Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  And yet, there are some common traits in this glossary. One trait was style. It can be read at first blush as literary. Hirschman would become one of the greatest authors in the social sciences, a division of intellectual life admittedly short on writerly credentials. Many have delighted in his vivid metaphors, memorable images, and poetic turns. But the great prose was in the service of a disposition that urged wariness about big claims, grand theories, and encompassing plans and the certainties that were required to scaffold them—required because social scientists increasingly sought quarry in models, theories, and laws that were meant to be true across time, and thus outside History. Hirschman was a skeptic who preferred anomalies, surprises, and the power of unintended effects, forces that were sometimes easier to see in literature. Whatever prevailed as the orthodoxy—fixing the dollar gap in Europe with austerity, faith in planning in the 1950s, exuberance about foreign aid in the 1960s, Latin American defeatism, and the triumph of free-market ideologies in the 1980s—Hirschman positioned himself as a contrarian. This was because he always feared that orthodoxy and certainty excluded the creative possibilities of doubt, of learning from surprises.

  As such, his narrative style summoned readers to question whether History really had to unfold a given way. Schooled as an adolescent in Marxism in one of its hotbeds, Berlin, he came to reject anything that smacked of teleology or historical laws. His early battles with Communist orthodoxy would have a lifelong effect. Sometimes the way out of a jam could come from being more modest, accepting one’s limitations, and pursuing strategies that lay before one’s nose, if only one could shed the temptation to presume that bigger is better or grander is greater. Other times, it was precisely exaggeration and ambition that was required. Being open to many possibilities meant accepting uncertainty and embracing the fact that one could learn from experience in the world by forfeiting presumptions that one could not know it all. Some of the options included the most counterintuitive. As he would note in Strategy of Economic Development (1958), it is where one faces the most resistance that one should press one’s pursuits. For this reason, some of his critics have noted that Hirschman had more fondness for understanding complexity in the social sciences than searching for strong predictions. They are right, and they are right to point to his affection for the powerful image over the perfect equation. But there are reasons for this preference that this biography aims to illuminate.

  If style was one of the traits, it was connected to the content of his thinking. And the content was deeply rooted in a sense of being in the world. Hirschman’s century was one of bad situations, and he found himself repeatedly—indeed, placed himself—at their junctions. Often painted as a hundred years of revolution, war, and genocide, the twentieth century ended with the general consensus that humanity did not dignify itself but rather displayed an ability to perform vast horrors. It is for this reason that Eric Hobsbawm once depicted the long history of the short century as an “age of extremes.” The extremes had their intellectuals. Many intellectuals. And many of these intellectuals worked in the service of the extremes. Just as we are accustomed to see the twentieth century as the age of extremes, we have tended to be more interested in its extremist apostles, from the revolutionaries to the reactionaries.

  But between revolution and counterrevolution, empire and nationalism, communism and capitalism, there was also another domain, that of reform. Often beleaguered, beaten, and overshadowed by utopian Titans, this was a realm of purposive and often nonconsensual, and therefore conflictive, change whose pursuit aimed not to perfect humanity, but only to improve it. The pursuit of flawless perfection all too often led to some horrific outcomes—Hirschman would lose family and friends to the century’s butchery at the hands of ideologues of the immaculate. What if humans had dared to dream less of humans as perfectible beings than as improvable ones? To Hirschman, it was a shame that the imagination gave so much allure to the former and treated the latter as second-best or simply—and disparagingly—as “acceptable.” How boring and undesirable! This was materiel for his struggle with utopians and fatalists from Berkeley to Berlin, who preferred all-or-nothing arguments that invariably left societies delirious with impossible expectations or despondent about their failures.

