Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  This meant breaking the news to Ford. Hirschman explained to Silvert that he felt it most important “to leave that [sabbatical] year wholly free of ‘programmed research.’ ” Silvert was the picture of understanding—and patience; Ford would be waiting for the right time to team up with Hirschman. “Don’t do what you don’t want to do,” said Silvert. My feeling is that you amply deserve a year to yourself, and that the Stanford opportunity affords precisely that.… My corporate feelings for your problem may be easily expressed: we are interested in your project; it follows that we are interested in helping you pursue your interests in whatever ways appear reasonable and sensible.”17 It is important not to drop this little exchange as one of the might-have-beens of a writerly life. Neither Hirschman nor Silvert did. As with petites idées, Hirschman was storing away strategic contacts and latent projects for the right occasion. It had been ten years since Hirschman emerged from Colombia; relations with big social science funders had changed. Hirschman was in the enviable position of having opportunities laid at his feet.

  We can get a glimpse of what Hirschman was “looking around” at from a file he opened once he knew he was Stanford bound. “Certain areas one feels uncertain about,” he started to catalogue. There was a list of topics and dossier of New York Times clippings, ranging from labor unions, to fights over inner city versus suburban schools, Black Power, Martin Luther King Jr., and Japan versus Latin America. And there were “Confessions—Mine.” These scribblings, unfortunately for us, were spartan. His notes have a frenetic and emphatic quality to them; one gets the impression of someone straining at intellectual frontiers in search of a way to transcend them. One also gets the impression of the world pressing in on his notes; June 1968 heralded what would become known as the Vietnam Summer and yield to a spasm of unrest. What started with a disturbing problem posed by Nigeria, where truckers and a chorus of disgruntled customers had been forced to “raise hell,” was becoming a more generalized assault on the commanders of big organizations—companies, states, churches—from Prague to São Paulo to Washington.

  There were hell-raisers in the family, too. It was perhaps foregone that Katia and Lisa would get heavily involved in the student movement. Lisa’s return from her year in Lima, en route to Wisconsin, where she was going to start graduate school, occasioned some family reunions. At Harvard, the Phillips Brooks House was a hub for young activists. One was Peter Gourevitch, a graduate student of Stanley Hoffmann’s with a similar family background of Russian social democratic émigrés. He was swept up in the antiwar movement and Sarah arranged for Lisa to meet him at the height of the summer agitation. Years later, Peter and Lisa would get married. When Lisa arrived, Katia and Alain came up from New York, bearing news from the front lines of student militancy. Alain in particular came brimming with hopes about the spreading “ ‘revolutions,’ from Columbia, France, etc. for which he is a follower and extremely and tenaciously convinced.” The conversations were sometimes strained, with Katia, Lisa, and Alain decidedly affiliated with protestors. Albert and Sarah would wince when their children referred to policemen as “pigs.” Alain had joined a group of alternative architects in New York who sought to reclaim charred real estate and developed a “vest pocket park” on the Lower East Side. Inspired by the work of Herbert Marcuse, it was a salvaged ruin for the city’s kids. Albert was not persuaded by the revolutionary ideas behind it, but he admired Alain’s reformmongering vision.

  Albert visiting Alain’s project in Manhattan, 1971.

  It was not easy to bridge the divide. Katia wanted children. Sarah and Albert worried about the money; Alain was making none. Eventually, Alain did land a job, in Boston. But then tragedy struck. Katia gave birth to their first child, Elise—a daughter with serious brain damage. Then their apartment in New York burned down. All was lost. When Alain and Katia relocated to Boston, they moved into the house on Holden St. and struggled with their despair over Elise’s health. Albert and Sarah did their best to support the grieving couple. While Sarah ministered, Albert was restrained but not distant; he kept his sorrow to himself. Alain could sense that memories of more distant losses were stirred. Katia, to keep busy, compiled the index for one of her father’s books, a collection of previously published essays. One night, Katia and Alain went out to see François Truffaut’s Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses). Paris’s bloom seemed exhilarating, and the couple walked out of the theater feeling resolved to return to France. As they packed their belongings, Albert’s latest anthology rolled off the printing presses. Called A Bias for Hope, it was dedicated to the two struggling parents.

