Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  This does not mean that the lectures were separated from the world. They were not abstract, but they were theoretical; Hirschman’s internal jousting with Olson, and more broadly with individualism, got him closer than ever to his grail, an endogenous model that explained human behavior that motivated social change. A quarter-century after his battles with development planners in the Third World, he was no less insistent that a deeper explanation—and thus a theory of reform—had to avoid the deus ex machina, the external event or force that would move societies from one place to the next—technological changes, foreign wars, the imported (or imposed!) master plan, external infusions of capital, “foreign aid,” disasters, or discoveries that moved history along from one phase to the next. These kinds of providentialist explanations were not only self-limiting, they also did not illuminate possible alternatives to a problem since the trumping breakthrough had to come from the outside. They also tended to point to the agency of outsiders—the well-meaning expert, the foreign capitalist, the enlightened few who looked at societies from the outside-in.

  It was time for a different story of modernization. Hirschman offered a theory about “pendular movements of collective behavior,” of the dynamics behind swings between happiness and disappointment and between public and private action. He moved from the domain of human experiences to emotional responses, such as anger at educational institutions, self-incrimination for buying a large house and regretting it (buyer’s remorse), and the ever disappointing “driving experience,” which far from yielding to the lyrical joy ride more often plunged the indebted pleasure-seeker into a traffic jam. This is where the BMW ad came in handy; it promised exhilaration but delivered dissatisfaction (and bills). Everywhere happiness was being dispensed and, behind peoples’ pursuits, left trails of disappointment. Disappointment, as he would make clear in the book that emerged from the lectures, was the counterpart to hope, its necessary twin, a force any possibilist had to reckon with. Regret and disappointment were not just the results of mistakes—but of activities conducted “with high expectations not to make mistakes.” Far from trying to eliminate a world of disappointment, Hirschman was trying to call attention to its necessity. To search for models that would dispense with dissatisfactions and regrets would rid the world of hope; here was an indictment of the Utopian thinking that had laced his skepticism of extremes throughout his life. “While a life filled with disappointment is a sad affair, a life without disappointment may not be bearable at all. For disappointment is the natural counterpart of man’s propensity to entertain magnificent vistas and aspirations.” It was not for nothing that a friend of Don Quixote (the Knight of the Mournful Countenance) would lament the curing of his madness, for it now deprived those around him of the pleasures they gained through his follies.28

  Nothing was fixed. Happiness never lasted and was unevenly distributed—and thus could not help but elicit its countervailing force, disappointment. Likewise disappointment was not an equilibrium point; people were inveterate “project-makers” as well as pleasure-seekers. Unless depressed—and psychoanalysis was one example of peoples’ search for “exits” from unhappiness and was also invariably a source of disappointment—people were inclined to swing away from the source of the diminishing returns to their efforts. These efforts could be either private-pursuing or public-engaging; the point is that they were subject to similar propensities. To contrast with Olson’s “logic,” Hirschman presented a “dialectic” that unfolded within the very self that comprised a complex amalgam of drives. Man had been a stage for battles between reason and passion before capitalism; the capitalist experience had not dissolved this fundamental struggle. Hirschman was returning to his case, which had been muted by a complex history in The Passions and the Interests, for reviving a more complex, “lovable,” and “tragic” human subject for a different kind of epic—a political economy that did not create itself around dichotomous categories of either-or, which condemned modern humans to be in a state of perpetually tearing their hearts apart.

  Here, then, was an alternative that shifted the accent from mechanisms that pulled societies forward to factors that pushed people to change. These factors explained changes that went back and forth in two directions—to private- and public-oriented activity as a new model of political economy.

  It was an audacious effort. It also overreached.

  After Watergate, the coup in Argentina, a crisis of the world economy, and the seeming failure of human-rights-guided foreign policy, it is perhaps not surprising that the motor for the oscillations between private and public activities was disappointment. This “elementary human experience” was the touchstone upon which Hirschman elaborated his meditations on peoples’ swings. The accent was now specifically on the role of disappointment, not unlike the diminishing returns a consumer experiences from the purchase of goods, such as consumer durables, or certain services, which were especially “disappointment-prone.” Disappointment could then spur public action; it could tender a ladder, Hirschman explained, on which the consumer-citizen “can climb gradually out of private life into the public arena,” and sometimes it could even lead to the corrosion of the ideology on which the pursuit of happiness was premised. This brought him face-to-face once more with Mancur Olson’s analysis of collective action, which by now had become an ur-reference in the muscular drive to decontrol markets with its emphasis on individual cost-benefit arithmetic and the ineluctable problem of free-riding. Of course, Hirschman was not presenting public action as an antidote. It, too, was subject to pendularity. Public action was no less disappointment prone than consumer durables. One hazard was “overcommitment.” Hirschman liked Oscar Wilde’s quip about socialism as self-defeating because “it takes too many evenings.” In societies where “electoral politics are the only politics” and public action is less rewarding than activists hoped, the disappointments can set in early in the cycle of engagement (though often leading to more generalized rage against “the system”).29

