Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  In the cacophony of griping there lurked alternatives. With the slumping economies and human rights atrocities, it was easier to see cause for despair. This bolstered Hirschman’s studious efforts to keep his hopes up. When Gert Rosenthal, the director of the Economic Commission for Latin America, sent Hirschman the proofs of a Spanish translation of one of his articles, Hirschman replied with a fable about the need to exaggerate one’s hopes in order to motivate oneself to pressure for change. It is a necessary myth for progressives, Hirschman explained, like the allure of a mirage to motivate a caravan forward through the desert even though it may eventually only find “a tiny waterhole.” For without the mirage, “the exhausted caravan would inevitably have perished in the sandstorm bereft of hope.” While the results may pale beside the hopes, at least the caravan arrived.46

  Hirschman returned to Princeton at the end of the summer determined to challenge the sacred cows of ideologists. And none was more sacred than the assumption that it was the nature of capitalism in Latin America that market life required despots. For the Left, the pressures to “deepen” heavy industry by securing the investment climate had called for jackboots to tame unruly citizens. To the Right, the argument was not dissimilar: populists and radicals had the region spinning out of control, and if modern life was to be salvaged, it required some cleansing of public life. It was precisely this agreement—and the circularity of the arguments that buoyed it—that inspired Hirschman’s dissent. There was an ethical purpose to his stance: “The more thoroughly and multifariously we can account for the establishment of authoritarian regimes in Latin America, the sooner we will be done with them,” he affirmed.47 A fresh view could point to a multitude of, but not limitless, possibilities and yield stories free of the normative weight that dominated development studies—the “tendency to look for heroes and villains.”48

  There was no more villainous character in Latin America in the mid-1970s than the confederation of economic elites and generals. This fixation was one that Hirschman was determined to break up. One of his implicit aims was to find ways in which economic elites might be salvaged from narratives that depicted them as hopelessly reactionary and bereft of scruples. A strain of his writings from the 1950s had extolled the hidden virtues of the entrepreneur, the doer. The importance of leadership and a heroic coalition of creative réalisateurs and intellectuals was one of his underlying themes, and “the polarization and lack of communication between these two types symbolizes, and at the same time renders more arduous, the transition from stagnation to dynamic development.” These were his words in Strategy. Almost two decades later, as the curtain fell on civilian regimes, one cannot help but sense that Hirschman had the fate of the Weimar Republic in mind, in which business elites had abandoned their pluralist and democratic principles because they felt they had no choice. He admitted that it was hard not to despair. Once upon a time, Enlightened thinkers optimistically affiliated market life with individual liberties, conjuring—as de Tocqueville put it—“a necessary relation between … freedom and industry.” Now, the affiliation flipped to identify “torture and industry.” Both the Left and Right could agree on this—rescuing Latin American capitalism required despots to stabilize the investment climate and subdue unruly workers, to break the grip of “exhaustion with inflation.” Hirschman wanted to break the iron logic. There was altogether too much reflex to run to extremes. The clarion calls in the 1960s had come from the Left, demanding revolution. Now they came more menacingly from the Right. An orthodoxy had settled in Santiago, one aiming to correct the course altogether with drastic market recipes advocated by faculty from Chicago and their former Chilean graduate students nestled into the highest echelons of various economic ministries to usher in nothing less than “a new economic order,” starting with a battery of “shock treatments.”49

  It was the effects of these that Hirschman witnessed during his recent trip and bemoaned. He bemoaned them in part because he was not convinced that they were necessary. The Chicago Boys argued that the old model was irredeemable because of its intractable disequilibria and that it should be replaced with “liberal economic organization.” For Hirschman, who’d long since backed off advocating imbalances, the problem was not the model but the difficulty of “shifting of gears” between policies, difficulties that were then attributed to the model. At issue was the lack of flexibility in thinking among policy makers as well as social scientists. Authoritarianism thrived in climates in which existed—and again, Weimar was an object lesson—“the generalized consciousness that the country is facing serious economic problems … without being able to solve them.” The Chicago Boys exaggerated the impossibility of fixing the existing system because they wanted something wholly different.50

  What bothered Hirschman most was the refusal to take responsibility for the traps that social scientists laid. As he was planning his trip to Latin America, McGeorge Bundy, the president of the Ford Foundation and former dean of the faculty at Harvard, contacted Carl Kaysen, expressing his interest in convening a meeting with “Messrs. Hirschman and Geertz and their colleagues on the question of the Ford Foundation priorities in the area which we have chosen to call ‘the hungry, crowded, competitive world.’ ” The very topic of the gathering expressed the prevailing mood. Hirschman was determined to challenge it by, as he told “Mac” Bundy, showing “that I am less of a mindless optimist than people (and sometimes my closest colleagues and friends) tend to think.”51 On January 27, 1976, an interlocutor from Ford sat down with Hirschman, Geertz, and Cardoso. The conversation began with a dark tone, and Hirschman immediately resisted with a reminder to put social scientific analysis into a broader historical context. The naïve 1950s believed that “all good things go together”: increase GDP and get democracy; free people and they will invest. “It was a simplistic model,” he recalled. “But now we have come in a sense to the inverse idea, that all bad things go together.” Growth is bunk. Human rights are violated. But this “dismal diagnosis” is “probably just as wrong as the earlier one, and I’m also a little bit suspicious of where it leads us.” Geertz, who knew Hirschman as well as anyone, and one of the friends who poked fun at the resilient hopefulness that bordered on quixotic, chimed in: “Albert always wants to look on the bright side.” “You always say,” he added, “truth lies not at the extremes but in the middle.”52

