Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  If there were colleagues with whom he regularly shared ideas, it was with junior colleagues. Visiting assistant professors such as Philippe Schmitter found in Hirschman one of the rare senior faculty interested in their work and careers. At the time, Harvard Economics was the home to a handful of well-known younger Marxist economists: Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, and Stephen Marglin. While Hirschman seldom agreed with them, their intelligence and creativity engaged him. In an ambience better known for the stratification between tenured and untenured scholars, Bowles found Hirschman “extremely warm” and unusually solicitous. When in 1971, the gregarious Herb Gintis gave an opaque talk to the faculty, many of the senior economists “freaked out.” Galbraith, on the other hand, was delighted to “have someone to my left!” Hirschman was less extroverted; he saved his encouraging thoughts for a more discreet conversation later. When Hirschman returned from Mexico, it was with Sam Bowles that he sorted out some of his early formulations about economic inequality’s effects on social behavior. In February 1972, “Sam” (Bowles) and “Tom” (probably Schelling) joined Hirschman for lunch at the Faculty Club. In the course of their discussion, Hirschman turned his receipt into a graph of the “lexicographic ordering” of peoples’ preferences between the pleasure they get from others’ rewards versus their own. After the lunch, Hirschman went back to his office and scribbled his notes down on his yellow pad, giving himself a diagrammatic image to synthesize his ruminations for what would become one of his most influential papers, on the tolerance for inequality.8

  Lexicographic ordering.

  Hirschman’s was not an ideological affinity; he simply liked colleagues with fresh ideas. In 1969, Michael Rothschild was hired as a junior faculty member as a specialist in the theory of economic uncertainty; he came equipped with a powerful mathematical inclination. Hirschman sought him out. He wanted to know more about uncertainty and shared some of his own ideas with his younger colleague—who found Hirschman “completely wrong” but equally open-minded. Other senior colleagues might have bristled at Rothschild’s pointed comments, but not Hirschman, who asked an “utterly charmed” Rothschild to collaborate with him on an essay. Over lunch at the Faculty Club, Rothschild plotted a simple mathematical formulation (“the least mathematical piece I have ever written,” he would later confess). Impressed, Hirschman urged him to rewrite the draft so they could publish it together. Meanwhile, he asked a research assistant to help him hunt down a quote from St. Thomas Aquinas and gushed to Katia that “the whole theory is being put into equations by a young mathematical economist!”9

  The mixture of faith and formulae was not to be. In the midst of all this, Hirschman checked into Massachusetts General Hospital for a heart procedure—so when Rothschild was done, he paid the patient a visit with the revisions under his arm. Hirschman flipped through the pages from his hospital bed, his face going from delight to shock. “This essay is all evidence!” he exclaimed. Rothschild was taken aback. The literary essayist and the precise quantitative analyst came face-to-face with their differences. But to Hirschman the personal relationship mattered too much for a falling out—and the article was eventually published under Hirschman’s name with a mathematical appendix by Rothschild. Later, Rothschild came to recognize the problem: Hirschman ran into problems contributing to a field that had long-since made its ballast out of elaborate formulae and definitions.10

  The mood in the department deteriorated substantially over the decision to deny tenure to Sam Bowles in December 1972. The faculty cleaved. Graduate students accused the senior faculty of ideological bias. Hirschman, a Bowles-backer, was away on leave that year, which meant he was absent for the dispute. But it only contributed to his lack of interest in departmental and disciplinary politics. In the wake of the Bowles vote, he tried to defer his return to Harvard—which generated “all kinds of problems.” The chair mollified him with a lighter teaching load, which led Hirschman to remark wryly that “it’s good to have some exit possibilities, that makes voice more powerful [sic].” Still, little could assuage him: within the first week of classes he had the feeling that “I’ll never be able to get back to my manuscript—there are just too many other pressures and obligations.”11

