Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  In the meantime, he faced the challenge of how to pull together the small details of his disparate projects. They ranged from efforts to give property rights to homes in shantytowns to cooperative schools. As usual, Hirschman did not wade into his evidence with big—or even small—hypotheses to test. It was a strategy that would perplex even the informal methodologist. But with an eye to the balance of competing personal and collective engagements, Hirschman let a pattern appear. What many of the projects shared was an initial thrust to better the private fortunes of families, and doing so led to public activities. One favorite example involved efforts to help tricicleros—deliverymen who wheeled around the capital of the Dominican Republic with three-wheeled bicycles with large racks on the front—get out of the trap of chronic defaults on their loans. Local businessmen and nongovernmental organizations contrived a plan to promote groups of seven tricicleros so that they would be jointly responsible for making payments on loans to buy their vehicles. The effect was a surge in ownership. But more than that, this initiative to protect creditors against default by individual borrowers had significant, and unanticipated, social and political effects as the small grupos turned into “grupos solidarios.” As the triciclero organizer beamed, “I can mobilize 500 tricycles to converge on any spot in the city and paralyze everything.” And the range of issues that concerned the deliverymen varied from traffic laws to taxes and police enforcement. So, a risk-spreading organization mutated into a “pressure group.” This kind of story fascinated Hirschman, and he filled his notebook with calculations about the cost of the vehicles, the insurance scheme, and how much could be saved with accounting precision to end with more than a successful business—a collective movement.24

  At the end of one of his narratives, he told readers: “Here then is another sequence where the traditional concern with ‘bettering one’s condition’ in the private sense leads over, almost effortlessly and without any clear sense of a break, into public advocacy and participation in public affairs,” an insight that returned to Adam Smith. In what would be a small book bereft of detours through theories and concepts of collective action, the only figure to appear was the Scottish moral philosopher. Smith’s observation that collective actions were either ignored or “castigated as conspiracies” swept the ground for Hirschman, who sought to examine a spectrum of actions, from the wholly private to the outspokenly public with many intermediate and mixed combinations in between, that came under Adam Smith’s rubric: “They are all conceived and intended by the participants as means to the end of bettering their condition.”25

  At the outset, Hirschman considered naming his project “Making it in Groups.” He liked the ring. But for a wordplay-man, he did not see the salacious double entendre. But some did. Friends—Mike McPherson, Judith Tendler, and Peter Hakim (who may have wondered how the wordplay might go down in Congress)—dissuaded him from this particular heading. McPherson and Hirschman brainstormed and came up with “Getting Ahead Collectively.”26

  It was an unusual piece. The prose was incredibly simple, some might say childlike. This was on purpose. Hirschman wanted the analysis, such as it was, to be accessible, to narrow the gap between the analyst and the analyzed; this was part of the “moral” personality of the book. Hirschman specifically appealed to the publisher (Pergamon Press) for a larger type to make it easier to read. This became something of an issue when the manuscript was sent for review, an exercise unlikely to bring out the best in Hirschman after the scorching he took for Shifting Involvements. Sure enough, one of the readers, the Quaker economist otherwise sympathetic to the whole enterprise, Jack Powelson, had the impression that Hirschman was trying to revisit ideas from Strategy in light of grassroots findings bereft of theoretical ambition or engagement. It was not unreasonable. But it rubbed Hirschman the wrong way. “The ms. does not want to be, nor does it anywhere pretend to be,” he retorted, “a comprehensive evaluation of the experience of grassroots development. It is the report of an eyewitness with a longstanding interest in development issues, but cast deliberately in a non-academic mold, with a minimum of footnotes, references, etc.” Striking a defensive pose, he announced that “I believe a scholar should be entitled to write and publish an impressionistic, speculative book provided the book has something suggestive and stimulating to say.”27

  It also contrasted with Development Projects Observed, which was organized around analytical claims. In Getting Ahead Collectively, he sung the epic by storytelling. Hirschman wrote it “not as a scholarly treatise” but rather as a “reasoned travelogue.” But this was a travelogue fixated on the particulars of people speaking to him with some uplifting antidotes to his own recent disappointment. Indeed, he marveled that even in the face of failure and setbacks, people did not swing to private pursuits as Shifting Involvements would have predicted. In many cases Albert and Sarah observed, each spasm of organizing was “a stepping stone” to the next, and that the step was upward not down. “The present Latin American generation is not waiting for their grandchildren: they seem perfectly able to resume a ‘fight’ … several times in the same lifetime.” He found this a perfect buttress for his indictment of fracasomanía, for lack of success could, ironically, help motivate a desire for even more success. And one had to be on the lookout for invisible and intangible benefits such as the dispelling of isolation and mutual trust. As one micro-impresario in the Dominican Republic told him as he scribbled, before “we used to see just each other, but we never knew each other.” Now, not only were they personally making it, they had a “change of mentality (cambio de mentalidad).”28

