Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

Cliff Geertz found Hirschman’s hunger for honorifics irritating and grumbled to friends that Albert was debasing himself (though it should be said that Geertz harvested his fair share, too). To some extent, he was right—it was going to Hirschman’s head, but in Hirschman’s own, humorously self-detaching way. His diary contains the following entry:

  When I was first in school I was told this is a bad omen for success in “life”—now that I am getting all kinds of honors while still alive I worry this is a bad omen for my fame after death.

  It has been said that the hoard of honorifics was compensation for not having won the prize—the Nobel Prize in economics. Hirschman once quipped that he figured an honorary doctorate from Harvard was the consolation for runners up. Still: why no Nobel Prize? No question came up more often in the course of a decade’s research on this book. As Le Monde declared in September 1997: “Hirschman, let’s say it outright, should have long ago received the Nobel Prize in economic sciences.”17 Certainly, Hirschman was nominating others for the prize—including heroic organizations like the Inter-American Foundation. One reviewer noted of Essays in Trespassing that Hirschman was in the same league as the other founders of development economics—Arthur Lewis, Gunnar Myrdal, and Raúl Prebisch—with original thinking and many admirers. But unlike them he had no disciples. “There is nothing which could be described as a Hirschman school of development economics,” noted the reviewer, and his lack of “method” explained the limits of his influence. Although Hirschman looked at the many ways in which phenomena are connected, “the connections he highlights are rarely direct or straightforward. His approach is circuitous; the most important linkages are often indirect; intellectual progress frequently requires lengthy detours and forays into seemingly unrelated areas.” The reviewer drew attention to Hirschman’s cherished cover of Journeys toward Progress, Paul Klee’s painting, Highways and Byways, as an apt image for the content of his thinking.18 This critique in the Times Literary Supplement stuck in Hirschman’s craw. When he began a talk at CEBRAP in March of 1982, he despaired that his readers only saw disjointed, indirect connections.19 Another reviewer, Alex Inkeles in the Journal of Economic Literature, noted that Hirschman was at his best when he connected economic relations to social and political systems; but when it came to “conventional economic analysis,” a reader was left wanting. Of course, Hirschman could only reply that he never aimed to fit convention.20

  By the late 1980s the rumors of Hirschman’s nomination for the Nobel were flying fast and furious. The guessing game was becoming an autumn ritual. In 1989, Peter Passell drafted a list for the New York Times based on phone calls with anonymous economists. Many confirmed that there was an element of crap-shooting going on. Passell named some of the obvious contenders, like Gary Becker (who would get it in 1992), Robert Lucas (1995), Joseph Stiglitz (2001), and Ronald Coase (1991). His list was impressively accurate in retrospect. To add some drama, he added a “dark horse category.” This is the “most fun” part of the whole game, he thought, as there were awardees who “would be sure to arouse controversy.” At the top of this category he put Hirschman, “who has ventured deep into sociology, anthropology and philosophy to explain economic phenomena.” There were others, too: Robert Fogel, Mancur Olson, Robert Mundell, and Martin Weitzman. Two of these would go on to win the prize, suggesting that dark horses could still cross the line first.21

  To some of his fans, among them laureates, it was a mystery why he did not get the Nobel Prize. Tom Schelling argues that the arc of his lifework yielded more originality of economic thinking, and this achievement, rather than any single “theorem” or “solution,” is what recommends him.22 A common account is that Hirschman was not mathematical. Amartya Sen, Albert’s nephew and a laureate, noted that in the early days most economists added math to their analytical kit bags and were recognized more for their conceptual breakthroughs; nowadays, when more and more economists start as mathematicians, this once “rare skill which Albert lacked” became increasingly notable. To Sen, this was regrettable; he considers Hirschman an uncommonly profound economic thinker. Beside, Hayek, Myrdal, and more recently Hirschman’s old friend Schelling were not especially math-inclined; the lack of math was not, in itself, the spoiler.23