  One day, he returned from his office and told Sarah that there was “a place where he dreamed of being.” It was the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Unlike Stanford’s center, it had permanent research faculty who were spared teaching obligations to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of great ideas. Hirschman fantasized being an intellectual without having to be an academic, a model more familiar to his Continental origins than of the United States and its rapidly expanding university midriff. It turned out that his former chairman, Carl Kaysen, had become the institute’s director. In November 1971, Hirschman wrote to Kaysen to inquire about a visiting fellowship for the following year. He had several projects going and was intrigued to hear that the respected anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, had recently moved there—“my work on the tropics would probably benefit from his presence.” One project was a continuation of his interest in the economic, social, and political effects of technology in the Third World. “I have done a considerable amount of dabbling in this field, which I like to call Micro-marxism,” he wrote. At the time, he was reading Fernando Ortíz’s Cuban Counterpoint and Geertz’s Agricultural Involution, both of which counterposed cultures organized around agrarian techniques. The project opened up a more conjectural topic, “a curiosity about attitudes and other changes that are entrained by technology although such changes were not visualized and much less intended, when the technology was adopted.” Never one to let a useful crisis go by without examining the foundations of ideas that were now in crisis, Hirschman was switching tacks. He had happened upon some writings of Montesquieu and Sir James Steuart about the rise of industry and commerce that piqued his interest. “Both felt,” he told Kaysen, “that the pursuit of material gain would keep men from indulging their passions for power, conquest, and domination.” The current obsession with the Invisible Hand “justification of individual profit-seeking” had “driven out these earlier richer, though profoundly flawed, ideas.”12

  As with many fledgling ideas, these were still muddled. A sojourn in the wooded comforts of the Institute for Advanced Study, first as a visitor in 1972–73, and then permanently in the fall of 1974, would afford time to explore his multiplying tracks. It also would give him a base from which he could engage in broad conversations with Latin American colleagues, conversations that would shape the history of the social sciences in the region.

  The lecture in Mexico was the first sign that his bias for hope was coming in for some self-interrogating. Meeting “half-way,” holding down the middle ground, was not as easy as it once was—or seemed to have been. Certainly, what we see is Hirschman’s urge to address positions—political as well as intellectual—as they drifted apart. Nowhere was this clearer than on the debate over what caused the gap between haves and have-nots, which was becoming a hot-button issue as development seemed to falter and hopes for social inclusion faded. The list of development disasters was growing; he’d seen some of them, like Pakistan and Nigeria, close up. Inequality had always been on Hirschman’s mind; his Marxist background attuned him to class disparities. Conversations with Gintis and especially Bowles may have rubbed some radicalism off on their senior colleague. Certainly, Hirschman was forced to confront a rising left-wing critique of reformism in Latin America. By the early 1970s, his concern with inequality was shifting from a problem to solve with development to becoming a problem churned up by development—with politically explosive consequences. No book synthesized the disenchantment more than Samuel P. Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), which assaulted the rosy prognostications of modernization theory that free markets, promoting growth, and expanding democracy were mutually reinforcing. Instead, argued Huntington, rapid development in the tropics made political systems more ungovernable. Hirschman did not agree with Hunt
ington; he had been skeptical of earlier facile theories in which “all good things go together.” But there was no reason to throw in the towel and assume the opposite. The development decade now appeared as just one more stage in a much larger saga of the history of capitalism—a “transitory” moment or an “exuberant phase.” As he noted, with tongue in cheek, at a Harvard lecture in the fall of 1973, we are faced “unfortunately not with an income distribution explosion, but income distribution literature explosion. Those who would change the social order,” he concluded, “oscillate between the illusion of complete powerlessness and the illusion of absolute power.” On his lecture script, the final four words were circled. A line connected them to one more: “Chile.” What one made of the debate over inequality was clearly tied to the political fate of reform in Santiago.13