  Drifting from consumer theory and Sen’s theory of meta-preferences yielded a paradox about modern politics. In democracies, the vote gives every citizen a stake in public decision making. At the same time, it places a ceiling on participation because casting ballots does not allow for the expression of different “intensities” of convictions. The result: voting has a “dual character”—to defend against the “excessive repressive state while “safeguarding” it against “excessively expressive” citizens. Needless to say, this was a very different way to paint a portrait of the voter’s paradox in Olson’s simplistic cost-benefit analysis. The story of the lessons learned from France after 1848, after three revolutions in less than two generations, were his case in point. The franchise was an “antidote to revolutionary change” not by stacking the outcome because there was some underlying “structural” distribution of power (as Marxists would argue), but because it stigmatized more direct, intense, “expressive” forms of political action that have the allure of being both more effective and more satisfying. “In short,” argued Hirschman, “the trouble with political life is that it is either too absorbing or too tame.”30

  This was a case for an unstable middle ground, unstable because it was perpetually leaning people toward contrary impulses, and middling because people never swung fully to private or public activities for long. In this fashion, Hirschman refuted the triumphalism (for the Right) and defeatism (for the Left) of those that asserted that private pursuits have bled public man, as if the idea that creating wealth—the objective of private action—were superior to the pursuit of power, which was now seen as “the exclusive goal of public action.” The “ultimate ideological revanche” was to represent the struggle for power as an activity that benefits only the winner, while the pursuit of wealth was “celebrated as a game at which all players can win,” so that complete immersion in private activity could be “felt as a liberating experience not only for oneself, but for all society.” This is what the rising neo-conservatives, and t
heir odds-on favorite for winning the ticket to lead the Republican Party against the crippled fortunes of President Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, were exalting. Hirschman tried to be optimistically prophetic. “The trouble is that our enthusiastic private citizen is now going to meet with the various disappointments” as the drive to consume one’s way to happiness ends in disappointment with consumer durables that people packed into their homes. Gravity dictated that the pendulum would swing back.31

  The pendular image was an invitation to trouble. Wasn’t it just as deterministic as some of the theories he was trying to challenge? Some, like Bob Keohane, tried to dissuade him from emphasizing too much the pushing drive: “It seems to me that you vastly underestimate the attraction of public life to many people.” When Hirschman presented a version of the work to colleagues at Stanford, not a few argued back: how could young people at the head of public demonstrations possibly be motivated by disappointment with the pursuit of material goods they never enjoyed? Maybe, as Keohane pointed out, the problem is the search for a “fully endogenous model?” Is there not something intrinsically appealing about engaging in public activity? Hirschman may have conceded too much to the fatalists who saw public pursuits as intrinsically prone to disenchantment.32

  It was an important comment, and certainly not the first time that Hirschman was questioned for relying on the precept of diminishing returns in his model. One is reminded just how economically Hirschman was thinking in his effort to counter Olson and others in their own terms. Certainly, what he had done was tie private pursuits and public passions together into a rivalrous sibling relationship. They were not autonomous fields; they were not the subjects for ideological interventions. The model’s automatic corrective features could not explain how or why behavior could get stuck or, worse, swing much more dramatically to one side. This meant that Hirschman’s herald of the return of public man seemed so utterly at odds with the electoral tide. He was shocked at the Reagan victory and even more dismayed by the shift of the 1980s.

  It was one of the few times Hirschman tried to be predictive—and it would bear out his reasons for avoiding punditry. But it deserves to be said that he was not just aiming at the ranks of gloating neo-cons. His eye was also trained at notable Cassandras, such as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, whose lament for “the atrophy of public meaning” stood for a more general cry against the mindless consumerism and atomism of the modern world, or Christopher Lasch, whose The Culture of Narcissism (1979) was a runaway hit that decried the egotistical individualism of the age. This kind of pessimism was “not only impoverishing in itself” for the same reasons that Olson’s impossibilism was, but it also condemned public action “to periodic spasmodic outbursts of ‘publicness’ that are hardly likely to be constructive.” What Hirschman wanted—the “moralizing claim implicit in my story”—was an unstable balance. Not an equipoise of selfless angels or an equilibrium of utility maximizers. He called for more “publicness” injected into everyday living, including work and consumption, “fostering in the private sphere that fusion of striving and attaining that is characteristic of public action.” The person who does so is “superior” to the rational-actor of the Republican juggernaut because he or she can “conceive of various states of happiness.” This “bungler” and “blunderer” was thereby connected to “nobler and richer qualities.”33

  His lectures were clarion calls to resist the climate of despair and summons (from the Right) for citizens to run for the “exits” of public involvement or (from the Left) to shriek about the intractable forces conspiring against collective progress.

