Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Nowadays, economic actors are considered as processors of information; we have moved from seeing the market as a mechanical arrangement to viewing agents themselves as mechanisms—a view that places economics on the road to becoming a science. This was a turn that Hirschman found unfortunate and is what spurred him to recover the origins of a different, but ultimately doomed, understanding of economic agents.

  There were, therefore, two simultaneous arguments being made in The Passions and the Interests. The first was a highly original recovery of the classical thinkers’ ability to present a combined self, one able to subsume passions and interests within the economic soul while at the same time presenting the autonomy of this recombined self as the bulwark against a trampling, meddling, politically impassioned state. The balancing act cut across a pair of axes: the self and state were each endowed with internally juxtaposing and blending drives, and at the same time there was a delicate equipoise between self-restraining selves and states. The second was about how the broader view of economic man sustained by gentlemanly commercial intercourse was doomed. If these were the arguments for capitalism before its triumph and were original for their prophecies, the very triumph could only degrade them. Adam Smith, in this respect, came across as the hinge in the history of economic thought. By rebranding passions as interests, Smith’s formulation “destroyed in passing the competing rationale” of the dialectic between passions and interests. Identifying particular interests with that of the whole made interests seem suddenly not so attractive, almost bloodless and mechanical; interests no longer fought with, or defined themselves at odds with, their sibling passions. They simply ruled. What Hirschman wanted was to restore the necessary competition, the rivalry, the tensions and non-synonymous features of human drives that Adam Smith had dissolved in the alchemy of the Invisible Hand. The complex, combined, but uneasy model of self-hood had gotten lost, which is why Hirschman insisted on going back to the passions to retrieve some of the originary anxiety, for the cleansed view of interests split them from man’s soul and drained them of normative content. By the end, interests even ceased to be a euphemism at all and gave way to the late twentieth-century’s semantic shift to “revealed preferences” and “maximization under constraint,” which Hirschman coded as “neutral and colorless neologisms.”46

  At first blush, the war over words might have seemed an esoteric dispute among intellectual historians. It is true that in the history of economic thought, no one had so forcefully combined insights into the simultaneous operations of politics and economics, self and state, by recovering a moment of thinking about capitalism that accepted—indeed, embraced—the idea of the individual as driven by more than the quest for utilities. But there was more going on related to contemporary disputes about how to understand capitalism now that it had triumphed. The Passions and the Interests appeared on the stands as many dismal scientists advocated sparer notions of homo economicus, whose striving acquisitive energy had to be freed from the shackles of the state. For those yearning for an expanded view of economics, one that saw through the Milton Friedmans of the world and their iron laws of money, Hirschman’s appeal to a more social and political homonidae gave some intellectual muscle to challenge the growing “neoclassical” orthodoxy and its influential battery of foundations and think tanks. At the same time, the view that impassioned public life had to take more seriously economic policy making seemed to many a needed coolant; the scourge of inflation in Europe and the United States could not be so easily dismissed, and the Left did so at its peril; the memory of Allende’s own political fate fueled by economic misfortunes was still fresh in the mind. The passions and interests had to be kept in the same syntax as counterpoints to each other; they were, in Hirschman’s mind, codependent. The rule of passions could lead, without checks, to horrible utopias; the rein of interests to soulless pragmatism.

  Woven through the many layers of The Passions and the Interests was Hirschman’s Adam Smith. By the mid-1970s, Smith was becoming a figure rolled out as the great apostle of the new economics with its strident defense of the unfettered market, especially upon the bicentenary of the 1776 publication of The Wealth of Nations. Chicago’s Milton Friedman, more than anyone, marketed the Scottish moral philosopher as the progenitor of his own convictions. The 1970s would see an intensified political reading of Adam Smith and a mighty struggle over whether to treat him as the prophet of capitalist laws or embrace him as the humanitarian with an eye on moral man. To some extent, Hirschman fell into the trap that Friedman and others had laid: to read Smith as the maker of the bold new world of neoclassical thinking. By terminating “the competing rationale” of interests and passions, Smith cleared the ground for the triumph of the former, whether he meant to or not. This was one of Hirschman’s readings.