  The decision to tell stories may have reflected the nature of the evidence; though Sarah andAlbert had scoured the paperwork for the projects, it was oral testimony that informed the study. Some were performed. Colombian women in La Calera sang about a young woman who had recently married a man who became a lout. “I serve you lentejas & you do not like them—so just leave them.” One group of men from San Bernardo acted a play on the dirt floor of a hut to tell the tale of their fathers’ dispossession of their land to a rapacious investor.29

  In contrast to all his other work, the social bottom did the talking in Hirschman’s slim volume, which would appear as a special supplement to the journal World Development in 1984. Only in a final chapter where Hirschman dealt with intermediaries, the welter of promoción social agents, did he move a notch up the social ladder. He avoided ministers, intellectuals, senior bureaucrats; gone are the policy makers that dominated his attention for three decades. Now, Hirschman did not avoid intellectuals; indeed, he met with them throughout the trip. In Peru he happened upon Hernando de Soto, who would later make himself famous as the champion of the informal economy and would become an influential policy maker in the 1990s. That evening, Hirschman noted, “self-made social scientist, interesting, leaning to Hayek?” He also had dinner with Mario and Patricia Vargas Llosa on the Malecón in Lima, and the night before that with Richard Webb, and the night before that with José Matos Mar. In Buenos Aires, Sarah and Albert spent a Sunday with Jorge Balan and Elizabeth Jelin wandering the parks and sculpture gardens and lunching on the shore of the River Plate. Albert devoured a parrillada of chorizo, morcilla, and beef while Jelin confided to Sarah some of her personal troubles. There were also the customary visits to the academic think tanks. But none of these are present in the work—despite the fact that as Hirschman travelled through the region he was witness to a raging debate over social movements and the agitation of poor folk.

  Part of the explanation is that still in 1983, most policy makers worked for authoritarian regimes or governments with troublesome, if not horrific, human rights records. If anything, the “state” played the role of “aggressor”—bulldozing shantytowns in Argentina or dividing and selling common Mapuche land in Chile—to which civilians responded collectively. Indeed, violence shadowed the two researchers. Some of it came from obvious quarters, the militaries of Argentina and Chile. But persecution transcended the conventi
onal image of state terror. As Sarah and Albert were escorted in a Jeep through the hills of Monte Azul in Colombia, someone pointed out a farm run by a recently widowed woman: “There are many widows around here,” one of their guides told them.30 The trip to Peru brushed Hirschman with the rising Maoist insurgent movement in Ayacucho. He got into Tingo Maria, the high jungle zone to which the expanding coca frontier had reached; the IAF had funded a peasant co-op, but it was wracked by struggles between landed interests, incumbent families, and the landless newcomers, refugees from the very social and political struggles that were sweeping across Ayacucho. What was once a “gem” of a project was now plagued by missing funds, and as Hirschman noted, pleas for more money from the IAF; early success had given way to failure. And, judging from what would come, the coca frontier was a bonanza for some, but not for self-helping collectivism or peace.31

  One might think that the general sense of upheaval in Latin America would overwhelm the travelogue: the recent explosion of the debt crisis, the growing crescendo of pressures to restore civilian rule, the “big” news that dominated the headlines. These were not absent. Indeed, it was the cold monster of the state that created the gap between the rights of Latin American citizens and policies, into which civic organizations poured their energies to create “safeguarding operations” for the people. But Hirschman’s eye was not on the macro. There was another reason for the simple style and close-to-the-ground content. The decision was not to write an academic treatise. Even though Elizabeth Jelin (on one side) and Hernando de Soto (on the other) represented emerging poles of what would become a vast scholarly field, and Hirschman was well aware of their research and positions, it was not with them that he wanted to engage in this work. In a sense, he preferred to close the gap between the reader and the subject, thus preferring the genre of the travelogue of development in action. One undoubted influence was Sarah, whose own organization devoted to collective reading and talking about short stories, Gente y Cuentos, was spreading its wings. This effort to talk about literature among groups traditionally marginal from high culture, to bridge literacy and orality and witness what happens, suggested a model for Hirschman’s own effort to connect subject and reader.

  This left some obvious subjects out. Ministers and intellectuals were absent. But so too was the larger setting. Foreign debt, military dictatorship, and deindustrialization may have been the context, but they were not what captured Hirschman’s literary attention because private initiatives for social promotion and welfare came not from elites and educated classes—as was the case for Western Europe and North American before the advent of the welfare state. They came from the grassroots, excluded by definition from the commanding heights that made the big news. Hirschman delighted in the little news. When talking to dairy farmers in Uruguay who, thanks to IAF-financing, had created a cooperative replete with a collection truck, he wrote euphorically, “now a truck from the new plant would collect the milk at the farmer’s doorstep thereby saving him 1 to 5 hours every single day of the year!”