  The question for many is, what did he contribute to the discipline? This, after all, is the metric for the award. The fact was, Hirschman’s increasing breadth and originality coincided with his decreasing interest in speaking only to his discipline. His departure from Harvard Economics for the IAS in a sense represented a departure from the discipline and its fundaments. His calls to resist the grain of disciplinary specialization, to move beyond a discipline’s own terms to explain social phenomena, meant that specialized practitioners were unlikely to see these injunctions as paths to further their pursuits. For this reason, Hirschman’s work could not influence economic thought as it was then being envisioned—increasingly as a discipline resting on claims that had to be sharp enough to be empirically tested, followed up, developed, and refined. Economists, as Eric Maskin once told me, found it easier to operate within existing models, dissolving ambiguities and anomalies in pursuit of taut precision. Too many of Hirschman’s insights did not add up to the kind of claims that could be tested in ways that yielded professional returns; by their standards, they were simply too wooly and elusive. The main exception was, paradoxically, the book that most veered him away from the discipline, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which is generally recognized as a work riddled with formulae waiting to be quarried. It may well be that the recent turn to examine behavioral foundations will lead some economists back to this forerunner.24

  If this was his drift, why not acknowledge his contribution to development economics? Strategy, after all, was recognized as possibly the single most important book in the field. The trouble was, the field was not exactly held in high regard by the discipline. The fact that a prize had been allocated to William Arthur Lewis and Theodore Schultz in 1979 was all the recognition the subfield was going to get. According to Paul Krugman, the path it was on was leading to “an intellectual dead end.” Hirschman, one should recall, was inclined to agree, though not for the same reasons. Although he never ceased to think about development, he worried that any proposition that the Third World required its own subfield was bound to lock economists into colonial outlooks. This concern lurked at the heart of his irritation with the big planners and “balanced growth” advocates of the 1950s and 1960s, who felt that Third World peoples need an external jolt. Rosenstein-Rodan’s crack about Allende bringing the coup upon himself only confirmed Hirschman’s doubts.25 When “endogenous” theories of growth erupted on to the discipline’s stage, the field flared up again, this time with technical virtuosity. But some of the circularity seemed all too familiar. In the fall of 1991, colleagues at Berkeley convened an international symposium, “Endogenous Growth,” and invited Hirschman as a keynote eminence; by then, he was one of the few lucid founders left. Judging from his notes on the occasion, there was not a bit of déjà vu as a younger generation debated whether growth implied industrialization (“No!” exclaimed the seventy-six-year-old to himself) and whether “market failures” and “externalities” explained the trouble. When one economist proclaimed that “I don’t have a model for that,” Hirschman scribbled, “missing the point.”26

  What made Hirschman so influential beyond his discipline, speaking as an economist to social science, is what deprived him of influence within it; in the end, it was the divergence between the direction of the economics discipline—whatever one might feel about it—and Hirschman’s own drift that accounts for him being passed over. He kept his disappointment to himself. Others have been vocal. “I don’t know whether he was saddened,” confided Sen, “by the fact that he did not get the Nobel. I am certainly saddened. Even now I don’t give up the hope that he might be recognized belatedly.”27 Sen, as Hirschman’s proxy, can perhaps take solace in the fact that Nobel committees often had difficulty with figures who def
y easy categorization. The figure who comes to mind most readily is Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine short-story writer and essayist who never won the Nobel Prize for literature and left the world to question forever the wisdom of the judges. Like Borges, Hirschman could enjoy legions of readers long after some prize winners were forgotten.

  With the exception of the taunting annual ritual of the Nobel Prize, Hirschman could bask in the aura as one of the world’s most celebrated social scientists. It was perhaps only a matter of time before a return to Berlin, the natal city, loomed. There had been excursions with Ursula and Eva, who badgered a reluctant brother to see old sites, the ruins of their old home in the Tiergarten district, and to take walks among the lime trees. Albert generally chafed at these, for his sisters would grumble when he did not share their nostalgia. Generally, he was tight-lipped about his past. When he opened up and spoke with Claus Offe or Wolf Lepenies, their exchanges were mainly in English, which helped insulate the present from the past. Letters to and from Ursula were in French or Italian, with occasional, childlike German notes. If there was a European attraction, it was Italy and especially France. Behind his discretion, Germany summoned too many mixed emotions; Albert handled this, unsurprisingly, by keeping them at bay.