  But there was another as well. At the same time, Hirschman was resisting his own view; he wanted a Smith who thought in his same, bifocal way—seeing economics through a political lens, and politics through an economic lens. The result was a Smith forced to play two roles in the drama of The Passions and the Interests. Adam Smith took the blame for heralding a new model of economic man. But there was also a way in which Smith was presented as a transitional, possibly tragic, figure: he was still enmeshed in a moral economy but aware of and even predicting the emerging norms and practices of the capitalist world. Friedman had had his own self-interested reading of Smith; but so too did Hirschman, with Adam Smith the last great economist attentive to the currents and countercurrents of the moral and possessive individualist, the last to imagine the philosopher and the political economist as one—that is, until Hirschman breathed some life into this vision of Adam Smith with air drawn from his own lungs, perhaps with an unexamined view of himself as a prophet of the same sort. Smith was, in Hirschman’s eyes not unlike Hirschman himself, poised at a moment in history in which the balance of morals and markets was shifting quickly. Both could not help but struggle to keep alive a complex view of individuals and to promote the idea of a delicate equipoise of society. What Smith saw with foresight Hirschman offered in hindsight.

  In the historiography of Adam Smith, Hirschman anticipated what would become an alternative view of Smith as the humanist. Donald Winch’s book, Adam Smith’s Politics, which appeared a year later, made this case. So too, against a broader intellectual tableau, would Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments (2002). Without the full benefits of these subsequent readings of Smith, Hirschman’s view was still ambivalent, and at times confused and confusing, in no small part because he was still struggling—and would continue to do so—to resolve his own quest to moor a humane economics after capitalism’s triumph.

  Hirschman’s version of the intellectual origins of capitalism was greeted by a volley of rhapsodic reviews from quarters in which Hirschman was hitherto unknown. Political theorists such as Alan Ryan sang its praises in Political Theory, as did the historian of the eighteenth century Nannerl Keohane in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Before long, it was being commented upon in Italy, France, Germany, and Latin America. Not even Exit, Voice and Loyalty had provoked such a flurry. Stanford’s Keohane sent him draft chapters of her first book, Philosophy and the State in France, to which Hirschman dedicated a goodly part of his summer vacation in Europe in 1977 to pore over. She replied in kind, with thoughts about his reflections on property as having given men “toes with roots” and thus reducing their mobility. “This is an excellent section, imaginatively linking economics with social attitudes and political possibilities,” Keohane wrote. She urged him to have a look at Rousseau’s Government of Poland, especially the passage in which he saw patriotism and love of country as precepts to strengthen loyalty and to channel more energy into the making of “public goods.” While including her revised draft of her introduction, Keohane also had gratifying gossip from the American Political Science Association convention in Washington. “Quite a few people at the convention were talking about your book with interest; I recall particularly
discussing it with Pocock, who likes it. And I basked in some of the reflected glory when friends mentioned your footnote on my essay on Nicole; it proves in any case that people are reading the book carefully, if they have got the footnotes by memory.” To this Hirschman cheerily replied, relieved to hear that noneconomists were reading his work “as my brethren tend to be totally ignorant of the matters I talk about and are apt to get them wrong as Lekachman did recently in The New Republic (even though he meant well).” This capped long comments on her draft and gratitude for the Rousseau tip which “is beautiful and I may use it should I rework my paper.”47

