Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  The difference was laid bare when a Berkeley graduate student, the Argentine Oscar Oszlak, invited Hirschman to a conference in Asilomar. Hirschman accepted and proposed the title “The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding.” Oszlak’s dissertation advisor, David Apter, another prominent political scientist, inquired whether Hirschman had accepted. If so, what was his paper about? When the Argentine explained, Apter smiled and countered with his own paper title, “The Use of Paradigms as a Help to Understanding,” to defend his side.31

  Hirschman did not mince words when it came to the imperialist features of some of the ornate, “theoretical” suppositions of the social sciences. In this, he returned to an old obsession to defrock the expert suffering from “the visiting economist syndrome”:

  In the academy, the prestige of the theorist is towering. Further, the extravagant use of language intimates that theorizing can rival sensuous delights: what used to be called an interesting or valuable theoretical point is commonly referred to today as a “stimulating” or even “exciting” theoretical “insight.” Moreover, in so far as the United States is concerned, an important role has no doubt been played by the desperate need, on the part of the hegemonic power, for shortcuts to the understanding of multifarious reality that must be coped with and controlled and therefore understood at once.32

  The new breed of social scientist and revolutionary “experience the same compulsion,” argued Hirschman. The revolutionaries now cite Marx without understanding him, arming themselves with “laws of change” to justify the view that interpreting the world is inferior to changing it. This was a not-so-subtle dig at American students and Latin American radicals who denied the possibility of change without revolution. More troublesome and pernicious was a “cognitive style” that was, as he put it politely, “unfortunate.” The problem was not which side to be on; it was the “impatience for theoretical formulation.” To make his case, he compared two books, John Womack, Jr.’s recently published profile of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and James L. Payne’s study of violence in Colombia. Womack, it needs to be said, was an assistant professor at Harvard, and Hirschman liked him immensely—not least because Womack did not hide his affection for Mexico and sympathy for Zapata’s cause behind a patina of objectivism. Payne, on the other hand, “exudes dislike and contempt” for the society he studied. Womack’s fine-grained narrative—“one might say Flaubertian”—about a redemptive struggle, contrasted with Payne’s neutral application of the latest “theories” to explain Colombians’ “self-made hell” and to tout a model that could be applied anywhere. Payne was the butt of Hirschman’s ridicule, which bordered on the cruel; his “model is as wrong as it is outrageous.” Worse, it was banal, “at best [it] leaves us with the proposition, which incidentally is both platitudinous and wrong, that if the politicians are vicious, the ensuing politics are likely to be too!”33

  Heat like this in Hirschman’s prose is rare, and it suggests that he was unhappy about the drift of entire sectors of American social science that he considered ruinous. He scribbled a Payne-inspired diatribe about “the conservative, anti-change chamber of social theories.”34 Testing variables, valorizing parsimony, and seeking generalizability all as ends in themselves had the additional ignominy of being painful to read. There was, of course, the charge that Hirschman valued complexity, which to some of his critics meant messiness, as an end in itself, and there are times when his work is not immune to the charge. But it misses the point of his cognitive style, which might be located in an unstable—and squeezed—middle. He was not calling for a grand unified social science, but rather a careful rebuilding from petits steps, or “mini-building blocks” that did not appeal to dependence on exclusive categories or magnify the distance between reality and intellectual schema. It was perhaps more elegantly framed by Paul Valéry, whom Hirschman was reading as he composed “The Search for Paradigms”: “Tout ce qui est simple est faux. Tout ce qui ne l’est pas est inutilisable.”35

  In the course of penning his diatribe, Hirschman added a little aphorism for himself in response to Payne: “Hope as a principle of action.” Another petite idée to stash away.

  What Hirschman did happen upon at Stanford was social psychology. Hirschman had always had an eye out for the psychological underpinnings of behavior and had never found the conventional self-interested homo economicus an especially revealing subject. Strategy had leaned on some social psychology to illuminate the ways in which people made decisions. Ideology and perceptions played a role in the habits of reformmongers. And the boundary between trait-making and trait-taking elaborated in Development Projects Observed had required some insight into more than just utility maximizing, which is why Albert and Shura burned the midnight oil. Indeed, we can see the strands of the challenge starting to interlace in the presentation Hirschman made in 1963 to the Institut d’étude du développement, when François Perroux had invited him to share his recent thoughts about the “obstacles” to development with a French audience. Hirschman seized the opportunity to try to shift the debate away from the “objective” constraints such as lack of roads or pervasive illiteracy. He wanted to draw attention to the ways in which perceptions of obstacles were sometimes thornier than the obstacles themselves; they could be intractable products of the beholder’s eye and thus get in the way of potential alternatives and reforms. And some obstacles could be turned into an advantage when seen differently. The outline notes to what would eventually become “Obstacles to Development: A Classification and a Quasi Vanishing Act,” sported a headline: “VICIOUS CIRCLES.”