  But by the 1980s, interest began to eclipse the aversion. Hirschman’s reentry to Germany was paved by Claus and Sabine Offe, who had spent a year in Princeton in 1977–78, and Wolf Lepenies, who spent three years there and would turn down a permanent position to return to Berlin and help build a cousin institute there. To German social scientists, Hirschman was anything but a household name. His only translated work was Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which appeared in a series better known for publishing Hayek, which branded Hirschman—identified as an American—as a conservative. Younger, left-wing social scientists ignored it. When Claus Offe arrived at Princeton, Hirschman was an unknown; it was an irony that Hirschman knew more about Offe and likened him to the critical emerging lights with whom he collaborated in Latin America. It was quite possible that this was in the back of his mind when he and Geertz arranged Offe’s sojourn in Princeton. At the time, Offe was at the forefront of struggles to keep the German government from trampling on university autonomy as the Red Army Faction, a radical left-wing movement taken to kidnapping and violent attacks, stepped up its campaign. He refused to sign a special loyalty oath submitted by the minister of science and denounced the practice of isolation torture of detained Red Army members. Hirschman was fascinated, though he would not, to Offe’s disappointment, be drawn into taking a public stance.

  It was simply a matter of time before Hirschman’s reflections on the human dilemma in all capitalist societies were marshaled to circulate in the one that was perhaps most riven by doubt. Albert and Sarah seized upon the opportunity to fly to Berlin in 1980 to visit the Offes. It was his first visit to his birthplace without his sisters, and thus he was freer to roam the city. Claus took them for a drive. Albert gazed out from the passenger seat chirping like a child in a German language that reminded Claus of his grandparents’. It was a kind of “linguistic archaeology,” recalled Offe. Hirschman’s tongue had been frozen in time, fluent in the anachronisms of a bygone world. Offe also noted a shift. Unlike his English voice, which was notably reticent, often mumbling, the returnee was lyrical, enthusiastic, and talkative—as if a different language brought forth a different persona. Offe would not be the first to observe the characterological shifts occasioned by Hirschman’s linguistic swings. Together, Claus and Sabine Offe launched the translation of Hirschman’s oeuvre into German in the mid-1980s, using their clout with a major publishing house, Suhrkamp, to reach out to broader readerships. To culminate this diffusion, Offe planned an Autorencolloquium to coincide with the paperback issue of Leidenschaften und Interessen (The Passions and the Interests) dedicated to discussing Hirschman’s work at the University of Bielefeld in 1988. There had been one devoted to John Rawls, and then to Jürgen Habermas. Hirschman was the next eminent in line. What made this different was that the event doubled as a coming out in the form of a return for a German émigré. Offe and Bielefeld went all out and summoned a who’s who of the German social sciences, with some prominent American, French, and British scholars mixed in. This was, it should be said, not quite how Hirschman saw the event. By then, his sleeves were rolled up for another book. Pleased to be celebrated and to hear others apply his work, he nonetheless receded from the discussion, his mind absorbed in petites idées; questions directed his way met with evasive smiles. There was a familiar sensation of him being dans la lune.28

  It was thanks to Wolf Lepenies that Hirschman became a frequent visitor to his birthplace. Once Hirschman retired from the institute in Princeton, his time became more disposable; for a period, he became a de facto member of the Wissenschaftskolleg, created in 1981 and modeled in large measure on the IAS. Wolf became its second rector in 1986, overseeing its expansion and growing visibility to American scholars. By arranging for Sarah and Albert to move back and forth, he reinforced Hirschman’s visibility to German social science while rekindling a bond with Berlin.