  This book is about someone who thought hard about and dwelled in the neglected, ravaged space between the romance of revolution and the firmament of reaction. It is a personal and intellectual story of a middle ground seen through the eyes of someone firmly committed to its place in the world, partly as a counterpoint to the great ideas that gave rise to grand utopian experiments. But he was not just responding to the charisma of grand schemes; his life was a twisting and gradually developing search for concepts to understand social change with their own integrity, complexity, and one might even say “theory,” though this word caused deep ambivalence for Hirschman. Hirschman’s life was a personal history of the twentieth century, its epic told through the life of one man who coursed through its most terrible and hopeful moments but never gave up on the ability to imagine life differently, better. Indeed, he would often tell his readers that a solution to the world’s problems lay not so much in some technical discovery as in the power of the imagination.

  The ensuing story charts a personal history of the world and a global history of an intellectual life.

  As we consider the life of Albert O. Hirschman, we might reflect on this place of reform as something more than a residual, a mere afterthought to the loftier utopias that dominate the pages of his century’s other thinkers. After all, Hirschman was an intellectual. His lifework represented a commitment to reform, which ranged from rebuilding war-torn Europe, to development in the Third World, and to defending a capitalism made humane by accepting the necessity of being reformable.

  Nowadays, we think of reform as fixing, mending what has been broken, but to Hirschman, it was more than a technical exercise in remediation. It was not what we do when we can’t imagine doing our best. Perhaps in retracing his life we can begin to piece together a biography of reform itself: the story of Albert O. Hirschman might be read as a collective memory in the form of a personal tale, a reencounter with a social science that finds hope in disappointment, solutions in tension, and liberty in uncertainty, a style of regarding the social world as a source of possibilities that the intellectual can help summon with a different combination of humility and daring.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Garden

  You are the task. No pupil far and wide.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  On August 1, 1914, the German capital erupted in festivities. A glorious war had broken out. The speechifying, recruiting parades, and posters and banners urging the troops to swift victory all celebrated a conflict that promised to end in six weeks. The ensuing armistice would restore a gentlemanly world governed by European monarchs, nobles, and capitalists. This was a welcome war, not a dreaded one. One young doctor applauded along with his fellow subjects. His name: Carl Hirschmann. He was a patriot; he loved Beethoven, Goethe, and the values of the German Enlightenment, as well as the German nation. In the wake of the naval Battle of Skagerrak (known as Jutland in English, May 31–June 1, 1916) he gushed to his wife, “What do you think of our victory at sea? How wonderful it would have been to be there!”1

  Carl Hirschmann’s excitement did not send him to the front or to the high seas. He served the cause behind the lines. A surgeon, a preferred career choice for aspiring German Jews, Hirschmann toiled away at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, tending the sick and mending the war’s wounded.

  He also became a father. A year before Skagerrak, Carl’s son was born. Brimming with national loyalty, Carl named the boy Otto (after the founder of the Great Reich, Otto von Bismarck) Albert (after his grandfather, a banker and patriarch of a well-off family). Carl not only yearned for a boy, he hoped he’d be able to celebrate the birth on April 1 to coincide with the festivities to mark Bismarck’s one-hundredth anniversary. Instead, the baby took his time. He was
born April 7. Otto Albert Hirschmann, known as OA among family and friends, was a child of war, the loyalties it inspired, and the consequences it wrought for Germany and the world.

  The infant Otto Albert was welcomed into a world in which greatness was supposed to await the German nation. But the war baby’s parents had to contend with some of the unanticipated effects of the conflict. When it was clear that this would not be a quick triumph, and the troops dug in for a long haul, the German capital began to suffer. Berlin, a metropolis of over two million, was heavily dependent on imported food. To break the German fighting spirit, the Allies mounted a blockade in the first winter, which was one of the reasons why the stakes at Skagerrak were so high. In fact, strategically the German navy never managed to break the blockade. Food stocks dwindled. A few months before Otto Albert’s birth, Berlin became the first German city to issue bread-ration cards. The winter of 1916 was called the Turnip Winter—that’s all there was to eat. By 1916, egg allocations were down to two per family per month. The next year, the potato crop, a staple for flour and bread, failed. That summer food riots rocked the German capital. And then the following winter was not only bitterly cold, there was no coal to heat homes. Berliners froze to death. Others suffered from severe malnutrition. Hospitals like Carl’s Charité were busier than ever. Carl’s wife, Hedwig (Hedda), left her two young children in the hands of a nanny while she too went to work, as a nurse. The glitz of prewar Berlin and the pomp of August 1914 had given way to death, shortages, darkness, and endless queues. In desperation, the government flung its remaining resources into two massive offensives in the spring of 1918, bloodbaths that left tens of thousands slaughtered without bringing the country any closer to victory.

