Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  It was in the book’s title: holding up his lantern meant extensive travel. As soon as classes were over, the Hirschmans packed their bags for Bogotá, which would become a base for several years. By June 1960, Colombia was not the same country as the one the family had left four years earlier. The dictatorship was gone, old partisan feuding had yielded to Cuban-style guerrilla focos, and the civilian successors were gearing up for major reforms as a way to put the history of conflict and turmoil behind. Bogotá was humming with activity—intellectual, cultural, and political. During the second summer the Hirschmans spent back in Colombia (1961), leaders and policy makers were gripped in a widespread debate about democracy, reconstruction, and social reform that was unlike anything Hirschman had seen before in the country. The excitement and urgency of a fast-moving debate in which he felt he could intervene clearly energized him. Enrique Peñalosa, the scion of a powerful family and a close friend, fed Hirschman a steady diet of clippings and information about the new agrarian reform institute while commenting on drafts of the Colombia chapter. In 1962, like a coconspirator, he warned Hirschman “that the great landowners are beginning to go to war to support the modifications of the [original agrarian reform] decrees.”31

  Neither, of course, was Hirschman the same man. As an accomplished academic, the author of proliferating numbers of books and articles, and an increasingly influential figure among foundations and policy circles, he viewed Latin America from a different angle. Still, there was room for familiarity. The Hirschmans rented a house from an American family that, to Albert’s delight, had bought his old desk and chair from the Calle 74 residence; he was thrilled to be able to write up his field notes and draft chapters in his old cradle. There were also occasions to deepen old friendships. Katia and Lisa posed for one of Colombia’s most famous photographers, Hernán Díaz. They spent a lot of time with Maria and Juan Antonio Roda and Enrique Peñalosa and his family. There were weekend trips to favorite destinations. At times, work and family adventures could be rolled into one. The girls helped with field research alongside their father. For all the pleasures of working and traveling in Colombia, the sun was setting on a phase of all their lives. At 1961’s summer’s end, the family packed their belongings in Bogotá and shipped what remained to New York and bid adieu to old friends, leaving Colombia as their home for good. Once back in 350 Central Park West, the Díaz portraits were hung on the walls, and later the Roda painting of Katia and Lisa would be too, and relics from the churches and furniture from the Candelaria district became permanent reminders of another home.32

  Colombia shaped Hirschman twice over: first as a source for alternative thinking about development economics, and now as a cauldron of reformism. It was a template for the rest of Latin America, which was undergoing similar groundswells of agitation motivated by a new generation of radical doctrines. Concepts like “dependency” spotlighted the role of unequal exchange in underdeveloping the Third World; only by challenging liberal trade relations could there be hope for development. In the more stratified societies, peasants were seizing estates, and slum dwellers squatted on empty blocks. Insurgencies began to spread. Hirschman felt the pressure on the small, sometimes abstract and evasive, message of The Strategy of Economic Development. Suddenly, it seemed there were so many decisions that were being made; they were no longer in short supply. More than that, what were once seen as intractable obstacles that only a balanced technical assault could overcome suddenly seemed more fragile. Radicals, emboldened above all by the Cuban revolutionaries, made these barriers seem vulnerable to acts of great human will. Castro and others promised to wipe away underdevelopment by shattering these structures in a single blow. Latin Americans, Hirschman saw, were hardly recoiling from instability, pressure points, and disequilibria. The challenge was how to tap the fervor for change in a way that did not fall prey to exaggerated fantasies of some developed Utopia.

