Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  The key was to be open to possibilities. More than that, it meant creating them. This is why his exile was not experienced as being severed from home, separating a self from one’s past, as Edward Said famously put it.1 Separation created possibilities for new combinations. Indeed, Hirschman coined a term, possibilism, or, perhaps more accurately, adapted it from Søren Kierkegaard’s famous aphorism “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never!” to evoke Hirschman’s disposition. For someone growing up in the shadow of fascism, war, and intolerance, this upbeat was not an expected point of arrival. In fact, most intellectuals of his generation—and Hannah Arendt, his elder by a few years, comes most readily to mind—worried more than they hoped, saw catastrophe instead of opportunity. But possibilism was more than just a personal disposition; it was also an intellectual stance for his brand of social science. The more familiar search for probabilistic laws based on a list of preconditions for events or outcomes all too often led to the dismaying conclusion that most societies would be unable to solve their problems and break out of vicious cycles on their own. This didn’t, in the end, leave much to the imagination and left Hirschman pondering what the point was—ethically as well as intellectually—to being a scholar. He yearned for a social science that reset the imagination of the intellectual to consider combinations that might take anomalous, deviant, or inverted sequences and make them a potential course; to explore combinations that might lay the tracks for different histories of the future.

  One way to prevent a life of trouble from becoming one of tragedy was through ironic, humor-laced detachment, a stance that never got in the way of empathy or commitment. Varian Fry, with whom Hirschman worked to get refugees (including Hannah Arendt) out of Marseilles as the Nazis swept across Europe, once recalled how the police finally caught up with Hirschman not because he had false papers but because he had too many good ones, which made him suspicious. Included in these bogus documents was the certificate that “M. Albert Hermant” was a Frenchman born in Philadelphia and cards testifying that he belonged to a number of associations, including a Club for People without Clubs. His seamless French helped cover his German origins and antifascist tracks. The German sociologist Wolf Lepenies once mused about Hirschman, “We have here a criminal with too many alibis.”2 After an unplanned vascular operation while he was visiting Berlin around the time of the fall of the Wall, Hirschman came out of the fog of the anesthetic, turned to his doctor, and asked in German, “Why are bananas bent?” The doctor smiled and shrugged. Hirschman replied, “Because nobody went to the jungle to adjust it and make it straight.”3

  This was not the only banana joke. In the 1950s, while the Hirschmans were living in Bogotá, Colombia, they made a habit of sending Christmas cards to their friends around the world. In 1952, a friend of theirs, Peter Aldor, a Hungarian cartoonist who had moved to Colombia to become one of that country’s great political satirists, drew a card for them. It featured Albert the economist perched in a banana plant clutching a sheet of graphs and figures. Below are his wife and daughters harvesting the fruit, whose production Albert is supposedly planning. The caption reads: “An excellent food is the banana. Let’s eat it today and plan it mañana.” The joke is layered with meanings, one of which was a dig at colleagues who believed in the lofty promises of economic planning.

  A holiday card from the Hirschman family, drawn by Peter Aldor, c. 1955.

  Humor was central to a literary personality; the form of the argument could not be so easily unraveled from its substance; indeed, late in life he would focus his attention on how people in modern society argue about public affairs. His last major work, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), tackled the way intransigent arguments threatened to weaken democracy, precisely because they narrowed options and alternatives. At the core of his argument was an observation about how social scientists played with words that had political and economic consequences.

  He should know—he was a master player in his own right. Hirschman amused himself with words, their sounds, and their meanings. Adept as he was at double entendres in German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English, his play with words meant careful attention; language and words were to his craft what the scalpel was to his father, the surgeon. Play with words was often a reminder that in the freedom of language one could find light even in dark times. In June 1932, as National Socialists were broadcasting their bile, Hirschman wrote his elder sister to warn her that a long-delayed letter was still being composed. “Do you know why you haven’t received this one yet?” he asked her. “Because it is awaiting transportation! Oh the poor one, sometimes at night I can hear it whining, awaiting [harren] its transportation.”4

  It was in words that his play came to full fruition. He loved a well-turned phrase, especially when twisting the familiar into the self-mocking. “The dead end that justifies the means! But does the end justify the meanness?” and “I am anxious for criticism as long as you find me seminole” can be found among his jottings. One can find “Metaphors in search of a reality,” a formulation he instantly doubted and then swapped for “metaphors in search referent,” folded into his notes on the problem of freight rates on Nigerian railways.

