Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  FRANZ KAFKA

  The late 1960s wrenched major American cities and university campuses with unrest; in Mexico City, Prague, and Paris, they became battlefields that shook regimes. Coups d’états and civil war spread across what were once upliftingly called “new nations.” The promises of the development decade seemed increasingly empty. How could one defend reform in this context? This was a difficult question, faced not only with an establishment looking for manageable answers, but also with radical sources of dissent coming back to life with an energy unseen since the 1930s. In late 1969, after a trip to Latin America, Hirschman penned a short essay, “How to Divest in Latin America, and Why,” a manifesto calling for American tolerance for nationalism and reform abroad. He gave a draft to a younger colleague, Sam Bowles. Bowles’s response echoed the tone of a new generation: Hirschman’s essay was a manifesto to make capitalism palatable. Divestment simply left the terrain of development to national bourgeoisies so that they “can exercise their class interests.” Left-wingers found Hirschman’s reformism too tepid to solve the world’s mounting problems. But he liked Bowles, a lot, so, he paused to clarify his argument: “I don’t think the ‘constructive’ tone is as counterrevolutionary as you think.” Was the choice just between revolution or foreign domination? Surely this was too limited, especially given the difficulties facing Latin American rebels—trigger-happy despots, scared investors, and Green Berets? “What I am doing, perhaps, is to try to increase the number of options, by pointing out the requirements … of a strategy that does not have revolution as an absolute prerequisite. I have all along argued against those who lay down such prerequisites for economic development, be they W. W. Rostow or [the Marxist] Paul Baran.” There had to be more ways of “moving forward.” Without them, people would be paralyzed and caught in an uneven clash of extremes. He ended the letter with a fable about a community of Jews who’d gathered to lament their lot. After much complaining, one of them finally stood up and concluded: “God will help!” A moment of silence passed before another carped, “But how does God help until such time as God will help?”1

  In fact, “How to Divest” was an epistle in article form written to New York’s governor Nelson Rockefeller. Nursing presidential aspirations and wanting to display his foreign policy credentials, Rockefeller had invited the Harvard economist to join him on a tour of Latin America. Hirschman politely said no and gave his reasons in “How to Divest,” a proposal to help improve things until God came along, an economist’s way of doing more than kvetch in the safer precincts of the faculty club.

  Indeed, Harvard seemed at first to be an unlikely setting for a heated clash. Life in Cambridge was lively and social. The Hirschmans were immediately swept up in the Harvard way, living in a modest, wood-clad house on Holden St., a few blocks from Littauer Hall, the columned home of the economics department. The Galbraiths lived nearby, and the Hirschmans were frequent guests at their festive, sophisticated soirées full of the “beautiful people.” Across the street were the Gerschenkrons. Albert and Shura were respectful and courteous, and occasionally Shura would seek out Sarah at home to pore over Tolstoy; the two conversed in Russian. But the ties tended to be formal, and with time, increasingly strained. For the first time, Hirschman had a personal study at home, but he had little time to use it. “The establishment here is the only thing that is really exaggerated,” he confessed to Ursula. The university was busy with seminars, discussion groups, and conferences. There seemed to be a committee for everything. When a new institute for politics was being created in memory of John F. Kennedy, the bash was all glitz. Jackie Kennedy made a glamorous appearance. Afterward, the guests moved to the Galbraiths’ for champagne and dancing. Hirschman wanted to slink home to his study; Sarah did her best to keep him engaged. “How one is then still supposed to be able to write something, that I haven’t quite understood yet,” he grumbled. One upside of socializing with the well-heeled was that he dusted off his childhood tennis game. Perhaps it was a discrete source of revenge, for he soon found himself beating most of his colleagues on the court.2

