Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Journeys toward Progress caught the pulse of a moment, which made it an immediate sensation. It soon became the reference for an alternative way forward uncharted by extremes, avoiding the national security frame of reform as the lesser evil to revolution while at the same time highlighting the role of the engagé social scientist. Some of Hirschman’s fans found this less-than-critical identification a bit much. Lincoln Gordon was one. As the ambassador, he was watching Brazil veer toward a more radical brand of populism, and he was inclined to blame domestic policies and propensities as the source of all the region’s woes. While he applauded the long analytical chapter on problem solving and policy making and looked forward to reading the studies on Chile and Colombia while on the plane back to Washington, he found the study of the Northeast “provocative.” But, he added diplomatically, “I remain unpersuaded by your intellectual love affair with Celso Furtado and your conviction that SUDENE really is something different from the other experiences,” adding prophetically, “I hope you will consider setting some time aside ten years hence to write a retrospective piece of self-criticism.” This was September 1963, and little did Gordon or Hirschman know just how tragically events would unfold for Brazil—and for Chile—and how difficult it would be for Hirschman to look back on a decade of reformmongering. Developments in Brazil, warned Gordon, “may well go worse before they go better.”44

  Journeys was also personally enlightening. With the surge of reform, from agrarian change in Latin America to civil rights at home, came its nemesis. The perception of the need for reform also spotlighted resistance to it. For some this meant that reform was doomed, and so another way forward had to be opened. To others, the cost of overcoming hurdles could be so destabilizing that it threatened the whole social order. Accustomed to hearing pessimism in Latin America, Hirschman wrote Journeys as a way to counter it. But increasingly, he encountered naysayers close by, at Columbia. One was his friend, Samuel Huntington, who grew alarmed that modernization and reform were going to throw the Third World into turmoil, and Huntington’s views, as he moved rightward, began to strain the friendship. But there were also younger radicals, like Immanuel Wallerstein, an emerging expert on African decolonization, who worried that without radical change, the development would fizzle. Hirschman found himself at odds with Wallerstein’s increasingly, if understandably, alarming view of the prospects for Africa in the world economy.

  Hirschman felt the need to address futilists of all stripes head on. An invitation from François Perroux, of the Institut d’étude du développement économique et social and the Collège de France, invited him to speak to an international audience about “obstacles” to the development process. What came of this was a trilogy of essays that confronted the ways in which social scientists, starting with Wallerstein, perceived change and how these perceptions shaped the prospects for change. His lecture was called “Obstacles to Development: A Classification and a Quasi-Vanishing Act.” When he stood before his Parisian audience, he had circled and emphasized the words “Vicious Circles” at the top of the first page of his script. Futilists were circular thinkers: reform was impossible because the conditions were not there to support them, while the absence of the conditions is what made reform so vital. This was unhelpful thinking. Hirschman was not so naïve as to think that all hurdles were surmountable. But there were “obstacles” that could be turned into advantages, like the extended family among cacao farmers in Ghana or the surviving skilled European artisans. To see the difference depended on the attitudes of the observer and meant ceasing to treat the past as nothing but a giant source of constraints. Backwardness was not destiny; there was plenty of room for alternatives as long as one did not feel obliged to wait for the “necessary conditions” or seize the “perfect solution.” “Obstacles to Development” was the first installation growing out of Journeys and was aimed directly at social scientists, to register alarm about the ways in which they contributed to the problems they sought to explain. In due course, he would grow increasingly impatient with this new patient. But for the time being, he seized the opportunity to cite the Marquise de Merteuil in Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, “Believe me, one rarely acquires the qualities he can do without.”45

  CHAPTER 13

  Sing the Epic

  To believe in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made. That would be no real act of belief.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  A flurry of books and breaking into the acme of the American academy did not leave Hirschman with an urge to settle down. If anything, he was more restless than ever. Journeys toward Progress was barely out in early 1963 when he issued feelers to the Ford Foundation offering his consulting services. Why? “The cause is good,” F. Champion Ward wrote apologetically, “but, frankly, we don’t quite see why what is essentially a consultant relationship need be independently financed when the results are to be primarily of value to the committee.”1