  The lectures begat a book, one that elicited a cascade of responses from friends, colleagues, and some tetchy reviewers when Princeton University Press’s Sanford Thatcher sent it out for evaluation. In retrospect, this is not all that surprising; none of his books had straddled disciplines and fields, from history to cognitive psychology, with such breathtaking scope—and with the same Hirschmanian economy of words. Remarkably, he covered all this ground in 187 manuscript pages, which inevitably meant large patches were on thin ice. Originally called Public and Private Happiness, it was later rebaptized to capture the motion at the core of the analysis, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. Possibly Hirschman’s most ambitious work, he knew he had stuck his neck out. “I have rarely felt so uncertain about a product of mine,” he told Katia. “Perhaps this is because, as I say in the preface, what I have written is less a work of social science, than the conceptual outline of one or several novels.”34 Indeed, the preface suggests that there is much more of Hirschman’s personal philosophy and life story stirred into the prose. It threatened to become a Bildungsroman “with, as always in novels, a number of autobiographical touches mixed in here and there.”35

  The fusion of brevity and breadth was at once the work’s immense strength and its weakness. Having covered so much ground, it could not help but do so unevenly and sketchily, and thus, ironically, disappoint. To some, it contained too little evidence. After the lectures, Skinner, who was immersed in his own work on the origins of humanism in English social thought, composed a long comment about earlier swings from the time that Cicero’s moral theory was translated and printed in the 1480s to shape English humanist writers’ views of a “conception of the best life for man, and thus of man’s highest duties.” Man’s highest duty was to override his self-love and its pursuits, “in order to pursue ‘common weal’, ie. the welfare of the whole (weal is for them the synonym for wealth—used interchangeably—and wealth doesn’t mean wealth in our sense; it means welfare).” Skinner went on to explain that some, like Calvin, saw private pursuits as a good way to frame man’s duties, a view that gathered strength in the sixteenth century, so “minding one’s own business” and not “meddling” (a word that Skinner and Hirschman continued to mull over as it acquired pejorative features) were extolled especially by those with interests to promote, such as merchants. Thus, what started as a distinction to help found a moral theory of Ciceronian inspiration, became deformed. Why not dig into these fascinating antecedents?36 Judith Tendler, his former student, wrote a long letter suggesting that he develop his insights about psychotherapy (and services in general) with its own disappointments. Sex, too, in the age of The Joy of Sex and Playboy, might make good examples of how people are made to feel that “normal” sexual relations, especially marital ones, are painted as a never-ending shortfall. While the manuscript was “brilliant,” she wanted more examples for how the pendularity actually worked. “Because there are so many good ideas,” she wrote, “it is like an orgy. It’s not just a matter of setting the ms. down for a while, in order to let an idea sink in. One needs, in addition, to have an example to help root the idea—to force you to be with the idea for a little longer, in a way that is less demanding than accompanying the articulation of the idea itself.”37 Writing from Montreal, Lisa also offered her father a few cents about consumer durables (like the Cuisinart), psychotherapy (from her own practice), and the looming referendum in Quebec. A win for the separatists might spell doom for the movement for having lost its “sense of purpose.” Like Skinner and Tendler, she called for more detail—especially, thinking about the vogue for referenda around North America, “what you mean by the vote.”38

  The criticism to put more empirical meat on the bones of his analysis was a sign that he had not clinched his argument, even if the style and scope of the work were so captivating. Hirschman’s harshest comments came in the form of a lengthy evaluation for Princeton University Press from Robert Lane, a Yale political scientist. While Lane lauded Hirschman’s previous works for being “seminal”—transcending fields and disciplines to reframe big debates, he was “dissatisfied” with this one. He found that the manuscript treated satisfaction and happiness insufficiently, and cited works in psychology and on the revolution of rising expectations that Hirschman had missed. Some of the recommended readings were welcome: Hirschman scribbled the call numbers in the margi
ns and promptly got copies from Princeton’s Firestone Library. But Lane also raised more serious issues, starting with the tying of public and private activities together. Hadn’t Hirschman tried to compare two completely different species, like “elephants and rabbits?” There was also a scarcity of evidence to justify the claims.39 Lane was not alone in hitting this mark. The historian Joan Scott, whom Hirschman would welcome as his permanent colleague at the IAS, made a similar observation. His “units of analysis” kept shifting from individuals to groups and back again. She also called for more evidence.40 The consensus seemed to call for a longer, empirically driven book. But this was not one of these. It was an “essay,” or series of “essays,” an analytical twist on the Montaigne tradition but pressing up against the limits of the genre.

  But the problem was not so easily dismissed. The decision to do so would cost him. George Akerlof, of Berkeley, offered a solution to help resolve some of the problems. He got underneath Lane’s complaint that private and public domains were simply incomparable and pointed out that “the author mentions, but fails adequately to deal with the problem that most of his motivations concern individual motivations and explain an individual’s cycle but he does not explain the macro cycle.”41 One of his proposed solutions was to suggest how individual motivations become contagious through ideology. So, for instance, the ideology of “privatization” speeds the transition from public action to private pursuits. Claus Offe suggested much the same—an intermediating or “third” domain that might help explain the timing and methods of the swings between private and public. This was an old concern of Hirschman’s and certainly would have been easy to work into the narrative while keeping the essay form of the book. Indeed, he agreed with Offe, adding that “another very acute critic raised the same point.” But it was not one he was prepared to pursue. “My present, a bit evasive defense,” he told Offe, “is that I had my hands full making one ‘endogenous’ transition plausible; and that I merely want to show the possibility of a phenomenological portrayal of such transitions without affirming that the ones I am portraying are the only ones.”42