  The answer was to be found in reform. When he returned to New York in September 1962, he informed the fund that “my trip to Colombia was particularly useful, for there a rather forceful land reform law had been passed at the end of 1961, and the first reform project had just been started by the newly organized Colombian Land Reform Institute.”33 This was true elsewhere. In Brazil, another civilian government unveiled an effort in 1959 to tackle massive poverty in the northeast of the country under the umbrella of the Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast (SUDENE). The brainchild of Celso Furtado, whom Hirschman had met while consulting for the Rockefeller Foundation, SUDENE had made the city of Recife a hub of reform. Furtado was its first director and by 1962 had vastly expanded its operations—leading it into budgetary problems. Meanwhile, the government of President João Goulart was running into conservative opposition. “Effective reform is not foreclosed,” Hirschman told the Twentieth Century Fund, “but the road to reform is full of unexpected turns.” For precisely these reasons, it was vital to keep a finger on the pulse of these changes. Perhaps anticipating the conflicts that were to come, he warned that “it certainly is not that smooth, orderly movement led by the vaunted ‘non-Communist Left’—a very hard group to lay one’s hand on in these countries.”34

  Albert in Recife, 1960.

  The project was vast. “Close range” and “considerable detail” to the history of fast-moving reform in five complex countries was not just ambitious. It reflected the naïveté of a social scientist who yearned to do field work with little experience. It was one thing to build on concepts from practical experience, the approach in Strategy; it was another to organize evidence coherently and derive insights from it. This was a nub of concern from Ed Lindblom and eventually led to two cases being dropped. Mexico was supposed to exemplify reforms affecting foreign investment, and Argentina was an example of oil policy. Argentina in the early 1960s was seared by upheaval, its democratic system shaking in the absence of a Peronist party and Perón, and oil was the subject of a heated debate. Though less turbulent, Mexico was no less complicated as the regime contended with massive labor disputes and the patina of stability of the government was wearing thin. In fact, the whole area of economic nationalism was becoming a vast, highly contentious, and unbounded subject. Part way through the research, Hirschman abandoned these two most difficult cases and opted to focus on Brazil to examine regional development policy and SUDENE, on Chile to study inflation, and on Colombia to look at agrarian reform.

  Journeys was the product of a historic conjuncture, and its author consciously let its energies shape it. Hirschman toggled back and forth between writing and field research, revising draft after draft in the light of new evidence and unfolding debates. One effect of this approach was to allow the passion of reformists motivate his analysis and seep into his prose; Hirschman was hardly an impartial raconteur. As he drafted chapters, he sent them out to the protagonists for their feedback, starting with Colombia, then Brazil, and followed by Chile, the case he found most difficult but perhaps most intellectually challenging. Carlos Lleras Restrepo, the champion of the agrarian reform law who left the country temporarily to let tempers cool, received a draft of the Colombian chapter thanks to Peñalosa, who was leading the countercharge in his absence. Through extensive conversations and commentary, Peñalosa had shaped Hirschman’s views—and so he was not surprisingly beaming about the analysis he found in the draft. He and Lleras in turn had a long conversation about it; Lleras asked his lieutenant to convey just how impressed he was at seeing their struggle so illuminated.35 Celso Furtado, the SUDENE founder, received his chapter and wrote back quickly from Rio with praise, “It seems to me an excellent overview and work of interpretation.” He added few amendments. What he wanted—not surprisingly given the glowing analysis of his venture—was a quick translation into Portuguese.36 President Kennedy’s ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, a partner in the Latin American Issues project also relayed day-to-day unfoldings. He too read a draft of the SUDENE chapter and kept Hirschman abreast of Furtado’s clash with the pluto
cratic governor of Pernambuco. This loggerhead “is true in greater or smaller degrees with several of the Governors,” and Gordon suggested that these strains “would be an interesting part of your political analysis.”37