  The strain posed by the generational divide should not obscure one thing: fundamentally, Hirschman’s heart was with the hell-raisers. He applauded the antiwar senator, Eugene McCarthy, and his decision to speak out against his own party and defy the president, turning the 1968 campaign into a call to America’s youth not to confuse “dropping out” over disagreement with Vietnam with “copping out.” “The relief was so widely felt” at McCarthy’s defiance, Hirschman exclaimed.18 Meanwhile, events in Paris and Prague were riveting, though there was some concern that the wildcat strikes and pitched battles in the Latin Quarter could get worse before improving. Hoping to find some balm, he speculated that perhaps the resignation of de Gaulle, “too late in my view,” might work because it now makes “the improvement seem less profound.” On the other hand, he crossed his fingers that they might bring “upheavals within the USSR.” Hirschman started to collect clippings about dissident Jews and their demands to be permitted to emigrate to Israel. Across the board, from Washington, to Paris, to Moscow, he scorned insiders who supported “country right or wrong,” repudiating us-or-them speak. “A plentiful supply of police dogs and atomic bombs” may be goods to some, but are just as likely to be vile to others.19

  On top of this was the American election of 1968. The campaign was dispiriting: the murder of Bobby Kennedy a blow, McCarthy prone to self-inflicted wounds, and the clash between rioters and Chicago’s police at the Democratic National Convention utterly disheartening. Then there was the outcome. As it approached, Hirschman observed that “depression reigns here.” “No one knows how to vote.” It was not just the victory of the Californian red-baiter, Richard Nixon, whom Hirschman recalled only too well from his time in Washington. It was also the echoes of extremism beyond student campuses. “For the first time there is a true uprising of the reactionary masses (like candidate Wallace), about which I have always known but which, in a sedative way, had always been deprived of representation, until now.” To Ursula, who did not require explanation, he lamented that “this too is déjà vu, and it’s not happy.”20

  In the midst of all this, Harvard got roiled. The year before, Katia and Alain had been among the Columbia students who had seized the central administration offices. By January, student strikes had spread to San Francisco State, Brandeis, Swarthmore College, Berkeley, Wisconsin, the City College of New York, Duke, Rutgers, and beyond. At Harvard there had been warning signs: as the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, left after giving a speech at Quincy House in the fall of 1966, his car was stopped and surrounded by students, who scrambled over it and rocked it until McNamara was allowed to retreat. By early 1969, the Vietnam War pitted students against faculty and administrators; outside the office of the Center for International Affairs, whose eminence, Samuel Huntington, had laid bare the connection between development and security, students chanted: “HEY, HEY, CFIA, HOW MANY COUPS DID YOU PULL TODAY?” The morning of April 9, 1969, saw 300 radicals from Students for a Democratic Society storm University Hall in front of Widener Library. A large black-and-red SDS banner was unfurled from the second story windows to the demonstrators below. The next day, the Cambridge police—whose relations with Harvard students were not especially amicable—rolled into Harvard Square with three busloads of officers; 400 armed policemen lined up before the hall while the occupants passed around wet cloths to cut the tear gas. The police charged, some of them stashin
g their badges so as to pummel students with abandon, followed by a rampage of police violence as officers chased students through the yards and into dormitories.21

  The occupation and spectacle of an armed assault in the middle of campus provoked outrage at the hapless President Nathan Pusey. Calling in the police so precipitously and giving them the green light to terrorize was a mistake argued many professors. Students had less polite words. Some students, though not many, came out in Pusey’s defense. Faculty meetings degenerated into verbal wars. By then, Hirschman missed the final explosion because he was at Stanford, but two of his closest friends, Stanley Hoffmann and Alexander Gerschenkron, found themselves on opposing sides. Gerschenkron gave a stirring speech in which he denounced radical students as criminals out to destroy the institution. It was a heartfelt, exaggerated index of how polarized Harvard had become.22

