Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  The 1980s intensified a process begun earlier with the recovery of memories. The return to Berlin with his sisters, the arrival of Claus and Sabine Offe at the institute, and the subsequent translation of his works into German rekindled his interest in Europe and his origins. They were never far from the surface of his thoughts anyway. Ursula, by then renown as a crusading women’s leader in Brussels, was struck suddenly in December 1975 by a cerebral hemorrhage and later aphasia, which wiped out her ability to communicate. Gone was her formidable energy. She was never her old self. Albert took the loss like a stoic, but behind the surface of control he was in agony. “Ursula: her sickness is for me like the death of my own youth and adolescence” he confided to his diary, “they are crumbling away leaving me incredibly impoverished. Perhaps one dies like that because one period after another of one’s life becomes inert (Socrates’ death). Persons who were close once become frozen fragments of one’s past.” The loss must have churned up more memories—suggesting that the allusions to history’s “foulest hour” were more than academic citations. During the 1977 trip to Russia, Sarah took Albert to see a play. En route to Moscow’s Taganka Theater, heavy clouds gathered overhead. The play was an avant-garde adaptation of Fyodor Abramov’s The Wooden Horses, a tale of forced collectivization and famine and the dramatization of a family shattered by state terror. The theater was crowded. Beside Albert an elderly man sat dressed in a medaled officer’s uniform with a silver silhouette of Stalin on his shirt. Albert squirmed in discomfort. When it was all over, the Hirschmans returned to their hotel. In the middle of the night, the blackness was pierced by a loud cracking sound. Albert jolted up in bed. From the penumbra of his dreams he began to mumble frantically about sabotage, connecting the play’s devastating criticism to Marx’s “transition from the weapon of criticism to the criticism through weapons,” words recovered and recited from his fierce disputes over the fate of Weimar. Sarah consoled him: it was only a storm. In the jumble of his words she could make out his protestations, “It is terrible, isn’t it terrible.”6

  Hirschman was impressively successful at masking the personal experiences informing his intellectual interventions. There remained, however, early intellectual selves to be recovered as part of his graduation to sagesse. One was the rediscovery of his forgotten first book. In 1975, a group of younger American political scientists called for a special issue of their flagship of the emerging trend of international political economy, International Organization, which was devoted to examining the economic dimensions of global power. The venture’s ringleader, James Caporaso, with the encouragement of Robert Keohane, cited National Power as one of the pioneering books “which links the tools of foreign economic policy to the systemic structure of a state’s foreign economic behavior.” The special issue, which finally came out in 1978, was a signature moment in the field’s development, and Caporaso was keen to get a contribution from Hirschman as an overlooked founder. Happy to contribute, and happier to accept the status as eminence, he agreed. In the course of the exchange, the idea of clearing the mothballs from National Power came up. Until then, no press had been interested in a book with no field. Hirschman’s essay for IO reflected on the solitude of writing a fieldless book. Hirschman owned up to his “infinitely naïve proposals” about global power and the eclipse of national sovereignty. By the mid-70s, the world had changed. So had political science. His former Harvard student, Stephen Krasner, who regarded National Power as a point of reference, took up the lost book’s cause. Krasner had published a field-defining essay deliberately playing on Hirschman’s title, “State Power and the Structure of International Trade.” When the University of California Press asked him to edit a new series for the international political economy field, Krasner seized the opportunity to bring National Power back into circulation; the IO essay was its new introduction. Not a few reviewers pointed out that it was more relevant thirty-five years later and was an appropriate anchor for the new field. Too bad the price had gone up from $3 to $16.60!7

  This was Hirschman’s first retrospective exercise. As he advanced through the years, successor generations appealed for more. It testified to the breadth of the domains he had shaped that so many overtures came from so many quarters. All too often, the great-man-looking-back genre yields self-serving histories sprinkled with unknown personal detail. Hirschman never succumbed to that literary temptation, even if he did not always resist small doses of narcissism (of which he was conscious but unembarrassed). More often, his aim was to complicate and even undo earlier formulae he now found too simplistic or too mechanistic; underneath this surface, memories of a more distant past began to shape his interventions.

  Only rarely did his reworkings improve on his basic insights. It is more revealing to read these as the work of an author groping to connect closely guarded personal experiences to an oeuvre meant for public consumption.

  In the midst of the growing alarm over assaults on citizens’ benefits in North America and Europe, Franklin Thomas, president of the Ford Foundation, asked Hirschman to join an executive panel on a large project, the “Future of the Welfare State.” Hirschman had published a well-known article in Dissent magazine warning the welfare doomsayers that one should not confuse friction from “growing pains” with a terminal crisis. There were many more options if one could replace the preference for “structural” (and pessimistic) explanations of the malaise with “non-fundamental” diagnoses. Hirschman had been harping on this theme for years. Why not see the trouble as correctable and do something about it? Reagan’s assault on “welfare bums” echoed some “earlier battles going back five or six decades,” which got him thinking about the connections between conservative offensives old and new.8