  There were some who acknowledged the two Hirschmans—the development economist and the intellectual historian. But they were rare. One was Bruce Cummings, an assistant professor at the University of Washington working on Korean authoritarianism and Chinese foreign policy, who had read Hirschman’s draft essay for the SSRC project and now drew the immediate connections to The Passions and the Interests. He appreciated “the difficulty of generalizing from the economic to the political, or establishing the connections between the two,” and he could not help but notice the echoes of Perón in Mao “regarding the elasticity of things economic.” What Mao called “walking on two legs” (with heavy industry and agricultural assaults pounding at the same time) had created a legacy of rigid thinking that “now appears like Sir James Steuart’s statesmen, so ‘bound up by the laws of his political economy.’ ” The analysis led, for Cummings, to a clear-eyed view of the responsibility of intellectuals, “another passage I particularly liked.” There is the Left, which advances its “revulsion with capitalism” to the point “that they make themselves irrelevant” or a threat, “so that nothing short of a revolution will satisfy them,” which “comprises a recipe for repression.” Then there’s the Right, like Samuel Huntington, who at least “are quicker to accept that responsibility.” “We all need the heightened awareness you call for.”48

  Awareness was, as it turns out, one of Hirschman’s key words, and while Cummings used the term to denote the illumination on the external world, it also had an internal significance as well. As Hirschman was deep into the writing of The Passions and the Interests, Katia was going through a troubled patch in Paris. Albert consoled her with a quote from Goethe: “Childhood is a paradise from which we cannot be expelled.” This, of course, was the problem—because aging and changing were inevitable, so “we’re in for a shock” and thus forced to ask ourselves, “Is this still me?” The point about growing up, leaving innocence to join grown-up rough and tumble, is that we are not prepared “for the roughness of the games that are being played by the adults of this world.” For Albert, this was more than a developmental challenge; he knew this firsthand, for “the biggest shock” was to discover “that I can play just as rough as the next fellow.” He recalled the moment of “this savage discovery” when he had been released from the French army in the summer of 1940 and was fleeing to the unoccupied zone. It gnawed at him that the bicycle that wheeled him to freedom in Marseilles was one he had stolen. And it clearly continued to bother him; “This was something I did which I had never thought I’d be capable of.” To Katia what he wanted to say was that we never get over this elementary duality—our sensitivity to the world and the feelings generated by living in it and the “sacro-egoism” (a term he borrowed from pre-1914 Italian foreign policy—of all places!) that’s often required for survival. Moreover, there’s never any perfect balance—sometimes the pendulum goes one way, sometimes the other. Perhaps the best preparation “is the awareness, in the back of one’s mind, that the time for the other mode of existence will surely come again.”49

  The intention of The Passions and the Interests was also this—a reminder of other ways of thinking about our “mode of existence.” To think about this awareness could not help but point to our vocabulary and our arguments. It was on this point that Hirschman ended his book: “I conclude that both critics and defenders of capitalism could improve upon the arguments through knowledge of the episode in intellectual history that has been recounted here. This is probably all one can ask of history, and of the history of ideas in particular: not to resolve the issues, but to raise the level of the debate” (p. 135).

  This was overly modest. There was in fact more going on than the level of debate. The challenge was not striving for an order that freed some “true” human nature or spirit, the rule of interests or rein of passions, but appreciating their conjoining and fluctuating propensities and the ways that people wrestled with them. Man, therefore, was a stage on which these competing and ineluctably combined drives carried out an epic struggle—one that, in his ever-optimistic turn, yielded to a modern character who could be acquisitive and virtuous, self-interested and other-regarding. There was no reason to sever the republican collective good from the liberal private purpose. But this is exactly what modern social theory was doing, worried Hirschman. As he reflected on later thinkers who imagined “that the economy must be deferred to,” capitalist societies contrived social arrangements that substituted “the interests for the passions as the guiding principle of human action for the many [which] can have the side effect of killing the civic spirit and of thereby opening the door to tyranny” (p. 125). One side was driving out others. It was Tocqueville, Hirschman reminded, who had some prophetic words for the advocates of a favorable business climate and the benefits of the maxim of enrichissez-vous! and who ask merely for law and order. He did not mention Pinochet, but in writing these words as he was travelling back and forth to South America, it is hard to believe he did not have the Chilean commander in mind when he quoted Tocqueville:

  A nation that demands from its government nothing but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the bottom of its heart; it is the slave of its well-being, and the man who is to chain it can arrive on the scene. (p. 124)

  Tocqueville had in mind those who yearned for public stability so that private pursuits could be liberated. Perhaps some fundamentals of the sociological imagination had not changed after all. But there is more: it was easier to see the tensions of capitalism in moments of birth or transition, whose uncertainties helped reveal internal juxtapositions at the core of political arguments. The years and centuries to come would obscure the strains and pressures under layers of triumph. Revisiting one’s Machiavelli and one’s Tocqueville provided a means to recover a memory of a different way to argue about capitalism and thereby to consider anew its possible futures.

  CHAPTER 17

  Body Parts

  If Albert Hirschman were a novelist, the human body might have figured prominently in his writings. Bodies fascinated him, not least his own. His eye for small details—human feelings expressed by a flinch or a discreetly placed hand—is a hallmark of the literary imagination he brought to bear on his social science, but it is only rarely visible through the lacquer of economic analysis and political theory. There was also a fundamental comfort with and confidence in his bodily self, a disposition that was not just coincident with the grace of his prose.

  We know the human body was important to Hirschman because of the attention he gave to the gesture. The Gerty Simon portrait of his father, reproduced in the first chapter of this book, was a reminder of a paternal afterlife. But it was not the melancholy of Carl’s eyes that stoked Hirschman’s memory, but their counterpoint—the strong yet nimble hands of the surgeon. Did these hands rest on the shoulder of a son while reading together? Were they reminders of a father’s chess moves? We cannot know for sure; the precise meaning of the memory of these body parts must be included in the store of absences and gaps of a life history. The significance of hands is also clear in Hirschman’s favorite passage from Madame Bovary, the scene in which Emma’s husband, Charles, leans over the dying body of his wife, clasping her hands as she shudders to her end. Emma has chosen to kill herself rather than confront the sordid reality of her affairs and debts. Charles weeps, but the last thing Emma hears is the blind beggar in the street below. Ha
nds are touching, but they do not feel. It was, to Hirschman, a picture image of realism, an echo of the register he tried to bring to his own less narrative style of social science, where the reader might capture the meaning of the whole through a riveting portrait of the small, seemingly insignificant, and almost imperceptible pattern—if not drawn to it by the writer’s pen.

  Of all human body parts, it was the heart that most concerned Hirschman. Throughout his life, the imagery of the heart divided or pressed to service a one-sided homo economicus was what Hirschman wanted to rescue from the social scientist’s obsession with rational man. Hamlet’s soliloquy on the heart (“Give me that Man / That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart / As I do thee.”) reminds us that the heart had to be conjugated in the singular; “heart of hearts” is an unfortunate bastardization. It is being enslaved to passion, not passion per se, that’s the problem for a man of reason like Horatio, to whom Hamlet is speaking. Since we have only one heart, it had to be a home for passion and reason, and Hamlet’s inability to reconcile this necessary tension helps explain his paralysis. From Hirschman’s long days’ conversations with Eugenio Colorni, whence they pronounced a shared commitment to prove Hamlet wrong, one might see the heart playing a starring role in his work. Consider the frontispiece of The Passions and the Interests: here we have a hand wielding a pair of iron tongs that have clasped a beating and bleeding heart; the pincers have begun to squeeze. The image is from 1617 and its caption, “Repress the Passions!” is a lurid reminder that the heart was the heart of the matter for social science. So too was one of Hirschman’s favorite aphorisms collected for his daughter Lisa in June 1967 on the occasion of her graduation from Barnard College, a decade before The Passions and the Interests was published: from Vauvenargues he wrote that “Les grandes idées viennent du Coeur.”1