  Soon his desk groaned under the weight of piled-up evidence that people made decisions in complicated and often counterintuitive ways. The effects of experiments by Jack W. Brehm, the late Arthur R. Cohen, and most of all, Leon Festinger—the Stanford psychologist who had pioneered the theory of cognitive dissonance and written a book that Hirschman admired, When Prophecy Fails—dominated his reading. The latter, a 1956 classic by undercover psychologists about a UFO cult that predicted the end of the world, piqued Hirschman’s interest for its use of a “case study” method drawn from a newspaper headline and applying the new concept of cognitive dissonance—just the kind of raw material Hirschman relished: everyday occurrences that yield new insights. How did believers keep up their faith when the prophecy from the planet Clarion did not materialize in Armageddon? Many, for reasons that went beyond simple dismissals of irrationality, hung on. Cognitive dissonance helped explain how disconfirming information and deep beliefs can be reconciled. The heart of the psychological enterprise inverted the customary (and still-resilient) precept that peoples’ attitudes shape their behavior. What psychologists did, which Hirschman took to the core of his own approach, was to flip the equation, to treat behavior as a shaper of beliefs and attitudes. Hirschman sent Festinger a draft of the “Obstacles” paper and asked him to review his treatment of how an economist might draw from his work on cognitive dissonance. Festinger, a notoriously irascible man, was impressed. “The remarks you make about dissonance theory and the implications for the theory are quite correct technically. In addition, I think you make them cogently and interestingly.”36

  Praise like this must have brought glee. But the author of When Prophecy Fails turned out to be a recluse and had no interest in reciprocating Hirschman’s overture to collaborate. Instead, Hirschman happened upon one of Festinger’s young colleagues, Philip Zimbardo, who had just joined the Stanford psychology department and was delighted to team with the distinguished economist. At the time, Zimbardo was working on illusions of choice before people made decisions; how they attached to decisions they found most laborious or identified with groups (like fraternities) they suffered to join (like humiliation rituals). Hirschman loved this kind of work and appreciated the careful parsing of questions such as, How long do loyalties last? When does dissonance become intolerable? How do group dynamics perpetuate or crumble? Hirschman and Zimbardo, himself an antiwar activist a
nd teach-in organizer, spent many hours over lunches and coffees talking about their respective interests and groping for an understanding of how intentions translate into actions. Along with one of Zimbardo’s graduate students, Mark Snyder, the three of them designed an experiment on “The Effects of Severity of Initiation on Activism,” which proposed to figure out what people do when they find out a group is less enjoyable or profitable than their expectations. Nothing came of it, in part, ironically, because a wave of revolt finally struck the Stanford campus the following academic year—which made getting human subjects to work on conformity and noncomformity seem a bit beside the point. Eventually, the idea rested in a forgotten appendix.37

  What had started out as a central premise in Hirschman’s thinking about economic development—disequilibrium—was broadening to fathom the reasons for the underlying volatility of the world. This was, after all, the tenor of the times; the happy, all-good-things-go-together mood that had inaugurated the 1960s was quickly dissipating. Confidence in progress and planning was giving way to crises and clashes; finally, the world appeared to be catching up to Hirschman’s instinctive search for the unbalanced aspects of social life. At the same time, Hirschman realized, there was a basic difference between creative disequilibria and a complete breakdown. It was a fine line he would later have to identify when the turmoil ceded to a darker mood in the 1970s. For now, what was necessary was a social science that brought out “the inborn tendencies towards instability.” It was not enough to preach imbalance or advocate antennae for unintended consequences. Hirschman was groping for something more fundamental, more internal to the black box of human behavior, a way to make good on what was still so unresolved but central to Strategy: the quest for an endogenous theory of how things changed. It was becoming more important as the shine on reform was quickly wearing off; an endogenous theory would clinch the case that reform was always possible because little about the world was as fixed, entrenched, or intractable as it seemed.

  What was becoming clearer was that people were internally mixed, always amalgamating motives and dispositions. Nowadays, with the modernist faiths behind us, this may seem self-evident. But in the late 1960s this was not a widespread acknowledgement. There were others groping around for similar coordinates. Erik Erikson advocated a psychosocial approach to the human ego, which had discrete stages to its development and was vulnerable to “identity crises.” An ur-text for radical readers, Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man blasted the view of modern Man as a creature of Reason—an ontological fiction that had to remove “him” from a dialectical relationship with society or nature in order to subordinate “him” to what Marcuse called “technological rationality and the logic of domination.” The underlying tone of alienation and crisis, which could be marshaled to justify a range of responses, from defying the draft to hurling Molotov cocktails, never appealed to Hirschman. When students pressed these works on him, he was usually polite but always dismissive. Hirschman was after something that simultaneously embraced instability while still being basically about redeeming the core of human behavior, a way to capture the multidimensional features of modern life. He fastened on two expressions. One was the decision to speak out against misdeeds and wrongdoings; the other was to defect. The first was what he saw in the griping about Nigerian railways, the second was the decision to opt for the intrepid truck; the first was protest against the military draft, the second, flight to Canada; the first was fight in the inner-city ghettos of Newark and Los Angeles, the second was to move up the economic ladder and out of the trap. The first, Hirschman labeled “voice,” the second, “exit.” This coinage would go on to have an august career of its own.