  Emerging in Hirschman’s mind was a history whose conclusion remained to be determined and an analysis that pressed its thumb on the scales in favor of audacious reform. In this sense, Journeys did more than collapse the distance between the observer and the reformer: it identified with him, gave him a label—the “reformmonger”—and was dedicated to two icons of the spirit—Celso Furtado and Carlos Lleras Restrepo, “masters” of the movement. Eventually the president of Colombia from 1966 to 1970, Lleras was the consummate advocate of daring, destabilizing efforts to redirect the course of the country’s history and whose spirit was kindred to Hirschman’s own advocacy of risk-taking, unbalanced, and bottom-up approaches to development. His brainchild, the Colombian Institute for Agrarian Reform (INCORA), created in 1961 with Peñalosa as the first director, was a herald for reformers in Latin America and an alternative to more radical models of collectivization. To Lleras this unconcluded history was an opportunity for a kind of social science to affect it. “There is a great need,” he implored Hirschman, “to organize peasants to become more politically active outside of the political parties—but rather as interest groups, like business groups are organized.”38

  Hirschman identified with a broader turn among Latin American social scientists. Consider, once more, Colombia. The rural sociologist, Orlando Fals Borda had come to Hirschman’s attention in 1957 during the evaluation tour for Norman Buchanan. Fals Borda’s work for the Caja Agraria and the Ministry of Labor left a deep impression. Perhaps thinking of his own transition, Hirschman informed Buchanan that Fals Borda “makes an excellent impression, seems genuinely interested in continuing scientific work rather than letting himself be absorbed by consulting activities.”39 On the heels of the Rockefeller report, Fals Borda’s El Hombre y la Tierra en Boyacá: Bases Sociológicas e Históricas para una Reforma Agraria rolled off the printing press. It was not just a pioneering ethnographic study of one of the country’s most destitute regions and one of Hirschman’s favorite destinations, it was written with a determined eye toward understanding the social forces behind the pressures for land redistribution. This portrait of a “world in transition,” from one still encased in its colonial features to one on the brink of an untold future, depicted a passage analogous to that of seventeenth-century Europe. But this time, the “virus” of “social injustice” came to the attention of the sociologist who could not stand by and document the cries for help from the immiserated peasantry of the highlands. For Hirschman, it would be a touchstone reference; the issue was not whether Colombian rural society would change, but how. And conducting the how was the essence of reform. Before long, Fals Borda became a personal friend of the family and a frequent visitor to the house in Bogotá. By then, he too had changed, for the book had made him the social scientist most closely aligned with reforms and one whose own contacts with the peasant movement exemplified a new model of “organic intellectual”—at once observing society and promoting its transformation. One day, Fals Borda appeared at the doorstep with another friend of the same spirit, the brilliant young priest, Camilo Torres, whose own restlessness about the pace of change was creating waves with in the Colombian Church. Fals Borda and Torres, cofounders of the Sociology Faculty at the National University in Bogotá, were committed to a new kind of engaged social sciences. Sarah and Albert welcomed the two into the house and then spent hours discussing the country’s problems; both Colombians were eager to share their views of the simmering problems and agitation in the countryside. As if to exemplify what was at stake at the crossroads and the breadth of the choices, Torres’s yearnings for change eventually led him to give up hope of working within the system. It was not anguish but rather frustration that pushed him to join Colombia’s guerrillas, only to be mowed down in his first skirmish with the military.40

  With this spirit of widening options and accumulated expectations, driven by the rising appeal of more drastic routes to social change, Colombia cast a shadow on the other “cases.” The crisis in the countryside and the violence that ravaged it may have been tragic, but it also presented an opportunity. New groups worked their way into power in part to find solutions. This is what brought the idea of agrarian reform before it became a policy. So, a crisis could be an important ingredient in problem solving and rally an esprit of policy making around a problem. Whether it was rural unrest, inflation, or a terrible drought, such as the one that visited misery upon the Brazilian northeast in 1958, a problem could summon new ways to think about it and change it. The drought, for instance, was devastating enough to shake up an otherwise flaccid National Development Bank and prompt the Kubitschek government to enlist Furtado, recently returned from Cambridge, to set up a plan. It was “very beautiful, very brilliant, very quick,” Furtado told Hirschman in one of their long conversations. From this emerged SUDENE, the northeast development bank, which was placed in Furtado’s hands. But it was not just the government that responded, so did the church, with a “bishop’s program” of their own and soon began to mobilize parishioners. Northeastern politicos soon climbed aboard the program. The result was a new coalition of forces able to push through reforms in the face of traditional resistance. Hirschman’s notes on the chats with Furtado reveal his admiration for the alchemy of policy daring and political maneuvering.41