  Rethinking hope was not the same as giving it up. When Hirschman returned to Latin America again in the early summer of 1973—as the socialist experiment in Chile reached its acme—he was more determined than ever to uphold a middle ground, in part because it was caving in. To one side was a chorus calling for more radical solutions because anything else was doomed to fail; to the other were the head-shakers believing that all notions of change were futile, self-defeating, and downright dangerous. Hirschman mused over Octavio Paz’s lament about Latin America’s “lack of progress” and his frustration that it refused to learn from past mistakes. This type of defeatist thinking was a nub of the problem. Perhaps, Hirschman speculated, the pattern is more complex and its lessons were too easily forgotten. There “are periods of learning” alternating with periods of “forgetting past lessons.” The result only contributed to the sense that nothing could be done incrementally, but rather only through a complete revolution. A potential title to Hirschman’s ruminations, he noted in his diary: “The desire for total change as a recipe for disaster.”14

  By this point, Hirschman was trying to fathom the sources of frustration that often accompanied hope and led many to give it up. The lectures, travels, and conversations yielded a milestone essay aimed at querying the reasons to despair. “Very seldom does it happen,” he noted, “that a new paradigm about the social world leads to modesty rather than to arrogance. If my paper has a virtue this is it, I believe.”15 In fact, the essay was hardly modest. “The Changing Tolerance for Income Inequality in the Course of Economic Development” was a critique of the prevailing disenchantment as well as a masterpiece about the psychology of epochal transitions. Indeed, he located the shift from elation to desolation in the early 1970s as one moment, one pendular swing, from one set of collective feelings to another. “I am working on a new topic,” he told Katia in late 1971. “It’s somewhat related to that famous Tocqueville passage, only that in my scheme people don’t have to get to be actually better off, it’s enough if they see some others beginning to be better off” to make them feel worse. “Envy is such a mean emotion.” Worse, it is the “only one of the seven deadly sins from whose practice you don’t ever get any fun or enjoyment (as you do initially from gluttony, avarice, adultery).” How could one account for the swings, particularly for people feeling worse off when nothing had worsened for them?16

  The essay unveiled a famous metaphor, “the tunnel effect,” which sought to capture how peoples’ sentiments changed from gratification to indignation, as well as the arithmetic of expectations that governed the shift. One day, while caught in traffic at the entrance to the tunnel to Logan Airport in Boston, he watched the reactions of other drivers as well as his own emotional mercury. As the congestion began to give way, he noticed that those in the stationary lane greeted the advance in the adjacent lane with relief—with the expectation that they too would start to move. As they waited, horns started to honk, drivers grew jealous; relief became envy, and envy evolved into outrage because drivers began to feel that someone up front was cheating them. Their mood, as a result, grew much worse because they were once gratified and now felt deprived. If the observation of such a daily emotional routine was one source of insight, Hirschman never let the gains from literature drift far from his mind. As he cast about, he stumbled on La Rochefoucauld, a man dedicated to “his systematic attempt to show the pervasive presence of self-interest in all human conduct and feeling.” It was La Rochefoucauld who “pointed out that when we rejoice at our friends’ good fortune this is not out of friendship but because we expect to extract some benefit from their advance.” Judging from Hirschman’s preferences, he was likely inspired by La Rochefoucauld’s Memoirs, which entwined esteem and enmity in the portrait of his contemporary, Jean François Paul de Gondi, the cardinal of Retz. Now Hirschman was not necessarily endorsing the seventeenth-century French aristocrat; he was trying to expose the apostles of gloominess in the social sciences (like Linder and Huntington) who have “given what seem to me an excessively dominant position to envy, relative deprivation, share-of-the-pie consciousness etc.” What he sought was to understand the oscillation between envy and other sentiments, optimism and pessimism.17

  The perception that rewards were being doled out or denied—what Hirschman called “semantic inventions and inversions”—could reverse moods. The tunnel effect represented the first moment of elation; it described the “tolerant” 1960s, which were giving way to the politics of envy and outrage of the 1970s as the tunnel effect wore off. As in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, there was a sliding scale of alternatives, from friendship and amity to rivalry and enmity, whose expression depended on circumstances; it was not necessary, he believed, to invoke dismal laws of human nature to reinforce “revolutions of rising expectations,” anger from “relative deprivation,” or “mobilization which outruns institutionalization”—stock-in-trade clichés of social scientific gloom. Rather, what was remarkable was the amount of “stability that has prevailed,” whose persistence “cries out at least as much for an explanation as the occurrence of rioting, coups, revolutions, or civil wars.” Still, in Latin America, what captivated people was the instability; even Hirschman had to conclude that there was reason for “more to come.”18