  What mattered for Hirschman was how the words expressed peoples’ efforts to mix, negotiate, and choose between courses. Perhaps rulers of institutions and organizations might then recognize—instead of suppressing—the need for alternatives and could “improve the design of institutions that need both exit and voice to be maintained in good health.” Herein lay the hope for “recuperation,” a subtle keyword in the text into which Hirschman would pour his thoughts about the world in an effort to bring to light “the hidden potential of whatever reaction mode is currently neglected.” The contrast with the tone of Marcuse cannot be denied. If the German critical theorist wanted to smash the system, the German economist wanted to make it more flexible. Indeed, the last line of the book would eventually register a personal plea for openness to the neglected, angular, hidden forces at work in society. “Such,” he concluded, “at least is the stuff writers’ dreams are made of.”38

  A two-way flow connected the complex views of people and adaptive organizations. Capturing this was the goal of the book, which would be a milestone in the history of the social sciences and which would catapult Hirschman to academic fame. As with Strategy, Hirschman drew upon an eclectic disciplinary repertoire. Whereas Colombia had been the laboratory for Strategy, Hirschman was now operating at an entirely different scale: the entire world was his observational oyster.

  By the end of 1968, he was prepared to unveil thoughts that were inchoate a year earlier. The Center for Behavioral Sciences had Hirschman culminate their fall-semester seminar; he presented a paper called “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.” “In spite of its length,” Hirschman apologized, for he had not taken the time to whittle it down, “it’s still incomplete.”39 People crowded into the room to hear the rambling, not very clear, almost demure presentation. It started by explaining his interest in connecting fields, how an idea might grow and open hidden pathways by combining insights from psychology, economic development, and decision making—what he called “cognitive dissonance in action.” Then came the customary cites of the writers: Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Constant, and Octavio Paz. The paper was hardly a draft and could not have been easy to follow, because Hirschman was still moving his pieces around. Still, the exercise forced him to focus on what undergirded the final text: behaviors that were at odds with attitudes and expected theories, followed by potential explanations for “inconsistent” acts. His goal was to undo “ordinary sequences” that made attitude change a condition for social change, and thus the limits of exhortation as a way to effect it.40

  This was his first iteration. While he was writing, he constantly adapted and refined his ideas. He was also updating with imports of breaking events and headlines: the flow of letters that Ralph Nader gave him from disgruntled customers, new issues of Consumer Reports, and the fate of the Black Power movement and its academic analogue, Black Studies, in Bay Area universities. Indeed, Black Studies was an exemplary case. Its proponents asked students and professors to reject a traditional pattern of upward social mobility on the grounds that “it was unworkable and undesirable for the most depressed group in our society.” The old pattern of “exit” of a few select African-Americans into white society, which was meant to promote “collective stimulation” of Blacks and the improvement of the ghetto, did nothing for those who remained. In losing the most promising members, Blacks were deprived of critical voices that might otherwise fight for the lot of the group. The rise of Black Studies represented the surge of a new kind of voice that Hirschman found “strikingly analogous” to the Nigerian railroads and public schools. They were all examples where peoples’ exit was ineffective at getting organizations to change their ways while voice “was fatally weakened by exit of the most quality-conscious customers.” Evidence of this kind of dynamic was all around him. Interestingly, Hirschman made no mention of his own exits—Berlin, Trieste, Paris, Washington—and there is nothing in his notes that suggested a personal connection.41 If the seminar performance was confusing, it was because he was still sorting out his ideas for what would become a deceptively simple formula.

  The final book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, was an immediate sensation; it had that unique mix of being quickly grasped while exploding in many directions. It explained how a World Bank project in Nigeria
n railways could aggravate relations between ethnic groups and stoke political exit or secession; it also illuminated how American students’ demand for participatory democracy was starting to slip into the countercultural herald to “drop out” of society and locate freedom through exit. And he was going after reigning theories of monopoly, a major set piece of economics. It both illuminated current events while addressing core theories in the social sciences. What made the text all the more stunning was its economy of words; he could cover so much territory in so few pages. There was enough of a draft for Hirschman to send out something “too long for an article and too short for a book,” ninety-seven pages. Despite protestations about being “out of my depths,” Hirschman was not about to hesitate when he was on to something. And he knew he was on to something. “It’s still rough and incomplete,” he told the Harvard historian Ernest May, “but I decided to circulate it now in this form, get started on something else and later in the year complete the essay when I shall have gathered some comments and second thoughts.”42 Another copy went to departmental colleagues Ken Arrow and Harvey Leibenstein and to Columbia’s Gary Becker, whom Hirschman had met at Cape Cod the previous summer. Arthur Stinchcombe, the Berkeley sociologist, also gave it a read and made some suggestions about the formal models, which later got demoted to the first four appendices of the final work. Hirschman worked furiously with the feedback, elaborated his points, and salted in the day’s news. Nothing was going to get in his way. “It has been a book that wrote itself,” Albert mused, “with no premeditation on my part.” By the end of the summer of 1969, a draft was finished. As they packed their bags and prepared to return to a sundered Cambridge, Albert had to confess that the isolation had allowed him to break his own personal record. Now he had to brace himself for a return home to his cleaved university, friends who were no longer talking to each other, and the angst of teaching.43