Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  The caustic words also speak to what Geertz and Hirschman did want: a worldly atmosphere free of provincial students and engaged in serious, cutting-edge discussion of new research. In his first year as a permanent faculty member, Hirschman’s visiting companions in Social Science included David Apter, Sidney Mintz, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, John Murra, Guillermo O’Donnell, and Arturo Warman—leaders of the new generation of social scientists working on development in Latin America. Included also was Donald Winch, an economist recovering from his stint as a dean at the University of Sussex during its turbulence. The following year brought Cardoso back and added the younger generation of Americans—David Collier, William Sewell (for several years), Victor Turner, and Orlando Patterson—and by 1976–77 the tilt in the profile of visitors included more historians, such as Michel Vovelle, Quentin Skinner (who would stay on until he was appointed to the chair of Political Science at Cambridge), as well as Hirschman’s old friend from Marshall Plan days and well-known economic historian, Charlie Kindleberger. The only Latin Americanist was José Serra, the Brazilian economist, who would stay at the IAS for two years under the aegis of being Hirschman’s assistant. What can be said of these assemblies—aside from the absence of women (Natalie Zemon Davis would be the first to join Social Science, in 1977)—was how they represented prominent voices in the two dominant spheres of Hirschman’s thinking in the first half of the 1970s: the troubles with development and early modern European history.25

  While there was not a lot of sustained dialogue across the divide that separated Latin American authoritarianism from eighteenth-century capitalism, they converged in Hirschman’s head. The outer world saw one Hirschman: the thinker of development in Latin America who seemed to be hopping incessantly from capital to capital. There was another, one receding into the foundational texts of the modern social sciences, perched in his glassed office on the second floor of the institute’s modern wing. The two Hirschmans were, in fact, one. What drove him to history was in part the experience of the more visible Hirschman dealing with the disenchantment with economic growth and “its most calamitous side effects in the political realm”: dictators and “wholesale violations of elementary human rights,” realities the world propagated in the face of his optimism. As he told a seminar at MIT shortly after returning from Chile and the spectacle of Chicago Boy medicine, he was dismayed by “many economists, cozily ensconced in their ever-expanding discipline and insulated from ‘exogenous’ happenings, however disastrous” and who “were not particularly struck by the possibility of such connections between economic and political events.” Having taken an increasingly vocal stand and urged Latin American social scientists to consider the political implications of their analyses, he was “deeply disturbed by what, so it seemed, we [economists] had wrought or at least helped bring about.” So, while the outer world was a source of despondency, Hirschman turned inward by going backward, to the foundations of thinking about capitalism and democracy. His solution was “to withdraw to history”—“to dwell for a while among the political philosophers and political economists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”26

  In fact, this withdrawal to history was already in train as the hopes for reform and development were waning. The sense that the confident ’60s were turning even before the decade was out spurred him to look for deeper patterns, to search for some originary clues about how the first social scientists squared political and economic life as they became separate domains. While working on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in Stanford, Hirschman happened to pick up a book from the shelf in the house they were renting. Called Economie politique et philosophie chez Steuart et Hegel, by Paul Chamley, it piqued his interest, not just because it took him back to some of his intellectual moorings, but also because it reopened the gate to classical political economy, where he had begun his teenage forays into the world of economics.27 Almost half a century later, what had started as an interest in the responses to the industrial revolution—as he had explained to Kaysen—became a voyage of its own. Yellow pads from the years 1972 to 1976 contain notes from Vico, Herder, the Duke of Rohan, Aristotle, the Physiocrats, Helvétius, and of course Machiavelli—and increasingly the figures of the Scottish Enlightenment: John Millar, Adam Ferguson, Sir James Steuart, David Hume, and Adam Smith. The summer of 1973 had him wrestling with Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. “It just happens, he [referring to the German sociologist] was primarily interested in showing [religion’s] importance in determining the rise of capitalism … while I am trying to go one step farther back & inquire why there was a compulsion for people to look for a new doctrine, there was a problem begging solution, namely how to get away from the desperate plight hence conduct in general … in the 17th century.” Note taking at the start of any project often reveals initial confusion. This was as true of Hirschman as anyone. But seldom had he started by casting his net so wide. Doing so added to the mystery and intrigue. And ambition. Here was a petite idée with big possibilities. Weber had pointed to the dreams of predestination that wound up yielding “disenchantment with the world.” Hirschman was puzzled: but what linked high hopes and disillusionment? “In my scheme,” he jotted, “the ‘distance that makes one gasp’ (the goal of all theory construction) is between the expectations and hopes that helped install & legitimize bourgeois society & capitalist activity, on the one hand, and the desperately disappointing results—so disappointing in fact that we have repressed the consciousness of those expectations & hopes (‘grundlichvergessen’ Freud).”28