  The divide between hope and hopelessness, between optimism and pessimism, was a false one, Hirschman believed. It was not a matter of whether the overall story was bleak or uplifting, but rather of how it was told, for the epic passage of social change was riddled with chance and choice, and understanding this required humility and a concession to the limits of Reason. From his Hegelian taproots he found the current “correlation” between economics and “the development of torture” as “puzzling” as it was “appalling.” He wanted to get at social scientists’ mindsets, why they persist “in thinking of having only one thing happen, and everything else will coalesce around it, and we’ll come out all right.” Why do “we only have one ‘new key’ at a time?”53

  Invariably, the question of complexity could not avoid the touchy question of ethics, especially when it came to economics. Hirschman wished that his colleagues felt freer to accept their own limits and uncertainties, but not because their claims were irrelevant. On the contrary. The relevance of economists was limited because “they feel more at home with economic magnitudes” and preferred to settle solely upon them. Hirschman never lost sight of a heroic place for the economist. His trouble was, he found it “intolerable” that a bubble of economists (“a little group of American-trained local economists who think they are still in graduate school”) make policy for Pinochet while another bubble of “neo-Marxists” go on about exploitation. Neither orthodoxy was capable of “breaking out” of its hermetic certainties. The irony was, as far as Hirschman was concerned, that feeling at ease with one’s limits would allow social scientists to learn about the economy itself. “It turns out it’
s not all just one black box; there are all kinds of new things churning in there.” Even in Chile, “things have not been completely shut down,” and he pointed to the important research being conducted there among his beleaguered friends at CIEPLAN. It struck some as starry-eyed, but Hirschman added: “If only there were someone who could bring these people together, it might be possible to create some type of dialogue.”54

  One can think of Hirschman talking of himself here, casting himself in the role of broker for such a dialogue. He invoked his “small study group on Latin America” and the way it was exploring, in the darkness of a despotic age, “interesting passages” through a labyrinth to find light. His conclusions could not help but be hesitant. Weeks later, he prepared to pack his bags and return to Latin America. But his mind’s eye was also looking elsewhere, back in time in search of deeper clues to explain how the social scientist learned to think in terms of one new key at a time.

  CHAPTER 16

  Man, the Stage

  The Good is in a certain sense comfortless.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  Hirschman’s life can be recounted as a biography of a reader, recounting stages in the development of a subject’s library, from childhood influences to the dog-eared volumes that shaped an intellectual imagination to the books he parried with his own. Such a narrative would arc across familiar categories of an intellectual biography, from formation to contribution, from absorption to creation.

  As with any effort to give Hirschman’s life history a shape, the story is invariably more complex and not always forward-moving. For one, the books that influenced him as a young man did not retire to the bookshelf. His dog-eared books were worn; the copy of The Wealth of Nations had long since lost its binding, though his Pléiade edition of Montaigne’s Essais remained remarkably intact. Just as he was taken to rethinking his own work, he reread his formative influences, forever finding new meaning in the subtle folds of their prose. During a meeting in São Paulo in 1971, Harley Browning, a sociologist from the University of Texas, turned to Albert and asked him how he came up with such captivating titles. “I always read Flaubert,” Hirschman replied.1

  Flaubert, Montaigne, Smith, Marx … and Machiavelli. Reading Machiavelli began when he was twenty years old (“a good time to read M,” he once told an audience), living in Paris and making his first steps into exiled Italian antifascist circles “reading Machiavelli and Leopardi.”2 He read M. again in Trieste, with Eugenio. When he got to Berkeley (with Montaigne’s Essays under his arm), he went to the library and signed out a copy of M.’s correspondences. This was how he started his first book, with Machiavelli’s confession to Francesco Vettori that he knew little about the “art” of the economy, which resigned him “to reason about the state.” The Prince travelled with him as a member of the OSS during the Italian campaign. Hirschman always kept Machiavelli close at hand, not just for what he thought about the mysteries of power, but for how he thought, how a writer portrayed man—including himself—as a stage upon which competing drives played out their drama.3 This is one of the reasons why Machiavelli’s epistles to Vettori became a refrain. Seven months after confiding his feeble command over trades to the Tuscan diplomat, friend, and hoped-for patron, Machiavelli shared an embellished account of his exile from Florence as a wanderer, hunting for thrushes and gathering firewood, playing cards and backgammon with the local “lice [to] ease my brain from its rot,” he would return home in the evenings, cast off his dirty clothes and boots and “put on the garments of court and palace.” Properly attired, he went to his study to dine in “the courts of the ancients.” There, “I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.” From these conversations with the ancients, Machiavelli explained, he wrote what he learned, a “short study, De principatibus, in which I delve as deeply as I can into the ideas concerning this topic, debating what a princedom is, of what kinds they are, how they are gained, how they are kept, and why they are lost.”4