  The essay on inequality was one of Hirschman’s most influential, in league with the witty blast “The Search for Paradigms as an Obstacle to Understanding.” Clifford Geertz, who singled out “The Search” as one of the landmarks for what would later be coined “interpretive social science,” applauded this one too. “This seems to me a wonderfully vivid metaphor; more valuable than a thousand flow charts linking one ism with another. It also confirms my long held suspicion that the car (automobile!) is the social psychologist’s moving laboratory: the one venue in which human nature is revealed raw and undisguised.” Geertz must not have known of Hirschman’s delight in driving and high threshold of tolerance for doing it so badly. Quentin Skinner, who read the essay several years later, called it “a fine example of your most delicately ironic manner of writing.”19

  Not everyone welcomed this appeal to understand how perceptions can lead people to abandon hope. Some figures on the Left, for whom Hirschman’s thinking was altogether too bourgeois, too accepting of power structures, too reliant on voluntarist solutions, found the proposition an affront. Hirschman sent a preliminary version of the essay to Octavio Paz, who immediately asked if he could publish it in his magazine, Plural. When it hit the stands in September 1972, the article elicited outrage from one of Mexico’s most prominent sociologists, Rodolfo Stavenhagen. Stavenhagen was irritated by insinuations that if the masses could just wait, they would get their just deserts; the problem was all in the head, which all too often lapsed into a justification for autocratic regimes to handle involuntary emotional switching. The Third World was teeming with indigence. No wonder there was so much contention! He argued that the tunnel effect was actually a “cul de sac,” condemned to keep social scientists from focusing on real material inequities. Hirschman countered that it was precisely the relative deprivation theory that he wanted to challenge; his goal was to transcend the oversimplifying precepts about the minds of the poor, th
eir impatience and envy—and, in a typical inversion, he charged Stavenhagen of simply collapsing into the same facile theories about what made people tick and explode. Instead of dismissing the importance of want, he was trying to spotlight precisely why inequality was a more important issue than ever. The pages of Plural laid bare two diverging currents in progressive thought that would contend for the heart of Latin American social science: Stavenhagen’s strong materialism, which accented the need for fundamental revolution, and Hirschman’s agenda for radical reform, which rested on a more subjective understanding of social classes and their struggles. When Guillermo O’Donnell, a skeptic of doctrinaire Marxism, read the exchange, he despaired for the Left. “This appalls me,” he confessed, “as an indication of the climate which, I fear, is in crescendo.… Aside from the real and non-trivial difficulties of mutual understanding there is now an additional decision, an almost explicit and self-righteous decision not to understand and use it to issue ‘denunciations’ to a public that is barely interested in the contents of intellectual debate. That this has reached the ranks ALSO of the Stavenhagens is a very worrying symptom.”20

  What was clear was that if Hirschman had a voice, it was being exercised less in Cambridge, Massachusetts, than in Latin America. Starting with the fall lecture tour of 1971, Hirschman was to return to Latin America with greater frequency than ever. The occasion for his heightened circulation and visibility was not just his essays, which were often immediately translated into Spanish and Portuguese and led to more and more invitations to lecture south of the Rio Grande, but the makings of a network of a new generation of scholars in Latin America who would remap the social sciences and for which Hirschman would serve as intellectual guide and institutional broker. Its seeds were sown in the summer of 1971, when Hirschman accompanied an Argentine political scientist, Guillermo O’Donnell, whom he had met as a graduate student at Yale, to Brazil. Not one to overlook young talent, Hirschman appreciated O’Donnell’s efforts to break away from the straightjackets of orthodox Marxism and radical nationalism that dominated progressive thinking in Latin America. Like Hirschman, O’Donnell was trying to bring the analysis of politics into closer dialogue with the study of economic development.