  Before the decade was out, a half century of distancing was giving way; reentry pulled back the veil on his own past. When the Free University of Berlin, created in 1948 as an alternative to the Communist-controlled University of Berlin, celebrated its fortieth anniversary, it chose to award Hirschman with an honorary doctorate. Of all the awards, this one touched him most deeply. This coming out was fraught with significance. He would at last get a university degree in Berlin. As was his wont, he started his lecture with some personal recollections of being a young Berliner, recounting the conversation with his father that led to the discovery that he had no worldview. He alluded vaguely to the feebleness of Weimar democracy as a segue to a discussion of Humboldt, Rawls, and the importance of having strong but undogmatic opinions as a gauge of one’s democratic personality. The possibilist, perhaps still trying to exorcise the spirits of 1933, urged his audience to explore what he called “the micro-foundations of a democratic society,” the making not of Theodor Adorno’s authoritarian personality, but rather a democratic one.29

  At the festive lunch at the Chalet Suisse, he sat beside his first girlfriend, Inge, now a successful sculptress living, as befitted her family’s Communist heritage, in East Berlin. On his other side was Alfred Blumenfeld, who had graduated with Albert from the Collège in March 1932 and spent the Nazi years in fear that his Jewish past would be revealed. After lunch, Inge accompanied Albert and Sarah back to their hotel, where they sat looking at photographs of her latest work. They also talked about life in the East, and Inge did not withhold her disenchantments. After several hours, she gathered her things and made way for the subway to cross to the other side. It may have been at the end of her visit that Hirschman, happening upon a good excuse for wordplay, jotted in his diary:

  Communism: The dead end that justified the means.

  The next day, Der Tagesspiegel featured a long profile of and interview with Hirschman, featuring him as the old Berliner coming home. A few days later, Wolf Lepenies, who with his wife, Annette, escorted Albert around the formalities, arranged a meeting with Jürgen Kuczynski, the son of René, whom Hirschman’s father had saved in his dying days. The luncheon was planned on a frigid day at the Kolleg. Jürgen, now eighty-four years old, was frail but utterly lucid. “I have something for you, he told Albert. Out came a large envelope with the original Gerty Simon portrait of Albert’s father. Kuczynski proceeded to tell a shocked Hirschman of what happened fifty-five years earlier, of Carl’s hidden heroism. As Hirschman packed his bags to leave Berlin, he got a call from Henri Hempel, a high school teacher who was writing a book about the now-famous class of 1932 of the Französisches Gymnasium and wanted to interview one of its few living members.

  To say that the week in Berlin was stirring would be an understatement. Certainly Hirschman had to wrestle with his customary reserve. He wrote to Claus Offe confessing an emotional tide
from the Free University ceremony. But “for me the reencounter with some old friends whom I had not seen for some three or four decades was perhaps the most moving experience,” which led to a reflex: “and I may even take time out to write about it.”30

  Indeed, he would.

  Thus it was that as the divisions between East and West Berlin began to shudder, Hirschman would witness the closure of what he had seen open in early 1933. We can only imagine what went through his mind during the short trips in 1989 and then the four months he spent there from October 1990 to January 1991—because the notes he took from his many interviews among the fleeing easterners, followed by a ten-day trip to Leipzig and Dresden, where the decisive demonstrations had taken place against the old regime, have disappeared. To say that he recognized the epic proportions of what was going on trivializes what it represented for him personally. We can get a glimpse of the inner churning from the rushed entries in his diary of petites idées. A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he met with Offe at the Free University, by which time the two Germanys had hurriedly turned their backs on the past to face reconciliation in the present. Hirschman must have worried that the talk of burying old differences threatened to bleed into the intellectual milieu. “This impulse to post-bellum reconciliation,” he noted, “does not exist after intellectual combat—you can’t say: ‘let’s make sure these antagonisms haven’t been argued in vain.’ ” It may have been that his dislike for the official way of “coping with the past” reflected the way in which he was, finally, reckoning with his own. German reunification implied a kind of internal reconnection that found characteristic expression in Hirschman’s words. He scribbled a story in his diary about getting lost in the Kolleg library, until he stumbled on a librarian and said: “Ich habe mich verlaufen.” These words delighted him. “This is a typically German linguistic formation of new meaning of verb laufen (run, go) by means of prefix ver—resulting in new meaning ‘lose one’s way …). I hadn’t used this for some 50 years + recovered it immediately, considerable pleasure from recovering it—like finding an old friend who moreover hasn’t changed or aged.” He could still play in German.