  If he could just figure out the passage between the ways in which capitalism was initially understood and reveal its prospectus, he could thereby shed light on why it was seen to fall short. Deriving this kind of “theory,” what we might now call recovering a memory of capitalism, might therefore thwart the temptations of the extremes of throwing one’s hopes behind the salvations of the pure market or the social revolution.

  An intellectual arc was forming that started with Machiavelli’s urge to see Political Man “as he really is” and the economic formulations of Adam Smith. A phrase from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws lodged in his memory and got filed away in his dossier of favorite quotes: “It is fortunate for men to be in a situation where, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked, they have nevertheless an interest in not being so.” The phrase would, fittingly, be the epigraph for the manuscript. In it was nestled the foundational paradox that motivated him. While Marxists and romantics alike criticized capitalism for its lack of moral compass, for having demeaned individual drives to narrow and base motives, in fact they denounced the system for realizing precisely what it was originally hoped would happen—turning the “wicked” into men who would have an “interest in not being so.” Hirschman discovered that a war was being waged over the very concept of human nature; for several centuries, “man was widely viewed as the stage on which fierce and unpredictable battles were fought between reason and passion or, later, among the various passions.”29 While the essay on the tunnel effect had cued Hirschman to the domains of peoples’ emotions—such as envy, the deadly sin that yielded no fun—and their effects on social processes, he was now moving backward in time to confer with his ancients to reckon with their understandings of the passions.

  This was new terrain for a development economist and observer of human behavior. As he packed his books for a summer of reading, he confided that “I am a little scared about plunging into a topic which will require a detailed knowledge of social and political thought from the 17th to the 19th century!” But six months later, the fear was giving way to thrill. “I feel that I have never skated on quite so thin an ice, and that’s saying quite a lot,” he wrote to Katia. In the hands of a different kind of reader, it might have led to antiquarianism or worse; the world of letters is populated by authors who “discovered” the classics for their own, more prosaic, purposes. For a “fox” who knew about many things (and not a “hedgehog” who knew one big thi
ng), Hirschman’s conversations with the ancients may have led in new directions, but his manner of pursuing them had not changed. “It’s the kind of tension I know of,” he observed of himself, “for I really am dying to know what I’ll come up with next, and in this particular case I am not even sure how I want things to turn out.” Tension, pressure points, and conflict were of course part of Hirschman’s theoretical arsenal. But moving into such new territory had also clearly churned it up inside. Few could tell. There were the occasional private confessions to Katia, and of course the long walks with Sarah. It was not lost upon José Serra who, as his assistant with an office across the hall, literally watched Hirschman painstakingly work out his arguments, at once able to cloak himself in self-protective confidence to the casual observer while fretting at his desk, constantly fretting over words with the younger Brazilian. Serra watched one essay on inflation take many months to finish. Hirschman once admitted that he feared talking about his ideas lest “someone might kill them” before they were ready.30