  But he did not grumble much. If he did, it was mainly on account of the teaching and diplomatic duties of a senior academic figure. Some occasions, like Octavio Paz’s frequent visits to Harvard, were redeemable; Hirschman and Paz became friends. But mostly, the public scene was tiresome, and he was only partly successful at inventive excuses to avoid it. Harvard gave him friendships, some rekindled, and some new, especially Stanley and Inge Hoffmann. It was almost a natural convergence. Though Albert and Stanley spoke in English, they shared French backgrounds and their discomfort with the disciplinary narrowness of departmental life. Inge and Sarah also became very close. The couples got together frequently for dinners and movies.3

  Harvard Economics was studded with big names. Beyond the Ionic columns facing Cambridge Street were some of the profession’s iconic names. The most famous was John Kenneth Galbraith. The domineering figure was Gerschenkron. But there was also the ebullient Wassily Leontief and Simon Kuznets, who was about to win a Nobel Prize. Soon Kenneth Arrow was to join the group, also an eventual laureate. There was also a rising generation of brilliant younger economists who spanned the spectrum of methods, such as Michael Rothschild and Herbert Gintis. Samuel Bowles, hired in 1965 after having done his dissertation on Nigeria under Gerschenkron’s supervision but who had become more interested in operational research and mathematical modeling, was in awe of his new colleague. This was, in short, a diverse, if rapidly evolving, group of scholars. It was also coming apart at its seams.4

  Though he was one of Littauer Hall’s stars, Hirschman’s own place in this assortment was somewhat marginal and became increasingly so. Not long after his arrival, he was named the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy, succeeding his former chair, Carl Kaysen, who had decamped from Harvard to become the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton the previous year. When the announcement was made public, the Harvard Crimson featured a beaming Hirschman in his suit on the front page; he hardly looked the part of the apostle for the dismal science.5 The ensuing publication of Development Projects Observed expanded his global reach beyond Latin America, while the frenetic pace of his publications made him a center of attention he did not always relish. Within the department, his closest colleagues tended to be junior faculty members. They, along with graduate students, were always on the lookout for an elder colleague with more sympathy for their radical ideas. Some, like Richard Bird and Michael Rothschild, became coauthors. In general, however, his outward stature was in inverse proportion to his profile in the department. None of his colleagues could recall him speaking at a faculty meeting. By contrast, he was a prolix grouser in private about endless deliberations.

  Nor did colleagues, with a few exceptions, seem very interested in speaking with him. At one of the department’s faculty workshops, Hirschman was the featured presenter. He presented some of his views on “obstacles,” embellished with diagrams for his colleagues’ benefit. While the junior faculty watched in awe, many senior members sat puzzled or indifferent. Political economy seemed old hat, and its newer valences were not yet on the horizon. Hirschman was a curio.6 So, he made the best of what he called his trait d’union position beyond Littauer. While his formal position was in Economics, and his undergraduate teaching was lodged there, most of his intellectual ties were scattered around the university: Hoffmann and Huntington were in Government, Schelling in the Kennedy School. Many of his students were not straight economics majors or economics graduate students; most came from political science. Hirschman’s fondest setting was the joint MIT-Harvard Seminar in Political Development, which he co-ran with Sam Huntington. Eventually, there was a fleeting effort to do something institutional to foster a more interdisciplinary climate for economists. Hirschman joined a small bloc of colleagues, including Leontief, Galbraith, and Arrow (who wrote the curriculum report), who called for the creation of a Department of Social Economy. But extensive me
etings with Dean Henry Rosovsky and President Derek Bok led nowhere.7

  One thing Harvard did not do was help Hirschman overcome his aversion to teaching. It was not that he had to reach far to prepare his classes. His undergraduate courses focused on economic development in Latin America, and he contributed some core lectures in Economics 1, the department’s gateway. There were some spin-off seminars, such as the one on development projects and a freshman seminar on his next book. There were also the special, topical offerings, such as the seminar “The Economic and Political Aspects of Imperialism,” a “large ungainly” affair involving a group of assistant professors (Hirschman was the only tenured one) and politically animated graduate students, whom the senior economists tended to eschew. This was the fall semester of 1970, on the heels of the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia and the massacre at Kent State University in Ohio. Though Hirschman was not always happy about the heavy formulations coming from the students, he agreed to be the faculty sponsor, cautioning, possibly to instill a bit of humility, “I’m one of the few who actually read this in German!” The reading list reflected his diet from the early 1930s: Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Rudolf Hilferding (whom he had failed to save in Marseilles). To drive home the point, the syllabus listed only the German editions. Still, he remained tight-lipped about his own past and never shared his own personal brush with the works. The students did not appear to realize there was a backstory.8