  Word play was not idle play. The paradoxical, backward, inverted developments one finds in his favorite images and aphorisms mirror the style he brought to bear in his outlook on the world. Like baguettes (with which he became a self-proclaimed world-expert sandwich-maker) that get soft, not hard, as they go stale, Hirschman enjoyed finding meaning from the way History defied “universal laws.” Out of the inversions and “wrong-way-around” sequences, came possibilities for things to be different—like the life that springs from what appear to be dead tree branches at the end of each winter. This impression, too, came to him as he gazed out his kitchen window at home in Princeton. As Hirschman joked to Clifford Geertz many years later, too many of their colleagues fell prey to “Law No. 1 of the Social Sciences. Whenever a phenomenon in the social world is fully explained, it ceases to operate.”5

  It was in palindromes that his fascination was realized, and one can detect in his public writings from the 1960s onward a sharp eye for the right phrase: “exit, voice, and loyalty,” “the tunnel effect,” “the passions and the interests.” These were his Flaubertian mots justes. Perhaps his best palindrome—certainly his fondest—was “Senile Lines,” composed in a collage of tongues around 1971. It starts like this:

  I,

  REVOLT LOVER,

  FOE OF

  PARTY TRAP

  EVIL IGNITING I LIVE.

  NAOMI, MOAN!

  MAORI, ROAM!

  HARASS SELFLESS SARAH!

  DIE, ID!

  NEIN SEIN! RÊVE: NADA, NEVER.

  A world of ideas wrapped in carefully chosen words.

  Behind his great books was a clandestine life—not of espionage (though Hirschman did have a brief career as a member of the antifascist underground, and he was once a member of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) nor of secret lovers or double lives. As Hirschman became one of the world’s foremost social scientists, he launched a sideline in 1972. With a group of fellow palindrome aficionados, he founded the 4W Club (Where We Went Wrong) to bombard a fictive Dr. Awkward with a letter campaign. It was one of the few international organizations that he was actually glad to direct. Albert’s favorite correspondent was the Guatemalan Augusto Monterroso, with whom he shared some tesoros. “AMO IDIOMA!” he exclaimed to the famous poet.6

  Words were to Hirschman what equations were for other economists. Indeed, by the standards of economics, Hirschman was an exceedingly wordy economist. Many in the profession, without knowing that he was once fairly handy with statistics and enjoyed its possibilities, disavowed him as a colleague for it. As Hirschman became a mature scholar, the charge of practicing a social science that did not lend itself to formal, theory-testing rigors or mathematical modeling was a common one. He felt compelled to explain himself to his friend from his
Harvard days, Daniel Bell. “The model builders sometimes criticize me,” Hirschman explained, “for not putting my thoughts into mathematical models. My reply to them is that mathematics has not quite caught up with metaphor or language—both are more inventive!”7 To many, this may seem a self-serving defense. But it is true that Hirschman’s skill with words always eclipsed his dexterity with numbers, and as the economics profession abandoned the former to pursue the latter, Hirschman was out of step.

  Why so much about words? For one thing, they were a sanctuary, a refuge for a man with no country. In the summer of 1944, as he waited anxiously and increasingly depressed in North Africa to join the American Army in Europe, he found solace in words. Despair began to overwhelm him as he thought about the number of people who had suffered on account of the war “or worse, the prisoners in concentration camps.” Anguished, he happened upon a verse by Jean Wahl, “Merci mon corps, tu fais bien ton métier de corps.” Writing to his pregnant wife (Sarah) in New York, he exclaimed, “Isn’t this well said? And so simple! Good poetry produces the effect of great inventions. It is so simple but one must think about it.” Characteristically, he concluded with more words inspired by those words: these are “themes to be developed.” Behind him, Albert Hirschman left diaries, letters, and marginalia in books filled with “ideas,” “themes,” and “questions” to mark the trails of his thoughts, verbal routes into his mind’s eye.8

  Language, especially its written form, was a dwelling place for mind and soul. That someone with so many languages should think of its practice as a kind of home may seem strange to us. But it was precisely his Odyssean life, so long unsettled that a physical home was almost an arbitrary one, that enhanced the dominion of words. He was above all a writer, and as Joseph Brodsky once noted, “for a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.”

  Words thereby gave solace. But they are also our clues to an intellectual imagination. Words, sentences, prose, and poetry—in effect, literature—were more than embellishments or ornaments to hang on existing social scientific classifications. Hirschman’s work represents an effort to practice social science as literature. It is what makes him appear so original in style and content now that the bonds between literature and social science have increasingly been severed. Hirschman, and the cultural milieu of assimilated bourgeois Jews of Berlin, sank a taproot deep into the classics, from Kafka the modernist to the Odyssey, long portions of which Hirschman could recite from the time he was a child. It is why Flaubert’s interiority gives insight into psychology, and it is why La Rochefoucauld plumbs the cunning of self-interest. Good literature, to Hirschman, summons the power of small details and anomalies to uncover something new about the whole. As Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a close friend, collaborator, and future president of Brazil once told me, Hirschman was like a Dutch painter, revealing in the small new ways of seeing the whole. An economist to the end, he was forever conjugating genres, styles, and divisions of the human sciences. As the cursus of his life slowly closed with the century, he made of his style a kind of rampart from which to warn us, without giving up on humor, of the perils of overspecialization, of a narrowing of vision, and of the temptation to fall in love with the image of one’s own technical prowess and vocabulary and lose sight of the vitality of moving back and forth between proving and preaching. Appreciating this is crucial for understanding his stance toward evidence and argumentation, why to him rhetoric mattered. He exemplifies at once a disposition that is much broader than the estuary of our social sciences; perhaps for this reason he represents a humanism of social science that may be slowly drying up.