  At the end of the summer of 1968, Albert and Sarah were invited to spend a month with Harry Kahn, an old friend from the Marshall Plan days and a successful New York stockbroker. The Kahns had a summer cottage on Cape Cod. While the world erupted in protest, Albert disappeared; he could have spent the weeks on the beach, which is what Kahn had proffered. Instead, the morning walks were followed by long days at a makeshift desk. Hirschman hunkered down and struggled with his ideas; his thinking “is going in some unforeseen directions,” he told Ursula.23

  Moving to the West Coast was like leaping from the frying pan into the fire. This was no longer the Bay Area where Albert and Sarah had met three decades earlier. Stanford University, like many, was roiled by conflict over Black Studies; in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 and the spasm of violence and grieving that followed, this academic “initiative” acquired a whole new tone.24 But Stanford was nothing compared to nearby Berkeley. In 1966, Ronald Reagan won the contest to be governor of the state, setting in motion a series of clashes across an array of issues. “Send the welfare bums back to work,” he thundered. He also promised to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” that haven for “Communist sympathizers, protestors, and sex deviants.” The showdown with students took place over an open field in front of the university, which students dubbed People’s Park. Reagan, spoiling for a fight, sent his highway patrol and the Berkeley police to cleanse it. Students turned on the fire hydrants and hurled bricks. The Alameda County sheriff’s men opened up with buckshot and tear gas. Hundreds were severely wounded; one student died. Reagan responded by declaring a state of emergency and dispatched several thousand National Guardsmen to occupy Berkeley; protesting girls slid flowers down the muzzles of the guards’ rifles. “If it takes a bloodbath,” snarled Reagan, “let’s get it over with.” Meanwhile, TV screens were filled with reporting and images of a bruising mayoral election in which a gloating conservative, Sam Yorty, used race-baiting accusations that the grandson of a slave, Thomas Bradley, would turn the city over to Black Nationalists. Albert and Sarah watched the unfolding with a sadness that reminded them why they could not embrace their children’s passions. It’s an “impossible war,” concluded Sarah and has led to “the famous backlash which has now really arrived. We have spent entire evenings watching the television and listening to the public sessions of the Berkeley Council,” admiring the rebels but sensing that their foe had more up their sleeves than could be imagined.25

  In the meantime, one hell-raiser caught Hirschman’s eye: Ralph Nader, who personified the little guy’s defiance of corporate America. In October 1968, Playboy ran a featured interview with the Princeton-educated gadfly. A month later, the New York Review of Books ran Nader’s essay, “The Great American Gyp.” Hirschman read both; the blend of passionate idealism and uncompromising individualism shook off the remnants of 1950s consensus and put a final end to its silent generation. Nader fashioned himself the Robin Hood of the modern-day peasant, screwed not by greedy tax collectors (that outrage would burst onto the Californian scene some years later) but by the corporate magnates. The little guy was now the consumer, and especially the driver of Detroit’s “deathtraps,” which were responsible, Nader alleged, for tens of thousands of fatalities a year. Detroit’s moguls were deaf to the complaints; worse, they went after Nader himself, a reflex that did them no favors in the public’s growing skepticism of big corporations. By 1966, his was a household name, the mouthpiece of a movement to defend consumers against corporations. Joseph Sobeck of Needham, Massachusetts, was a sign of the times. After shoddy service on his “beautiful ’65 Ford,” he wrote to Henry Ford at corporate headquarters to complain:

  I must say that this is a nice way to treat a guy who has bought Fords for the past twenty years. You can also be assured that I absolutely will not purchase a Ford of any kind no matter what your usual form letter to me will say. Or does Ford now have a policy of not answering letters too!!26

  In early spring 1969, Hirschman reached out to Nader and explained that he was studying how people were responding to the large organizations that shaped market life, which gave him material he aimed to use for a course next year at Harvard. Nader was excited. He replied immediately, sharing his admiration for Hirschman’s international work, and volunteered material for the course (including Sobeck’s plea), bemoaning how “our system has institutionalized ‘exit’ into an ideology and a remedy for a wide variety of abuses.” Now, as a Chevy man, Hirschman may have appreciated the blast against General Motors (though, he too would soon give up on his brand in favor of the upscale Saab). Either way, his ties to Nader were important for his project. Nader was interesting not just because he ventilated in such an articulate way how Americans were experiencing the corporate oversight of everyday life; he had tapped the disappointments of consumers whose activities had a special appeal for a Hirschman who was seeking to place consumerism into the broader panel of peoples’ responses to American capitalism. The fact that Nader’s casus belli was a car—the maligned Corvair—only added to the appeal.27