  Two things were going on. First, Hirschman’s itchiness was in part the result of his unease with Columbia. One senses that he felt more at home in Colombia. The university was a congenial place to work; Hirschman had a few colleagues with similar interests in the Third World, such as Samuel Huntington, with whom he overlapped until Huntington returned to Harvard (where he had been denied tenure in 1959) in 1963. He, too, harbored reservations about the Third World modernization euphoria—though his would veer into a more pessimistic track. While Hirschman celebrated the increasing disorder of modernization as a virtue, to Huntington it was a menace. But on one principle they agreed: anyone who thought that the transformations in the Third World could be planned, balanced, orderly affairs arranged by elites and their technocrats were deluding themselves—and everyone else. But otherwise, Hirschman never connected to Columbia, neither its colleagues nor students. A kind of detachment loomed like a nimbus over “Professor” Hirschman, who preferred field work in Latin America and writerly seclusion on Central Park West.

  In mid-October 1963, Hirschman’s phone rang. It was Shura Gerschenkron. They were not telephone habitués, but over the years Albert and Shura had remained in touch and shared each other’s work. A fresh copy of Journeys sat on Gerschenkron’s office desk. It was this, no doubt, that prompted the call—and an invitation for Hirschman to come to Cambridge to meet with a class on development taught by Arthur Smithies in early December 1963. Behind the scenes, Shura, at the peak of his influence, had been angling for the chair of the economics department, Carl Kaysen, to have Hirschman as a colleague. He was taking advantage of a movement (short-lived, as it turned out) to create more cross-appointments. Hirschman was being considered as the first professor of political economy appointed through the Graduate School of Public Administration (soon to be renamed the John F. Kennedy School of Government) and jointly named to the Department of Economics as a specialist in Latin America. This was a time in which the discipline still made room for regional or national expertise and area studies was on the rise. Smithies and Edward Mason covered development economics, but neither had extensive experience in the field. Between Harvard’s anxiety to bulk up on the hot development field and catch up in Latin American studies, it did what it does as a reflex: Harvard went faculty hunting. Hirschman and Samuel Huntington were their two big catches that season; Columbia lost them both.

  In those days, the business of being a candidate was a more informal, gentlemanly, and inevitably arbitrary and personalized affair. And fast. It was also one in which Hirschman would easily shine. There was a luncheon organized by the dean, Donald Price, and a lecture followed by dinner with Carl Kaysen, Smithies, Mason, and Shura Gerschenkron. The “deliberation,” such as it was, was quick and uncontroversial. Kenneth Galbraith quickly jumped on the bandwagon—and within a week Price was in conversation with Hirschman about the terms of an appointment. Within a few months the offer letter had come through, and the recruitment, Kaysen recalled, was left to Shura. It was not a tough sell. Hirschman regarded himself as “a h
yphen between economists and political scientists.” He fancied this self-image. Beside, it felt like a step up: Harvard had more prestige, better economists, and more “interesting activities for me.” The salary of $20,000 was standard for the day. But he knew he would miss the theater, art galleries, and the foreign films on New York’s screens. Still, he scarcely blinked; a week after getting the offer, he accepted; retention efforts by Columbia’s Dean Andrew Cordier and Provost Jacques Barzun were pointless. Hirschman was gone.2