  But this would be far too gloomy a reading—and Hirschman would be the first to object to this portrait of his own work. Thank goodness, he would no doubt say, that Fortuna has plenty of tricks up her sleeve.

  The affection for writing is what draws our attention to Hirschman; it is his books and articles that have captivated generations of readers and make him unique in the human sciences. But this story is not the story of the works; it is rather the story behind them. By this I do not mean that Hirschman’s books and essays should speak for themselves, though their lucidity often left me paraphrasing what was rendered much better in the original. Upon rereading one of Hirschman’s essays, the great historian of ideas Quentin Skinner felt compelled to confess that he had been pressing it upon his Cambridge graduate students, “but I find on re-reading it that the points I try to make to them about it are in fact in the essay itself. An unconscious application of a form of dishonesty common, I suppose, among teachers, especially of the harried kind.”9 I agree with Skinner. This study does not seek to explain arguments that are told well enough by the original author, but rather, by illuminating the drama, complexity, tension—and downright hard work of the intellectual labor process—to invite readers to have their own reading experience by telling the biographical backstory of a life’s ideas.

  But which backstory? These days, biography, especially of the “popular” sort, has become a synonym for private revelation, culled from a stash of secret letters, a hidden diary, or a confession. The presumption seems to be that what is most private is also most revealing, as if the real truth about someone is that which is least known, what Louis Menand called “the Rosebud assumption.”10 Leave aside the naïveté of this genre—as if people don’t lie in their letters, distort in their diaries, and concoct in their confessions. Hirschman himself was not above melodramatizing the moment. There is also the matter of what is always inscrutable about a life history. In trying to render a vivid sense of the person’s likeness from letters, personal notes, manuscripts, and archives from several continents, not to mention the conversations with him and others, I became aware of the multiplying gaps, the unprovable stories, the maddening lack of evidence. Some are the gaps that we know of, such as the death of his dear colleague and close friend, Clifford Geertz, before I could arrange formal interviews with him. The absence of Geertz’s testimony will be a lasting fault, and readers should be aware of the absence of his voice here. There are also gaps of a less accidental kind; Hirschman, though pressed, did not want to revisit his memories of fighting for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. I have often wondered whether his brand of hopefulness and his faith in reform, his possibilism, required covering the tracks of terrible memories. If they did, it is important to know that some details are sometimes more relevant and saddening in their absence because the gap was there for a reason.

  Mercifully, biographical uncertainty is something that can now be admitted. It points to something that Hermione Lee has thoughtfully discussed: how a biography amalgamates what is known and what is not known, the present and the absent,—and how it includes the welter of alternatives, accidents, might-have-beens, in a word, the possibilities of a life, only some of which can be reconstructed.11 It is perhaps fitting that Hirschman himself would accent life’s possibilities, not just in the way he lived but also for History, and that any social theory worth its weight had to reckon with it. At the core of his possibilism was the idea that people had a right to what he called a “non-projected future.” From a biographer’s point of view, one might say the same of the past, especially one that traces a subject’s uncanny ability to get out of a jam and find reasons for hope and space for reform even when they seem most implausible. It was not an accident that one of Hirschman’s favored words was débrouillard, from the Old French root, brouiller (to mix up), which alludes to artful ways to wiggle out of a convoluted, intractable, or bad situation.

  Words met ideas and ideas found their expression in a quest. One might see Hirschman as a latter-day Don Quixote, striving in his books and essays to produce possibilities that can only be dimly seen. Cervantes was, in fact, a favorite of Hirschman’s and a source of some of his selected quotes. The very idea of Quixote’s Librillo de memoria, his book of memories, inspired the kind of note taking and observation that provide grist for the narrative of this book. It was only af
ter several years of research that Hirschman’s wife, muse, and, in decisive moments, his life intellectual partner shared with me Hirschman’s little brown diaries, in which he jotted some of his most personal notes. Understandably, it had taken time to build confidence in her husband’s biographer. These as well as other sources help paint a portrait of an errant knight, a figure often noted for being disconnected from reality. But this is only one mode of reading the character, a mode that became commonplace during the English Civil War, which has warped how we think of dreamers. In Hirschman we find a dreamer—Fry would complain about his invaluable coconspirator that he was too often dans la lune—who was most certainly connected to his worlds, connected and committed to the extent that he was willing to lay his life on the line for his cause.

  The quest is evident across the writings that would span seven decades. But there is no single idea or topic at work; Hirschman’s attention moved along with History. The subjects vary from the economic causes of imperialism and war, the subject of his near-forgotten first book, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1945), to his searing indictment of modern habits of political discourse in The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991). One can read any single Hirschman oeuvre as a window onto a moment, and together they make up a kind of intellectual glossary of a century. Certainly, many of his works now rank among classics of the social sciences—one thinks of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970) or The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (1977). To see them as testimonies and products of moments in time and place, to give these books their own history, is one aspiration of this book.