  This was one of Hirschman’s favorite passages and he treated it as a dreamscape for himself, an allusion to an idyll where one could meet the ancients; a place free of shame or fear; a place where after a day’s hard work in the fields of Third World development one might contemplate princedoms with ancient philosophers. Machiavelli’s ritualized encounters with the ghosts of classicism were, in a sense, Hirschman’s; he too treated the dialogue with the deceased—through their books—with the proper reverence, down to the sartorial preparations associated with Renaissance custom. In the halls in Princeton, people singled out Hirschman as dapper as he was learned, his garments carefully chosen from a clothier in Paris’s sixth arrondissement so that his vestments befit the honor with which he prepared to greet Machiavelli in the sanctuary of the Institute for Advanced Study.

  Life with Machiavelli surfaced again in October 1976. Hirschman was rereading The Prince and Discourses after a long and saddening trip to South America that summer, where the abuse of power was on open display, “and the impact is extraordinary,” he told Katia.5 When it comes to Machiavelli, he said effacingly, “I consider myself a dilettante.” But the excitement was back, not least because he found proof that M. had embarked “on a new route, which has not been followed by any one.” Like M., Hirschman was wading into the “experience of what it is to think dangerous thoughts,” to disturb “fearlessness in facing the truth that may be terrible.” These are Hirschman’s words, not M.’s, but they are premised on his understanding of “Machiavelli as the first big unmasker of [the] Modern Age—[to show] how things really happen in politics.” But he also recalled that at the age of twenty he had been most impressed by M.’s “search for regola generale = generalizations,” which he likened to “Marx’s law of motion.” Almost half a century later, a grown-up Hirschman encountered in M. a skeptic trying to unmask the ironies of “historical regola.” “Not only is man a rather contemptible creature,” Hirschman explained, “but the world is rather poorly (or maliciously) arranged.” Repeatedly he found in The Prince examples of situations “where for success to be assured one needs simultaneously two ingredients, but only one is usually to be had at one time … never both together.” So we can find kingly people without kingdoms and kings deprived of kingly qualities. Seldom do they coincide. This is why it was necessary for good men to usurp power (and behave badly) in order to restore liberties (which is good)—the alignment of an “exceptional man” and fortune to “overcome basic conspiracies against success.” Here we have Hirschman already pondering how Fortuna might turn her back on reform and force the social scientist—is he referring to himself, one might ask?—to take a different tack: “It struck me that M argues like an economist trying to make the best of scarce resources—you just can’t be a paragon of virtue and maintain the state at the same time—so you must maximize morality under constraint of state-maintenance just as a consumer maximizes satisfaction under budget constraint.”6

  One reason why Machiavelli’s dream appealed to Hirschman was because he felt increasingly drawn into a dialogue with his intellectual ancestors, forever trying to explain to them the events around him and enlisting their wisdom. A dialogue for the most part conducted in his head, it is manifest in his ramblings, in the file of “favorite quotes,” and in his occasional letters. His personal diary reveals him meditating on “two classic paradoxes.” They are

  1. For things to function or to be worthwhile, for life to change to be possible or to prosper, there is need for two contradictory requirements to be fulfilled: e.g. in a state there must be both power and participation, in a marriage similarity and diversity.

  2. The various states of the world are often arranged in a circle, not along a straight line, with the best and worst states close together: that is, maximum participation and mass indoctrination as in a police state touch each
other with demobilized, bureaucratic elitist regimes (democratic and otherwise) at opposite sides of [a] circle; or in father-daughter relative closeness is close to incest and both are equally far from coldness-indifference.

  “I feel there is a connection between these two principles,” he concluded.

  The search for insights into the ambiguities and contradictions of his age—heightened freedom coinciding with ruthless abuses, prosperity mixed with terrible want—suggested that these apparent incompatibilities were in fact siblings. It sent him backward to a founding moment in the making of the modern world. Were there currents of thought that could be recovered as historical lanterns for the future now that, as far as Hirschman was concerned, the quest for simplifying yet technically awesome methods was yielding diminishing returns? He folded himself into the problem. In writing to Katia about his preface to a W. W. Norton edition of Journeys he felt it necessary to deal with “certain overoptimistic passages of the end of my stories.” Looking up “must be understood,” he felt, “as a fling to which every writer has a good right at the end of his effort.” Ending this way was “part exhortation, part incantation.” “After all,” he exhorted, “didn’t Machiavelli predict the imminent unification of Italy in the last chapter of The Prince?” He liked this self-defense: “I really enjoyed that not-so-subtle way of putting myself into Machiavelli’s class—one can do that by claiming the same weakness or foibles,” with the hope “that one also shares their other attributes.”7