  The courses may have been close to his heart, but teaching still made him sick to his stomach. He remained, in the memory of one of his admiring Harvard students, “a catastrophically bad teacher” but made up for it with his sheer presence—which is just as well, because that appears to capture most of what students got out of him. Even his devotee, Stephen Krasner, one of the pioneering figures in international political economy whose thesis got its first formulation in a Hirschman seminar, recalls Hirschman’s polite passivity and scarce feedback. Another economics PhD student, Mexico’s Carlos Bazdresch, approached Hirschman early on but got the distinct impression that graduate students were not going to be the focus of his attention. There is something revealing about the gap between the students’ impression of a distant, spectral Hirschman and his own sense of sacrifice. On the eve of his first semester at Harvard, Sarah took the girls to Long Island for two weeks, leaving Albert in the flat on Central Park West. “I feel like a boy before his final exams,” he groaned to Ursula. “I have been working like crazy these weeks to learn a few things that I will be teaching. Whenever I arrive improvised like this, I am always tempted to exclaim with Gretchen [thinking of Goethe]:

  Dear God! What such a man as this

  Can think on all and everything!9

  A year later, from the same room, during the last days he would spend there before moving the household to Cambridge, he grumbled that writing Development Projects Observed had already inspired some petites idées that he wanted to pursue—“but I have to prepare these damn lectures now.”10 The sleepless nights, churning stomach, diarrhea before lectures—Albert’s torments afflicted Sarah. “Well,” exclaimed Sarah later, “they told him once to pretend that you believe everything, and that you knew everything.” It was perhaps this pretense that churned his insides. Either way, Albert’s anxiety took its toll on Sarah: “I was never there, [but] I suffered every time Albert was lecturing, I was at home suffering.… I actually had the cramps. It was that bad.”11

  As at Columbia, he proceeded to wiggle off the teaching hook at Harvard. No sooner had the Hirschmans settled down, unpacked, and decorated the Holden St. house and Hirschman completed a semester’s teaching, than he began to explore alternatives. As he had done so effectively before, he reached out to the foundation world with a flurry of ideas.

  One involved ideas about industrial policy he had unveiled to a group of social scientists in Chile. There was a growing chorus of critics on the Latin American Left and Right that disagreed on almost everything—except the dismal view of the future of manufacturing in the region. It was doomed, either because it was not enough of a revolutionary force (for the Left) or because it held back the progress of capitalism (for the Right). Hirschman, as one might expect, found both extremes too pessimistic. In late 1967, he contacted Kalman Silvert, a political scientist at the time working as a program officer for the Ford Foundation. They met in New York in early December and agreed that Hirschman would outline some ideas. The Ford, at the time, was getting more deeply involved in Chile, and like Hirschman, was trying to shore up more middle-of-the-road, reform-oriented research. Having a figure like Hirschman on board would be a boon in a climate of escalating polarization in Santiago. Hirschman wanted Pinto and Sunkel involved, as well as a young sociologist from São Paulo working on Brazilian industrialists, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. What came of this was a new collaboration with Latin American scholars, but not right away. No sooner were arrangements made than Hirschman got cold feet—and explained to Silvert that he did not want to be locked into a trip to Latin America. He had a huge backlog of work to take care of. Beside, “having written three books on economic development in the past ten years, I should perhaps pause and look around a bit to consider where to plunge next.”12

  Here was a break from the pattern; for a decade, Hirschman had been racing through projects at such a clip that there was little breathing room between them. Each project had been a concatenated outgrowth from questions or ideas remaindered from the one that had been dispatched to the printers. His diary contains a half-mocking observation:

  What keeps me from suicide are, besides cowardice, two matters: 1) the idea that it would be considered a refutation of my own theories of creative imbalances etc. 2) the fact that I always seem to have still one idea to write up—the dangerous moment will come when I’ll have my best petite idée all worked out.