  Increasing numbers of people saw Hirschman, now in his seventies, as a walking memory willing to overturn official heroic accounts of the past. When it came to honor his old colleague Ken Galbraith in 1988, Hirschman penned an essay that toyed with Galbraith’s story of “how Keynes came to America,” recast as “how Keynes was spread from America,” and recounted how he witnessed as a Marshall Planner the ways in which Keynesianism became an orthodoxy in the United States, and how it became an ideological export for economic missionaries. Galbraith thanked his friend for the flattering comments, recalling that as the chief economic policy adviser in the State Department after the war “in charge of German and Japanese economic policy … my influence by way of the Joint Chiefs on these matters was either nil or slightly less.”9

  It was only a matter of time before these backward-looking exercises got more self-referential. If there was an occasion that brought this to full fruition it was the ritual associated with the honorary doctorate. Hirschman amassed them like trophies, and his attitude, to Sarah’s chagrin, was not unlike a boy’s. Sarah found the occasions a bore. But she soldiered on as Albert draped on the robes, posed severely for photographs, and gave a short lecture—usually a potted history of his connection to the institution gracing him with the doctor honoris causa. The first was from Rutgers University in 1978; Cardoso was a fellow honoree, and Albert beamed to him that he was finally going to get a respectable doctorate! Then there was a gap of eight years until the University of Southern California offered its version. Thereafter, it was a regular flow: Amherst College, Harvard, Paris, the New School, Florence, Trier, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Campinas, São Paulo.…10

  Honorifics poured in. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences lauded Hirschman as a “man of letters” within the social sciences, implying he was a rare (and perhaps endangered) species. Conferring of the Talcott Parsons Prize in 1983 inaugurated a cycle of public unveiling of a hidden past. Daniel Bell, his former colleague from Harvard, presided over the ceremony and shared little-known details of Hirschman’s trajectory. In 1945, Bell had been the managing editor of a magazine called Common Sense; its editor was Varian Fry, who must have told Bell a great deal, because he proceeded to recount the story of Neu Beginnen, Justice and Liberty, the toothpaste t
ubes stuffed with secret messages, and a young associate’s of Fry’s in Marseilles, Beamish. “I would use the phrase ‘a hero of our time,’ ” Bell told his audience, “if not for the slight sense of vice that applies to the character of Perchorin in the Lermontov novel.” But “Albert had few vices. And he is a hero. Varian Fry, with the help of Albert and a few others—but very much with Albert’s help, given his skills, his languages, his knowledge and ingenuity—saved the lives of many great figures of European culture.” What Hirschman made of this outing is a mystery, though by the 1980s, he was shedding the armor of discretion—at least about that moment of his life. Other, more sickening, memories, like the Spanish Civil War, remained locked up.11 If academics could convert their awards into the equivalent of a soldier’s medals, Hirschman’s uniform would have been decorated like a Soviet General’s.

  Albert and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, honorary degree recipients, Rutgers University, 1978.

  A career-culminating ritual for academics is the festschrift, a celebration thrown by former students, colleagues and friends, usually involving papers discussing the honoree whose best work, one presumed, was behind him and thus worthy of retrospective analysis and celebration. Hirschman had four of them, a surprise in light of his ambivalence about students, his aversion to disciples, and his determination to undo efforts to create a “Hirschman school.” None of these, however, should be confused with the more nebulous “influence,” which Hirschman was never reluctant to deny. Indeed, in most cases, he took advantage of the occasion to defy the presumption that retirement puts an end to cognitive activity—starting with retrospection and critiques of his own work. The first took place at the University of Notre Dame in 1984, organized by Guillermo O’Donnell, Alejandro Foxley, and Michael McPherson and which dwelled on the theme of development and democracy as South American countries were making their passage from dictatorships. What came of that event was a volume that transcended regional borders and broke into unusual disciplinary provinces, such as psychology, with a paper by Carol Gilligan on voice and exit in adolescents. Interestingly, Hirschman combed through each of the draft chapters and wrote comments, some quite extensive, for each author; Carol Gilligan got four pages of line-by-line edits. This at least ensured that an otherwise quite dispersed volume had the coherence of a subject—and a shadow voice.12 In November 1988, the institute hosted a large event funded by the Inter-American Development Bank, “Hirschman’s Work on Development and Latin America.” The following year, at the occasion of his honorary degree at the University of Buenos Aires, a research center, the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella launched (with the help of the Inter-American Development Bank, the Ford Foundation, and the American Embassy) a sprawling four-day gala, “Hirschman’s Work and a New Development Strategy for Latin America.” It was at this event that I, on the heels of my doctorate in economic history, got my first glimpse of someone approaching legend status. The scene conveyed something of the aura that by then surrounded him. The dozens of conferees and hundreds in attendance filled the air with expectation; when Hirschman moved, an entourage trailed him. It could not be helped that the mood was affected by what was going on outside, for Argentina was in the throes of a dramatic crisis, military unrest, hyperinflation, and a messy democratic turnover. If anything, there was a slight feeling of malaise as many of the intellectuals associated with the outgoing reformist government of Raúl Alfonsín were Hirschmanianos, and their turbulent final days raised—to some—questions about the viability of his brand of heterodoxy. When Albert arrived in Buenos Aires and checked into the swanky Plaza Hotel on Florida Street, he was greeted by a letter from the event organizer, Torcuato Di Tella. “Welcome to this hopeless country!” it started, not realizing that one of Hirschman’s favorite quotes was Lenin’s: “There is no such thing as a hopeless situation.”13