  But there was a second, more important source of his rootlessness. The whole prospect of going to Harvard was nothing compared to the distress of events in Brazil. The coup of April 1, 1964, brought down the civilian government of João Goulart—an exemplar reformmonger—and installed some tight-fisted generals who would augur brutal dictatorships. The northeastern SUDENE reform was rubbished. Goulart’s minister of planning, Hirschman’s friend Celso Furtado, fled into exile, first to Yale briefly, then to Paris. Hirschman had a premonition that the coup was not just a passing event; a blight was now cast on radical reform. “I have been very depressed these weeks about events in Brazil,” he told Ursula, “which reveal the follies and crimes of the Right. Even in underdeveloped states they are at the height of those in industrial countries. It is such a shame because there were so many possibilities that Brazil might find its own and attractive way [une voie propre et attrayente], and this has all been ruined, at least for the moment.”3 The Brazilian coup was a sign of things to come. The hope for civilian reform was beginning to wane and seemed to be eclipsed by populist revolution and its antonym, junta. Vietnamese villages were becoming war zones, Brazilian officers patrolled the streets of São Paulo, and a year later President Johnson dispatched over 40,000 Marines to the Dominican Republic to thwart a “second Cuba,” while Indonesian generals wiped out the ranks of the country’s Communists. The seams of development and reform were starting to show. In places they came apart. Scarcely a few years into a Development Decade launched with such fanfare by the United Nations in 1961, it was coming apart. Suddenly, the rapturous tone of Journeys seemed out of key.

  It was this concern that motivated the missive to the Ford Foundation. Ford was not the only pool into which he was casting. Hirschman wrote to Burke Knapp, the World Bank’s vice president, in March of 1963. He promised Burke a copy of the book—my “highly experimental venture”—when it appeared. But he confessed to now being overwhelmed by the feeling of “what it must be like to retire.” There is something vaguely manic in his reaction: instead of savoring accomplishment, “in the ensuing discomfort, my thoughts have naturally come to be occupied with the question: What next? And this is the subject of this letter.” He had two years’ leave forthcoming. He wanted to combine these into a twenty-seven-month run to fathom some of the troubles behind development. From thinking about how policies were made, he turned to their projects and their effects. Having thought about models and strategies, he wanted to get close to the ground, to study the giant dams, heroic roads, and massive irrigation plans that were earning pharaonic reputations. The specific question was, how did development projects perform?4

  Some in the World Bank, an institution at the front lines of the growing criticism, had similar concerns. Knapp replied immediately—and invited Hirschman to Washington for further talks. Eager “to learn a great deal,” Knapp asked Hirschman to outline the issues and criteria for evaluating development in action. A proposal was on the desk of Hirschman’s old friend, Sandy Stevenson, now head of the Economics Department of the bank. From Sandy’s perspective, the organization’s mission creep from European reconstruction to Third World development revealed no overall assessment of, or method of assessing, the value of its work. Knapp and Stevenson had allies in the form of Richard Demuth, the director of development services, who would eventually assume stewardship of Hirschman’s enterprise. After the summer’s travels, Hirschman returned to Washington to hammer out the details of a scheme in Demuth’s office. All of this was unfolding as Hirschman was considering the move to Harvard.

  Without these self-critical bank insiders, Hirschman’s ideas would have gone nowhere. Stevenson and Demuth insisted that something had to be done to remedy the situation—beginning with an external, objective evaluator. They had to override the influential chief economist of the Projects Division, Robert Sadove, a firm believer of “change from within,” who had earlier turned the World Bank away from Program Loans (a staple of European financing that conferred more autonomy to borrowers) to Project Loans. Sadove wanted busybodies at a distance. Stevenson, who saw right through the circularity, advocated an outsider and thrust forth his old friend, now brimming with unimpeachable credentials.

  From the start, Hirschman’s project brought out some seething resentment from some insiders. This was a delicate proposal; it was rare for the bank—by no means unique in this reluctance—to throw open its files for an observer to rifle through them. His backers were a tight-knit group whose influence bespeaks the relatively simple, if cliquish, way in which business was done in Washington in those days. Rather than get gummed up in an internal stalemate, Stevenson stepped outside the bank and consulted an old friend of his from the Marshall Plan days, Robert E. Asher, who was then working at the Brookings Institution overseeing the research on international trade and finance. Maybe Hirschman could do the work under the auspices of the Brookings. Asher liked the idea of Hirschman’s autonomy, his independence of mind, and what this would bring to his group. Hirschman’s stature, as Asher told the Brookings president, Robert D. Calkins, was sterling; perhaps it would help if Calkins had a word with the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Brookings Institution, Eugene Black, who had recently stepped down as president of the World Bank and who would not have forgotten his sympathy for Hirschman from the early days in Colombia. Whether backroom conversations or a few phone calls helped grease the wheels, we do not know. By the end of 1963, Sandy called Albert to tell him the project was on.5