  “What’s good for GM is good for America” was a risible reminder of duped bygone days, as was the image of the straightlaced, obedient “organization man.” Indeed, organizations had ceased to be synonyms for order and stability—more and more they were seen as the purveyors of disenchantment and treachery.

  Hirschman described the setting in Palo Alto once he’d moved in: each of the roughly fifty visitors at the Center for Behavioral Sciences “occupies a cell in a very beautiful location, with superb views, but without telephones or any contact with the world beyond. If this was a paradise, Hirschman conceded that “there are a number here who appear on the verge of a nervous breakdown in this monastic regime.” This was as good as it could get given the accumulation of writing projects. To top off his pleasures, he bicycled from the house through the campus’s eucalyptus-lined lanes to his office. “When I close my eyes (very briefly!) I imagine myself on the Tiergartenstrasse chasing a bus.” To add to the memories was the rumor that Richard “Rix” Löwenthal, Hirschman’s mentor from the ORG days, was due to visit the center from Berlin’s Free University. In a curious twist, Löwenthal would help Hirschman apply his thoughts to party systems in decline; one can only speculate whether they talked about Weimar—if they did, the traces are imperceptible in the text or notes.28

  Albert, Stanford, 1969.

  As Hirschman settled into his cell and unpacked his bulging files of clippings and yellow notepads, one aspect of his ruminations in his “Confessions—Mine” was clear: his determination to get beyond the vocabulary that he and Shura had been using over dinner. “Social science is compartmentalized,” he noted, adding that “cross connections can be found perhaps best by those who haven’t acquired Veblen’s ‘trained incapacity’ ” (that is, the acquired incapacity to comprehend or even perceive a problem). What he was now pursuing was a “unity of social sciences—communication across disciplines, economics, politics, social psychology, morality” precisely to overcome what he perceived to be creeping narrowness of disciplines.29 It was something of a paradox of the age
that the professionalization of the social sciences appeared to Hirschman to blinker scholars just as the challenges of modern society mounted. The paradox drilled a dilemma into his sense of purpose: at once Hirschman was seeking to shape the social sciences while trying to transcend the ever-rising boundaries separating the disciplines from each other. It would, as we shall see, account for the runaway success of his new project while at the same time unmoor him from the field of economics.

  Where the divide immediately came to the surface was not, however, with his mother discipline, but rather with its cousin, political science. Gabriel Almond had maneuvered behind the scenes to get Hirschman to Stanford in the hopes of forging a collaboration. It did not come to pass. The divergence of their relationship reveals a great deal about Hirschman’s difficulties in the quickly shifting landscape of the American social sciences. As a political scientist, Almond saw in Hirschman a rare economist who used the tools of his discipline to illuminate politics while thinking politically about economic matters. Their relationship thinned in part because, by the time Hirschman arrived in Palo Alto, the original questions about technology and choice had veered onto a very different track. Hirschman felt a twinge of guilt that his sojourn did not yield to the collaboration that Almond had in mind. But there was more. Almond was a practitioner of structural-functionalist analysis, which could occasionally get worked up about elaborate explanatory schema that never appealed to Hirschman’s interest in paradoxes, inversions, and unexpected side effects. A gap was widening between Hirschman and a growing scientistic trend in the social sciences; economists tended increasingly to enhance their progress by eliminating exogenous forces from their models, and political scientists were doing the same, explaining political change wholly in terms of political categories. Hirschman marveled at, as he put it elsewhere, “the noble, if unconscious, desire to demonstrate the irreducibility of the social world to general laws!”30 If he found the search for “parsimonious” theories in search of universal explanations a fruitless pursuit, in less charitable moments he called it “mindless,” bent on oversimplifying in order to control.