  When the government finally signed the armistice, a wave of unrest swept the city and brought down Otto von Bismarck’s imperial monarchy. While radical workers, inspired by the events in Russia, proclaimed “Red Berlin,” and Lenin prophesied that Berlin had now become the capital not of Germany but of the World Revolution, the economy came to a standstill. Factories that had been pumping out war materiel locked their gates. By February 1919, over a quarter million Berliners were without work. Migrants from devastated East Prussia flocked in, creating armies of roving homeless. And then there was disease. In December 1918 alone, influenza killed almost 5,000 Berliners. The pandemic scoured the city and flooded the morgues; the Spartacist uprising a month later ended in savagery. Rosa Luxemburg’s body was dumped in the Landwehr Canal, Karl Liebknecht was shot in the back in the Tiergarten Park, and right-wing thugs patrolled the city to stop the Soviet influence from crossing into German lands.

  From this mayhem was born the Weimar Republic, the political and cultural setting of Otto Albert’s upbringing.

  The Weimar years may have brought an end to aristocratic empire, but the republic was also the realization for many Germans of an older dream of greatness, of a model born of the Enlightenment and a vision of the German nation as a tolerant, accommodating political community premised on the integration of the various peoples that lived within German boundaries but who were not necessarily of it: Catholics, easterners, Russian refugees, and above all, the group most invested in the idea of emancipation with integration, secular Jews. Weimar appeared to wipe away the relics that stood in the way of the promise of the German Enlightenment; it invited republican believers to cast aside their doubts. Carl and Hedwig Hirschmann were members of a generation that staked its personal fortunes on this faith. Their three children, Ursula, Otto Albert, and Eva, were of a generation that grew up in the apex of the republican dream. It saw the young Otto Albert through his school days, first loves, first efforts as a writer, and first forays into politics, but with the end of the republic and the rise of the Third Reich, Hirschmann’s Berlin collapsed around him, the effects of which provided a basic arc for his life history: his was the last generation to have shared in the German dream and the first to be stamped by its horrific fate. He carried with him throughout his life many of the precepts and values he had inherited as a boy and picked up as a young man in a vibrantly cosmopolitan, civil, bourgeois—republican—upbringing, steeped in the view that things could be made better, that out of the ashes of the old, new worlds could be made.

  But throughout his life, he knew equally well just how precarious this world could be.

  By the time the postwar dust settled down, the Weimar Republic—that fourteen-year experiment in mass democracy and norm-shattering modernism—had appeared to deliver on its promises to create a new balance of freedom and stability. For a short time, the western world’s cultural center moved from Paris to Berlin. Perhaps this was because, unlike either London or Paris, Berlin was a newcomer, a “parvenu among capitals” in the words of another young Berliner, Peter Gay.2 After all, it had only become the capital in 1871, and even then it still had the hallmarks of a garrison town. So it was freer of the constraints of an age-old urban myth or tradition. Perhaps the old order had more thoroughly crumbled in the German capital so that its residents could more easily devote themselves to novelty. In fact, many Berliners were newcomers: there were some 200,000 Russian émigrés alone. For a time, British poets and writers such as W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood called Berlin home. Viennese directors, such as Max Reinhardt, relocated from the old Hapsburg center. The Berlin Style was, to a very large extent, made by nonnative Berliners.