  This did not mean he was starry-eyed, as if the people he observed happily embraced communal solutions to their problems. His was not a romantic defense of getting ahead collectively. The field notes on Chile captured the degree of infighting among Mapuche parents, some wanting Spanish teaching, others (fathers in particular) hostile to girls’ schooling. But the disagreement, he concluded, was good for the community. “A lot of fighting in Parents is healthy,” he scribbled, “ ‘Parents’ sometimes people who do not have children—Let kids go to school—Boys and girls together. Boys sewing & cooking. Girls castrate animals. Girls’ fathers against it—Finally worked.” Indeed, across many of the projects Sarah and Albert noted widespread tension between men and women, of latent conflict brought to the fore by the ways in which the hardships of capitalism in the early 1980s sowed quarrels within households.32

  Many movements were far from “successes” and hung on by threads, surviving only because governments abandoned social services. Many were plagued with problems of staffing. Griping about managers was rampant; sometimes members of cooperatives complained that they didn’t enjoy enough “voice” or were afraid of criticizing their friends and neighbors who had become their superiors. After a day of visiting cobblers and carpenters in the Dominican Republic, Sarah wrote: “Problem: one becomes manager-boss the others workers—diff to accept coop.”33 Attrition was commonplace. Albert went hunting for tricicleros who did not join the association, only to find one that echoed Oscar Wilde’s quip about socialism absorbing too many evenings: “He does not want to spend so much time in group meetings, he does not want to file papers etc.” recorded Sarah. Indeed, the tricicleros’ association had rampant problems collecting dues from members, and not a few let their payments on their vehicles slide into arrears—vindicating Mancur Olson’s argument about free-riders.34 Some successful groups were vulnerable to government predation. An effective and popular soup kitchen in Santiago run by a mother’s club got seized by Pinochet’s wife, anxious to shore up an image of a caring dictatorship. In this case, the IAF was unhappy but went along with the arrangement until mismanagement by the state drove the effort into bankruptcy.35

  Albert and Sarah at a jewelry workshop, Dominican Republic, 1983.

  Cooperatives were not panaceas; more is not always better; what works and doesn’t work defied any single measure. Between the simple narrative bereft of formal diagrams or social science claims, and the shortage of obvious take-away points for do-gooders and naysayers alike, it is no wonder the book got lost in the shuffle.

  On the whole, this was no catalogue of corruptions, no inventory of development disasters. This was progress on the march, thanks to the collective efforts of poor people who marshaled their “social energy.” Hirschman’s field notes were sprinkled with phrases like “remarkable survival,” “fascinating to watch,” “local group knows what it wants.” Out of the little news emerged a thickening network of activists who made social relations “more caring and less private” in a broader political setting in which governments preferred privatization and immobilization. These grassroots stirrings, he speculated in the conclusion, “were an important underlying factor in preventing the social quiescence and introversion that are required for an authoritarian regime to take hold.”36

  In the quest to make the work even more accessible, the IAF program officer coordinating from Washington, Sheldon Annis, approached Hirschman about having the book illustrated to enhance its appeal by making the human dimension literally more visible. Annis contracted a photographer to trail the Hirschmans during their interviews. To follow up, he then dispatched a Guatemalan-based photographer, Mitchell Denburg, to retrace the steps and take more photos to illustrate the grassroots working, tricicleros loaded with bananas, a sewing class in Peru’s Academy for Women, and farmers milking their cows in Uruguay. Denburg carried the manuscript with him: “It was like a living story as I went along,” he recalled. He was struck, like Ternes, at the effect that Hirschman had had on his subjects. “He clearly left an impression with people in Latin America; he had respect for people and their achievements.” Some of the photos captured the scenes of research. One example was of San Bernardo del Viento, where the sons of dispossessed Colombian farmers performed the process by which a land-swindler stole their father’s property. The impression from the photos was of work and cooperation in action, advancement, and forward motion—to redouble the aheadness of the study as an alternative account to the perception of crisis, impossibility, and retrogression, especially for the poor.37

  With Getting Ahead Collectively, Hirschman came up with a partial answer to the problem posed by Shifting Involvements. He had gone to the field and there, not among the disenchanted consumers of the fatigued rich countries, he found his public-minded, active citizens. More than finding them, he sought them out. Hirschman’s dissatisfaction with his answer to Mancur Olson and the turn of “public” economics was very much on his mind as he travelled
through Latin America. After visiting an IAF-supported school in the Dominican Republic, he returned to “the public and the private.” “There is a much greater intermingling of these two spheres than in the ‘advanced’ countries,” he noted, “at all levels of society: on top one finds lots of businessmen who are public figures and take positions on public issues, give much time to public causes & agencies.… We tend to see only the ugly side of this confusion of public & private, not the way in which it enriches the lives of these people, nor the way in which it is needed to achieve any progress at all.”38 Publicness was not just a solution to market failures. Hirschman saw more; for just as his lovable, pitiable, and tragic human was a combination of reasoned and passionate, so too the functioning of the economy blended the private with the public. Here, Hirschman was stepping away from the mechanical, pendular movement he claimed was at work in society in Shifting Involvements and which had elicited so many frowning reviews. Getting Ahead was thus more than an empirical counterpoint, a “retreat” back to the field. It helped him resolve his own unease.