Hirschman sought support, his ideas and the fund’s concerns matched up well.26

  What Hirschman proposed was a working group to meet over the course of 1959–60 to think seriously about the region at its crossroads. “Much of Latin America is today in a restless and perplexed mood,” noted Hirschman in his memo to the fund, “somewhat similar to that which characterized the United States in the thirties.” There was concern about the prospects of democracy, as well as doubts about economic development. Inflation and rural unrest sent policy makers scrambling and improvising. What Hirschman proposed was to explore whether there was a “Latin American style” of policy making. If so, what were its features, achievements, and challenges? How were problems identified, analyzed, and tackled? There was also a discrete goal: to step back from US policy guided by the anxiety to fix the region’s problems; instead, Hirschman felt, Americans had to understand how Latin Americans defined and fixed them.27

  Hirschman’s group straddled several divides. He combined the scholarly and policy worlds. The largest cohort represented economists from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. There was Lincoln Gordon, the ambassador to Brazil during an especially turbulent time in Brasilia and Washington; Joseph Grunwald, the director of the Institute of Economic Research in Santiago, Chile; and David Felix, a young economist from Wayne State University. At an early stage in the discussions, Lindblom was also active. Hirschman was also committed to avoid a syndrome typical of American scholars who talked among themselves about others; it was important to have strong Latin American participation as well. Accordingly, he included the Mexican writer Víctor Alba; Brazil’s Roberto Campos, the former director of Brazil’s National Development Bank; and Víctor Urquidi of the Colegio de Mexico. The group convened in December 1959 and started meeting monthly until April. Each gathering grappled with drafts of a few papers, concentrating on a few problem areas and leaving extended periods for discussion. The hot topic was inflation—a problem sweeping Latin America and a controversial one because it was the source of bitter feuding between self-styled “structuralists” and “monetarists,” precisely a model of how men with ideas framed problems and prescriptions. The debate within the group, especially among Campos, Grunwald, and Felix, piqued Hirschman’s interest in the “impatience of the patients,” especially with each side arguing for “fundamental” explanations and thus far-reaching solutions, solutions that struck Hirschman as beyond the scale of the original problem. Here, he mused, was a style of thinking and pattern of problem solving that risked compounding things.

  The final result was a collection of essays brimming with ideas but not quite adding up to the promise of Hirschman’s original goals. The only one to really plumb the question of whether there was a style of thinking about policies and problems in Latin America was Hirschman himself. “Ideologies of Economic Development,” his long opening chapter to the anthology Latin American Issues (published by the Twentieth Century Fund), was his first foray into thinking that the way development was imagined was critical to how it might unfold. It blurred the hardened lines between economic analysis and the rest of the social sciences. It was also one of the first to pose the question: how did the way Latin Americans understood their problems shape the way they tackled them? If economists were accustomed to thinking of themselves as outside societies looking in, like a doctor examining a patient, Hirschman turned them into the subject.

  There was something that was especially intriguing about Latin American economists, and social scientists more generally, he felt. Whereas Europeans and North Americans tended to turn their observations into universal claims about “society,” Latin American intellectuals tended to particularize their societies as uniquely blessed—or more commonly, afflicted—with problems of their own making. Self-incriminating explanations for backwardness ranged from racial mixtures, tropical geographies, or Hispanic legacies. More recently, nationalists and radicals were wagging their fingers at European and North American neocolonialism. Either way, imagining reform did not come naturally to Latin America’s social scientists, that is, until the formation in 1948 of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), which tutored the emergence of a new brand of economist and social scientist, seen by Hirschman as a figure who might break the fatalist lock. Though he was skeptical of the ECLA analysts’ accent on unfair international trade as the source of the problem, he nonetheless pointed to them as a new model of social scientist looking for solutions in a region where the only conceivable futures lay in the hands of providence—or revolution. The last words of his essay were for American readers. In Europe and North America ideology had been pronounced dead, and public policy handed over to “sophisticated incrementalists bored with yesterday’s ideological bouts.” Latin America was different. “We are seriously out of phase with the mood prevailing in Latin America,” wrote Hirschman. South of the border, “ideologies are in their accustomed roles, holding men in their grip, pushing them into actions that have important effects, both positive and negative, on economic growth.”28

  Appearing in 1961, Latin American Issues was timely. There was little well-informed analysis, in spite of the firestorm of news about events south of the border. It was this book and some nudging from Adolf Berle, who had returned to diplomatic service as head of an interdepartmental task force on Latin American affairs, to put hemispheric relations onto a new track that fueled Washington’s eagerness to enlist Hirschman’s services. By then, Hirschman wanted to analyze policy, not make it.

  Working on Issues opened more doors. From the start, the Twentieth Century Fund’s board had hoped that this network would become the basis for a larger, “major study” that it hoped Hirschman would undertake. “By this procedure Mr. Hirschman’s interests will be brought into line with those of the Fund and his services will be made available on an increasing scale.” The fund wanted to sponsor research that would make a difference to policy makers, and Hirschman wanted to study policy making. By then, Hirschman was also itching to return to the field. As he explained to the board, “Social scientists usually analyze problems such as inflation and land tenure from the outside, like certain doctors who engage in a strict minimum conversation with the patient.” But how was a problem first “perceived as a problem?” And how did the percepti
on shape the solution? The board was delighted; it named him research director of Latin American Projects and gave him resources to cover three years’ field research and salary for a sabbatical for 1961–62.29

  Projects that yield books about social and economic problems can be divided into two sorts. One gets written “because the author even before sitting down to write has hit on an answer or an overriding thesis which he at least feels sure is an illuminating insight,” Hirschman once observed. Another kind arises because an author “had an unanswered question which he wanted to worry with the intensity which only the writing of a book affords.” The first helps the mind focus on an answer, but “will easily convince itself that this answer solves not one, but a great many questions.” The second starts with a question leading the restless mind to uncover “not one, but a variety of answers.” These reflections, written while Hirschman finished Journeys toward Progress, leave no doubt as to his frame of mind. In completing the work, he realized he’d stumbled onto what would became the element of a personal literary signature—a model for those who liked multiple keys and frustration for those who wanted more black and white. Gone was the search for encompassing theories; clearer was the role of a guiding question or paradoxes leading in multiple directions. Shortly after writing Journeys he had to confess, not unhappily, that he found it impossible to summarize the book into “one, two, or even three neat points.” Gone was the temptation to distill his aperçus into concise equations; clearer was his preference for narrative analysis. “I took my empirical lantern and examined at close range and in considerable detail the history of three protracted and important Latin American policy problems.” This project had become the economist’s internal voyage as well.30