  Hirschman’s stories did not always point one way; these were not triumphal accounts of reformers overcoming all odds. A crisis could just as well deepen the problem. In Colombia, once the violence settled down, the underlying problem seemed to recede and some reformers turned down the pressure. The result was a groundswell of impatience on the part of peasants and a revolutionary offensive by guerrillas sensing it might be their last opportunity. As Hirschman was putting the final touches to the book, Colombia appeared to be backsliding in this fashion, despite Peñalosa’s optimism. Chile, on the other hand, was at a crossroads but veering the other way. After years of floundering, which were on display during the Issues discussions, the country had appeared to grind itself into an inflationary impasse. Earlier efforts at stabilizing prices by orthodox measures, such as those advocated by the Sachs-Klein Mission (yet another intervention of “foreign experts” to shake up a local logjam), did little to appease anyone. Clotario Blest, the legendary trade union leader arrested for striking against President Ibañez’s economic policies, told Hirschman that a 10 to 15 percent rate of inflation “is a good thing.” Others, like the Chicago School envoy, Arnold Harberger, bewailed it as the source of all evil. Chile’s inflation crisis at first blush was a diorama of futility. The intractable debate between monetarists and so-called structuralists seemed to reinforce the argument that only an overhaul of the “system” would bring price stability. But Hirschman’s tale of frustration and social agitation yielded a very different lesson: the very intractability of inflation led leaders to spotlight problems in the system that might bring on a revolution. When he sat down to talk with the leader of the new Christian Democratic Party, Eduardo Frei, he got an earful about run-amok prices, food shortages, poor infrastructure, and poverty. How inflation caused them all was not quite clear—but Hirschman was struck by the self-evidence with which Frei bundled the problems and argued that inflation made tackling them all the more pressing. The ensuing conversation with the leader of the left-wing coalition FRAP, a mild mannered doctor named Salvador Allende, pointed to a basic cause: the abuse by foreign copper companies and the drainage of wealth from the country. To Allende, the inflationary symptom demanded deep solutions, such as taking on exploitative companies. They may have been rivals, but Frei and Allende shared the tendency to treat inflation as a scourge remediable only with social reforms. By 1963, this was an urgent consensus that set the stage for a dramatic decade.42

  Throughout the stories, the constructive role of tensio
ns and imbalances and the learning by doing and observing became key elements of the histories of reform and policy making. To American intellectuals and policy makers, Journeys illustrated the complexity, and occasional violence and high risk, associated with reform. It was hardly the smooth orderly process that could be managed with expertise and foreign aid. It required shaky alliances and “wily and complex tactics” by a breed of locals who must be at the very least understood if their audacity were to work. Then there was a second audience—Latin American intellectuals and policy makers who treated reform as futile. Some saw reform as petty bourgeois sop; others felt that the obstacles and hurdles were so great that reform would stop in its tracks. For both breeds of skeptics, nothing could change unless everything changed. “In a way,” Hirschman mused, “the book provides source material for a ‘reformmonger’s manual’ which is badly needed to offer some competition to the many works on the techniques of revolution, coups d’états and guerrilla warfare.” He imagined Journeys, not just jokingly, as a counterpoint to Che Guevara’s best-selling manual, Guerrilla Warfare. His purpose was “to break down the rigid dichotomy between reform and revolution and to show that the changes that occur in the real world are often something wholly outside these two stereotypes.” Americans had to accept that revolutionary forces were not a threat to progress; Latin Americans had to see that revolution was not the only way to realize it.43