  Some might have wished that more time be spared for each project, especially as they got bigger and bigger in analytical ambition. But one of the features of Hirschman’s explosion onto the social science stage in the 1960s was that to the outside world each book appeared to be such a departure from its predecessor, and yet his notes and manuscripts reveal the umbilical ties between them. Hirschman was clearly trying to keep pace with a rapidly changing world, his petites idées multiplying.

  The continuity should not, however, be overstated. After all, the unfolding of the 1960s was quickly breaking up the coordinates of reform—in economic development as well as in the War on Poverty. Hitherto, his pragmatic idealism tended to be positioned as a response to more totalizing appeals of others. But now a fuse was burning at the core of reform. The growing tensions prompted Hirschman to take a second look at some of his own precepts. Indeed, there was another reason why he backed out of the Ford project; he had found a sponsor to help him “look around.” Word had arrived from the Center for Behavioral Sciences at Stanford that they wanted him to spend a year in Palo Alto. Hirschman had been to Stanford in November to give a talk, “Competition vs Monopoly in the Fallible Economy,” in which he explored some of the residual concerns from Development Projects Observed. He started with the case of Nigerian railroads. “Why didn’t highway competition help? Or did it perhaps hinder? With highway poor performance,” read his lecture notes, “of RR is tolerable evil, without something might have been done to correct sit’a.”13 The fact was, a ghastly civil war had erupted across Biafra in July and disturbed him. His failure to see that a development project he had so recently evaluated was contributing to savagery was clearly haunting him—and he confessed that economists needed to grapple with the unintended consequences of their thought; they could not wave them away as the results of some external force beyond their framework or control. One of the attendees was Hirschman’s future colleague, Kenneth Arrow, who was still at Stanford. Arrow thought the idea of creating problems to solve was an ingenious proposition in Strategy but was not very enthusiastic about Hirschman’s writings about industrialization. Still, Hirschman being one of the discipline’s
original thinkers, Arrow wanted to know what he was working on. What he heard “knocked me out,” he recalled.14

  What was clear was that Hirschman’s underlying confidence in the prospects for reform was beginning to fray; how could one explain behaviors that could turn some unintended consequences into disastrous ones? The difficulty was, Hirschman was pushing at the frontiers of his discipline while still working within it. The problem on his mind was the apparently technical, or neutral, dilemma of competition versus monopoly. A year earlier, Shura and Albert had had dinner together and spent the evening deep in conversation. They grappled with Albert’s festering questions: if there was an alternative to lousy railways, why wasn’t the consumer response, to favor the humble truck and force the big bad monopoly to change its inefficient ways, doing the trick? The next morning, Shura typed out a long response, drawing an analogy to the problem of American schools: “It is very likely and intuitively very understandable that the consumers with the highest consumer surplus will be the first to desert public schools and move over to private schools.” What mattered was the citizens’ “surplus”—what they had to forfeit by staying with a bad system and what they gained from sticking with a good one. Shura and Albert were mulling over a problem that was starting to loom large in America: “choice.”15

  For the moment, their foggy explorations were being framed in the language of relative prices and losses, opportunity costs, and theories of consumption. But the spread of pogroms in Nigeria the riptide of unrest in the streets and campuses at home made monopoly versus competition seem a little banal, and Albert was groping for a way to put his analysis of economic development into a broader perspective—and this started to seep through at the Stanford presentation. It left a deep impression on those around the table, like Gabriel Almond, a major builder of comparative political science and chair of Stanford’s department, who immediately started pulling levers to get Hirschman to the West Coast. When the invitation reached Hirschman, it was a complete surprise. Overjoyed understates Hirschman’s response. “A really formidable piece of news,” he exclaimed to Ursula. “There, we have no other obligation than to sit and think.”16