  The history of ideas was, in some respects, a polar extreme to development studies and its concerns with roads, inflation, and agrarian reform. For Hirschman, however, it was not such a stretch to see the links between these universes; he had always been alert to the ways in which ideologies and intellectuals shaped the thinking of policy makers who fashioned the spectrum of peoples’ choices. But there was a way in which the foundations of intellectual history were shifting that brought the classical texts of the past down to earth. Moving to the IAS brought Hirschman face-to-face with new currents. The coming of age in the 1970s of a new school, sometimes dubbed the Cambridge School, shifted the emphasis from the inherent significance of a classic to the meaning of a treatise derived from a reconstruction of the political idiom of when and where it was written. The new turn, associated with Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and John Pocock and with influential reinterpretations of Hobbes, Locke, and Machiavelli, cleared the ground for recombining ideas with ideologies.31

  It so happened that the core concern of the new intellectual history was with movements such as republicanism and civic humanism, whose values coursed through Hirschman from childhood. An ideal of an active, participatory citizenship, combined with an ethic of education and learnedness—principles that echoed his father’s assimilated Jewish republicanism as well as Eugenio’s ethics—the very term civic humanism was minted in the Weimar Republic by the historian Hans Baron, one of the republic’s assimilated Jews, who, like Hirschman, found himself driven from Germany in 1933. Arguing for an alternative to the nationalist, and ultimately despotic, spirit that was also sired by the First World War, civic humanists traced their origins to Renaissance Florence and through republican theorists like Montesquieu. There were many currents that sprang from it. One flowed through the pen of Skinner, who was to join, upon John Elliott’s recommendation, the IAS’s School of Historical Studies in 1974, which coincided with Hirschman’s arrival. He then moved for three years to Social Science. Among Skinner’s large projects was a history of political thought that tried to recover the Renaissance tradition of thinking about freedom and the common good as inextricably bound up with each other. There was, therefore, an important congruence between Skinner’s effort to recover a tradition of thinking about political liberty before liberalism and Hirschman’s effort to recover lost understandings of personal interests before capitalism.

  Was this parallel play? Hirschman was certainly not motivated by a debate among historians. There is no evidence that Hirschman had read either the milestone methodological essays by Skinner or Pocock or John Dunn’s classic study of John Locke, when he began his perambulations. He remained, in this sense, the self-guided reader of Montesquieu and Adam Smith, just as he had digested Keynes and Montaigne solo. When Pocock published his celebrated The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition in 1975, it came as news to Hirschman. That spring, he and Donald Winch, who was embarking, largely motivated by conversations with Skinner, on his own study of Adam Smith, agreed that it would be a fine idea to invite Pocock to come for lunch to the institute and talk about his recent book. While this was an opportunity for Hirschman to consider this major intervention, his thinking had already taken shape. There was little engagement with Pocock; Hirschman cited The Machiavellian Moment several times with the neutral, if not tepid, recommendation that readers follow Pocock’s trail should they be interested in “more detail.”

  The influence of the new intellectual history was more ambient. For someone with such an observational style, the conversations around him validated “his new project” of making sense of Montesquieu’s paradox about wicked men losing their interest in being so. He certainly did not have to feel guilty for his withdrawal. The regular seminars, daily lunches, and routine occasions for scholars to gather and share insights anchored him to an intellectual environment while he was simultaneously interviewing finance ministers and creating think tanks in Latin America. Winch was a regular source of notes for Hirschman’s mailbox and would occasionally venture down the quiet hallway to fairly courtly meetings with the quiet, seemingly aloof, senior colleague. There was also a movement, spearheaded by what was regarded as “the English mafia” at the institute, to hold regular informal gatherings to discuss questions of method and historiography. Meeting at Geertz’s house, the conversations tended to be dominated by Skinner’s energy and deep engagement with the topics as he was wrestling with his own project, which would culminate in the multivolume Foundations of Modern Political Thought in 1978.32

  These occasions were perfectly suited for Hirschman’s osmotic style. Forever quietly taking insights from his milieu, his conversations with Skinner and Winch over lunch or a seminar would send him back to his office to reread and write. Winch drew attention to important passages from Adam Smith’s The Lectures on Jurisprudence, which were in the course of being published for the first time. These revealed a Smith concerned about the ties between the working of the market and public authority, fields that Hirschman thought the Scot had severed in order to invent homo economicus and a discipline to illuminate him.33