  The Brookings’ Foreign Policy Studies Division cobbled together a proposal for the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation to examine a set of World Bank projects with three aims: explore improvements in the selection and evaluation of development projects, illuminate the problems and potential of foreign aid, “and contribute to our knowledge of the process of development.” The candidate was touted as one of the world’s foremost thinkers of development; Hirschman’s experience examining projects was ideal for directing this two-year undertaking. The criteria for the projects under review included those running for at least five years and focusing on the introduction of a new activity or facility into a particular region (a highway, a rail line, a hydroelectric dam, or an industrial plant) stretching across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Stevenson, meanwhile, lined up bank staff to prepare the case files, with his eye trained especially on the South Asian precedents. As far as he was concerned, the Indian and Pakistani projects were the bank’s “problem children.”6 By June, Carnegie stepped forward with $31,340 to foot the bills. By July, Hirschman’s travel plans were set, by which time Hirschman was bound to Harvard, where he negotiated a first year’s sabbatical to conduct the travel and research for what would eventually become Development Projects Observed, published in October 1967. His itinerary and projects would eventually include:

  El Salvador—electric power plant

  Ecuador—roads in Guayas Province

  Peru—San Lorenzo irrigation project

  Uruguay—pasture improvement for livestock

  Ethiopia—telecommunications and roads

  Uganda—electric power transmission and distribution

  Sudan—irrigation project

  Nigeria—railway modernization and Bornu extension line

  India—Damodar Valley Corporation and selected industries in Mysore

  West Pakistan—Karnaphuli Paper Mills

  East Pakistan—Karnaphuli Paper Mills

  Thailand—Chao Phya irrigation project

 
Italy—irrigation in South

  The choice raised some eyebrows. About the only coherence was that these were projects. Some found the scale, “the widely scattered” selection “around the fields of activity,” potentially superficial. Why not, asked Robert F. Skillings of the International Finance Corporation, a division of the World Bank, adopt “a more concentrated approach,” like looking at all projects within a given sector (roads, energy, or irrigation, for instance)? Not only would this be more in-depth, it might avoid “the problems of random factors which unavoidably enter into a very small sample,” and it might yield “conclusions of more general applications.” Skillings was not alone in worrying about the practicability of any lessons.7 These questions would subsequently plague Hirschman’s findings.

  The Hirschmans kept their base in Central Park West. Sarah would serve as an “uncompensated assistant” to the project—but all of her expenses were covered. Once Columbia’s classes were over, Albert and Sarah rushed “to work furiously in the files of the World Bank so that we are completely informed about the projects we are going to visit.”8 They partitioned the field work into three phases: the first trip would take them back to Latin America (July–October), the second to India, Pakistan, and Thailand (November–March), with a pause in Washington, and the third to Africa, ending with an Italian leg in the summer. Meanwhile, the girls, now undergraduates at Barnard, would take care of the apartment—which left a few friends wondering if Albert and Sarah were not just a bit too trusting.

  Their bags bulging with Pan Am and BOAC plane tickets and folders of complex itineraries plotted out by a small army of staff, Albert and Sarah set off as economic explorers. There was no Kodak, but they had plenty of spiral-bound notebooks for diaries and for most places a guide provided by the bank. It helped that the first leg was the familiar terrain of Latin America, where the field work for Journeys had tutored them in an observational method. Beyond, it was all new. Of all the countries they visited, India and Nigeria left the strongest impressions. Travel by rail and Land Rover got them to remote, difficult-to-reach, hot parts, face-to-face with the ways in which big projects in poor countries were churning up social conflict.