  Now, Berliners turned to culture. True, it still was the scene of political grandstanding from the Kapp Putsch of 1920 to Hitler’s ill-fated 1923 Campaign in Berlin. For a moment, however, the presence of politics faded. In the meantime, Dada artists, Bauhaus architects, Berlin expressionists, and avant-garde filmmakers made Berlin their capital. Perhaps best known was the flourishing of a distinct Berlin movement in theater, film, and criticism, especially with the collaboration of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, whose Three Penny Opera presented industrializing London as an allegory for contemporary Berlin. Berlin’s first talking movie, The Blue Angel, made Marlene Dietrich famous around the world. But before then, she was already a diva at home. The stage was the setting for her memorable walk down a broad staircase in tuxedo and top hat. In the summer of 1927, the Hirschmann family was vacationing on the Island of Sylt, taking advantage of the new Hindenburgdamm, the causeway that linked the beaches on the North Sea to the German mainland. They went to the swanky Westerland and in a restaurant found the glamorous actress nearby. When she asked a waiter to bring her fur coat, Carl jumped to his feet, took the coat from the waiter, and draped it over Dietrich’s shoulders. As she slipped her arms into the sleeves, Carl whispered in her ear, “Meine beste Freundin!” (the name of her hit recording). Dietrich laughed and thanked him.3

  Especially after the taming of the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, Berlin boomed. It was not beautiful like Paris; it had no great boulevards, had few historic monuments, and was spare in its nineteenth-century classicism. Neither did it have the imperial grandeur and pretensions of London. But it exuded modernity, what Eric Weitz has called “Berlin modern.”4 It was also surrounded by lakes and trees of the Mark Brandenburg, providing weekend getaways for Berliners. Its avenues lined by chestnut and linden trees, Berlin had canals, parks, and an active public culture. Cafes were full. There were three large opera houses, one of them devoted exclusively to modern and experimental productions. Above all, it had theater: three state theaters and four more under the direction of the brilliant Max Reinhardt alone. Even before the republic, Berlin had been the home for expressionist denunciations of social conventions; cultural activity was increasingly seen as a realm for social criticism to lampoon aristocratic buffoonery and lambaste all efforts to censure or curb creative freedoms.

  These impressions of Weimar Berlin should not overwhelm the many other ways in which Berliners went about their lives influenced only sparingly by the satiric, the illicit, and the bawdy. For many, the war ended monarchy and empire and humbled some of the old aristocratic grandiosity, but it did not demolish cla
ssical traditions. Indeed, the war lifted obstacles against others participating in the marketplace for conventional high culture. This sphere also boomed. Three famous conductors—Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, and Otto Klemperer—had their orchestras in Berlin. Popular highbrow pastimes like rowing had new devotees after the war. The elegant parks, once uncomfortable scenes reserved for the middle classes except on special occasions, were thrown open to social arrivistes. It was the uneasy compromise of the old and the new, the past and the present, the radical and the staid, that coexisted—albeit more tenuously than many recognized at the time—through the republic.5

  So it was that the city reinvented itself not of wholly new cloth. It had a heritage upon which to build and feel confident in its republican values. Berlin, and Prussia, had a much older history of accommodating, albeit with mixed feelings, newcomers. Its Jews were compelled by the promise of emancipation, and not a few of them—including the Hirschmanns and the Marcuses, the two branches of Otto Albert’s family—responded to the calls for assimilation and integration. They could make the enlightened figures of Herder, Kant, Goethe, and Schiller their own. Moses Mendelssohn, the German Socrates, who anchored the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) in Berlin, argued for expanded liberties in return for Jews’ acceptance of German civic norms. By the time Hitler seized power, the official size of the Jewish community in Germany was half a million, but there were just as many Jews who had converted to Christianity and nondenominational citizens of Jewish descent. Among these were the Hirschmanns. Moreover, Jews were becoming wealthier and more important, and new generations were probing opportunities to engage in science and philosophy—opening a complex spectrum of degrees of integration.