  In the blizzard of prizes that come with fame, several themes stand out. The first is Hirschman’s use of the pulpit to think, speak, and write retrospectively. In the fall of 1987, he flew to Turin to receive a doctorate and recounted his “familial, personal, intellectual, and sentimental ties” he had with Italy. He warned his audience that he was averse to autobiography because “I tend to think of it as the ultimate admission to having run out of ideas” (which became something of a cliché). By now, he was repeating a refrain, which suggested that writing some kind of memoir might have been a temptation he had to suppress. So, he gave himself exception to prove his more general rule: such an endeavor could illuminate if “the autobiographical exercise serves the purpose of recovering an idea.” In this case, it was the memory of Eugenio Colorni and the desire to prove Hamlet wrong. As Latin Americans struggled to rebuild civilian rule, he drew the arc backward to an earlier struggle and found in Colorni’s example of combining participation in public affairs with intellectual openness an “ideal microfoundation of a democratic politics.”14 Retrospection, when not self-indulgent, was conversation in pursuit of a method. The final festschrift was a gathering at MIT, which prompted Hirschman to author a chronicle of his own tendency to raise doubts about his own concepts. Many of his readers often concluded that he was less interested in theory than in locating anomalies to rules, even his own. What they failed to see was that self-reflection and skepticism were aimed at adapting earlier insights to new complexities, insisting that theorizing had to account for its own historical limits. He called this practice self-subversion. Conversation was a constant; it is what he was doing with his petites idées and files of quotes and aphorisms. What changed as Hirschman became a profiled figure was that the conversations were less with the ancients and more with himself. Still, the ancients did not take a back seat: his final major book, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) was an argument with reactionaries.15

  The second theme was the rather obvious globalization of his voice. And with globalization came a return to his European roots. With the return to Europe came the encounter with his own personal memories to reclaim forgotten legacies. The European return began in France. The translation of The Passions and the Interests into French brought him to the attention of a whole new public that knew little or nothing of his continental formation. To French readers, the book had clearly located their Enlightenment in broader European currents; this may have been obvious to non-French readers, but to the French, especially those less familiar with the narrower field of intellectual history, breaking out of the Pantheon was an eye-opener. It was this that François Furet, the celebrated historian of the French Revolution and director of the prestigious École des hautes études en sciences sociales, had in mind when he invited Hirschman to deliver the Marc Bloch Lecture in the spring of 1982. It was a kind of French coming out. Before heading to the Grand Salon de la Sorbonne, Hirschman lunched with Furet, Pierre Nora, Lucette Valensi, Jacques Julliard, and Fernando Henrique and Ruth Cardoso. Paris’s intelligentsia came out en masse for the performance at the Sorbonne’s Grand Amphitheatre. After Furet’s introduction, Hirschman stepped to the podium and read his paper with Philippe de Champaigne’s grand portrait of a stately Richelieu hanging nearby. It was as if he were born for the occasion. Hirschman began by reprising his Parisian days and proceeded to braid intellectual traditions—the French Enlightenment faith in man’s perfectibility, the Scots’ insight into the role of unintended consequences, and the birth of a German critique of capitalism in the early nineteenth century. He was tracing the lineages of his own amalgamation. When he got to quotes of the classics, he would don a Basque beret. Midway through the lecture, he grinned and flipped the blackboard to draw graphs with chalk.

  Delivering the Marc Bloch Lectures at the Sorbonne, 1982.

  Pleased with this little trick, he argued that these conflicting “theses” about society developed largely without awareness and communication between them, leaving us with rival but disengaged views of the market. “Intimately related intellectual formations,” he noted, “unfolded at great length, without ever taking cognizance of each other. Such ignoring of close k
in is no doubt the price paid by ideology for the self-confidence it likes to parade.” Hirschman offered a tableau idéologique of the rivals. In conversing with them, he drew them to the table to communicate with the other. This “democratic” approach to economic thought deprived any single argument of certainty nurtured by isolation. In staging this conversation among rival views of the market, however, Hirschman had to concede that over the course of the twentieth century the prospect of such a dialogue was getting more difficult. In fact, it could only be resurrected through his kind of historical reenactment. Ever the optimist, he suggested that this version of history should be seen as a precedent for present.16

  At the Sorbonne, his locution had lost some of its fluency. The words were clear but laced with an unidentifiable accent whose origins were lost in a lifetime of migration and translation. One who was captivated was Annie Cot, the French historian of economic thought. Lia Rein’s son, Martin Andler, arranged for them to meet, and soon Hirschman found himself on Cot’s dissertation committee. Many years later, her seminar at the Sorbonne for PhD students working on the history of economic thought became baptized informally as the Séminaire Albert Hirschman.