  It was Skinner who had the most profound influence, possibly because he was more engaged with the core of Hirschman’s enterprise, and possibly because of the shared affection for word games. To the Cambridge School founder, Hirschman’s point of arrival, Adam Smith and the dawn of economics, was less the concern than the point of departure, Machiavelli and politics. Skinner teased apart nuances that Hirschman glossed over (for instance, the difference between honor and glory in The Prince, which Skinner felt represented quite different ideals in the Renaissance; perhaps Calvin would be a better example than Hobbes as an illustration of someone who imagined the state as a repressor of man’s passions?). More importantly, he directed him to an alternative fount for thinking about the ideal of active citizenship and commerce. Hirschman wondered how Machiavelli simultaneously wrestled with “how things really happen in politics” while at the same time being attached to the notion that honor and glory were goals of action that could yield socially desirable outcomes—and one cannot help but hear echoes of Eugenio Colorni, the Justice and Liberty movement, and Hirschman’s determination to return continually to the antifascist front. To Skinner’s eye, this was more fully developed in Machiavelli’s Discorsi, which was the more influential treatise to moralists of the eighteenth century, than in The Prince. There one could find the image of the armed citizen, as Skinner wrote to Hirschman, “ready to fight for his liberties, and jealously guarding them by ensuring that the classes remain pitted against each other and thus that the powers are separated.” The hero is “an intensely political citizen,” endowed with the leisure to rule and the virtù to fight for his country. This image, Skinner reminded Hirschman, was “immensely influential on Montesquieu, at least when discussing republics.” From there, Albert could note the continuity to Rousseau and the strength of the “activist tradition” of thinking about citizen
ship (in contrast to that laid out by Hobbes, “who commends such inability to meddle”). Hirschman immediately got his hands on a copy of the Discorsi.34

  While all of this was transpiring over lunch and in the hallways of the institute, the trails into intellectual history never led Hirschman far from his concern with the twentieth century, the problems of development, and the shadow of Latin America’s despots. As the final picture of his project was forming in his mind, he felt compelled to remind himself of “The Reasons for Undertaking this Project.” “So What?” he asked. So what if early modern thinkers saw the coming of capitalism with “extravagant hopes” it “totally failed” to deliver? Writing in the climate of the mid-1970s, “capitalism was born alienated and already repressed and repressing.” In the gloom of the mid-70s, this was hardly an original observation. Many Latin Americans were telling him this. So were Marxist students and colleagues.35

  Did it all have to be just so bleak? Smarting after watching his earlier hopes for development and reform run afoul, Hirschman was grasping at an idea that “a certain type of economic relations leads to a certain type of politics.” But it was far from a simple idea, because he was searching for a way to be “deterministic” (as he had pressed Guillermo O’Donnell in his own search for the links between development and dictatorship in Latin America) and yet contain within his model multiple possible outcomes. In fact, he was dueling with two currents and thus staking a double-edged position. What made the result all the more remarkable was the deceptively simple prose in which he wrapped it. On one hand, Hirschman was after an idea that would illuminate the ties between economics and politics in a way that did not force a narrowed version of the latter to conform to the expanded needs of the former. This, of course, was the prevailing view among Pinochetistas in Chile and an emerging brand of “new” conservatives in Europe and North America who thought the rabble-rousing of the 1960s had pushed participation to extremes and made countries “ungovernable.” How could an active citizen be kept active in a way that allowed the pursuit of honor and glory, and expanded politics, to yield socially desirable results? At the same time, there was an opposing thrust. He wanted an economy composed of self-interested people capable of wielding power in such a way that imposed “constraints on policymakers” while hoping that their pursuit of private selfish goals might yield to the “paradoxical consequences of the introduction of certain institutions”—institutions that could govern countries. In this fashion, unbridled ego-driven individualism might beget individual-liberty-protecting governments.36