Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Otto Albert on Eva’s shoulders, Forte di Marmi, 1935.

  Colorni vastly expanded the horizons of his brother-in-law. For Otto Albert, Eugenio was to be the single most important intellectual influence. It began with the particular spirit of Colorni’s political convictions. Born in 1909, Eugenio Colorni was a son of Milan’s assimilated upper-middle-class Jews. He went to a distinguished lyceum and was enraptured by the liberal philosopher and historian, Benedetto Croce, who had published several monumental books about the nineteenth “century of liberty” and its legacies for the present. After entering the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Milan, Colorni began a career of writing essays on aesthetics, ethics, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of science. It was his interest in Leibnitz that led him to the University of Marburg, where he studied under Erich Auerbach, the brilliant philologist who had recently translated Giambattista Vico’s The New Science into German and authored a celebrated study of Dante. In Marburg, Auerbach had turned to French authors of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries to prepare his classes, and one can presume that much of this rubbed off on the young Colorni, for his reading preferences bear important resemblances to the core of what was emerging as Auerbach’s magisterial effort to connect written texts with lived experiences and to treat people and writers as Historical creatures. Auerbach would himself be driven by Nazis to Istanbul, where he would compose his masterwork, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a work he had begun in Marburg. Later, he would become a professor of literature at Yale, where Hirschman would finally meet him several decades later, shortly before Auerbach’s death. “This afternoon we met a Polish friend of ours who teaches French here,” he told Ursula, “and we got to know Professor Auerbach there. After some talking it turned out that he was the one who let Eugenio come to Marburg—he was a full professor there for Romanic languages and then later went to Istanbul. He passed through Trieste in the year 1937 (with his wife) and they met you then.… He seemed very nice, lively and intelligent, his wife apparently less so (and hard of hearing!).”34 It is one of the ironic features of the century of massive, involuntary social dislocations that Hirschman had no idea how indirectly Auerbach had influenced him. It is “a very beautiful and famous book,” he would tell Ursula many years later, when she was laboring on her own memoirs and wondered if her brother might help identify the mysterious Professor Auerbach to whom her Eugenio had gone for tutoring.35

  Upon his reading Mimesis, there is no indication that Hirschman could see his own intellectual genealogy passing through Colorni back to Auerbach. It is hard enough for us to see—for there are only strong coincidences and notable echoes in the place of a direct, evidentiary paper trail. The critical link, Eugenio Colorni, would be killed by fascist thugs before he could leave behind a testimonial of his influence. It is not a stretch to observe a tie, however hidden, between Auerbach and Hirschman, for it was Auerbach who bequeathed a penchant for finding in classical works the origins of the present. To Auerbach, it was the divide between the Old Testament and Homer that set the stage for divergent traditions of literary realism. There was also the essayist style of criticism that Colorni adored and adopted, and his affection for long quotes as the basis for his explication de texte (which readers of Hirschman can find most developed in The Passions and the Interests). There was the great affection for the French novelists of the nineteenth century—Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal—whose work was the apotheosis of a brand of literary realism that would become a touchstone for Hirschman for the rest of the century. But above all, there was a kind of serene erudition that nowadays seems as remote as the classics that shaped it, a style that owes itself to a particular perspective. “One must be aware, it seems to me,” wrote Auerbach in 1953, “of regarding the exact sciences as our model; our precision relates to the particular.” The great breakthroughs in the “historical arts” were the result of a refined “perspectival formation of judgment, which makes it possible to accord to various epochs and cultures their own presuppositions and views, to strive to the utmost towards the discovery of those, and to dismiss as unhistorical and dilettantish every absolute assessment of the phenomena that is brought in from outside.”36 This eye for particulars and their meanings imprinted itself on Hirschman, who was already questioning History’s “laws” and searching for a spirit that was more epic because it was open to chance and to choice.

  The full effects of this inheritance would not take effect immediately; the picking up and devouring of the literary canon would have taken time away from other callings. As it was, Auerbach was about books, habits of reading them, and the passage of intellectual traditions. But for the younger generation of Colorni and Hirschman, there was another reality in the mix: the political present. Colorni did not write much about politics per se, but he was intensely political and very involved in clandestine activities. It was impossible to immunize even his wedding in Milan from clandestine activity. On the evening before the ceremony, in the midst of the rehearsal dinner, Eugenio pulled Otto Albert aside and explained that “you have to accompany me to the Central Station. We can pretend that we are observing the old custom of ‘burying the celibate’s life.’ ” They slipped out of the proceedings. At the station, Eugenio asked Otto Albert to wait for him—and if he didn’t return he was to notify “certain people.” A perplexed future brother-in-law stood by while Eugenio disappeared into the crowd to make sure his cousin Emilio “Mimmo” Sereni boarded the train for Paris. Sereni, a brilliant, prolific author, and one of Mussolini’s most trenchant Communist critics, was condemned to exile in Paris but had snuck back to Milan for the wedding and now needed to get out. Eventually, Eugenio returned from the platform, mission accomplished; the pair then dashed back to the wedding rehearsals.37

  Paris became an active outpost for Italian exiles and their enemies, to the chagrin of French authorities. Thousands of Italian Communists fled to Paris, many of whom joined and became active in the French Section of the Communist International. This made Paris the site for expatriate political dueling. Between 1923 and 1933, twenty-eight Italian fascists were murdered.38 For Italians, fascism’s resilience was all too clear, and they could not help but shake their heads at German-exile expectations of Hitler’s imminent fall. Many had been in Paris since the mid-1920s. Some, such as the literary scholar Leone Ginzburg, the writer-painter Carlo Levi, and the political theorist Norberto Bobbio, worked underground in Turin, Milan, and Trieste and would form the backbone of a resistance movement and the Party of Action when Mussolini was finally toppled, though Ginzburg himself would be tortured to death by Nazis in early 1944. Others, such as the Rosselli brothers, who staged a sensational getaway from prison on the island of Lipari, made Paris their base. They founded the Giustizia e Libertà movement as a cover for all progressives who were committed to ridding Italy of its despot.

  The indomitable force of Carlo Rosselli brought together an alliance of liberals, socialists, republicans, Mazzinian nationalists, to imagine a postfascist order and to conspire to topple Mussolini. Bombings, audacious flights over Italian cities to shower leaflets, schemes to assassinate Il Duce, smuggling illegal newspapers like Giustizia e Libertà—there was no end to the clandestine praxis of liberty—and so long as the coalition was oriented to action, there was less cause for theoretical, internecine feuds. A stark contrast to German leftist handwringing would be harder to find. This was the movement that Colorni joined in 1930, in Milan, and he subsequently worked closely with the circle in Turin, led by Leone Ginzburg, though his engagements were often cut short by his travels to Germany to study. When the Turin group—as well as other domestic cells—was rounded up in March 1935, Eugenio Colorni searched out other affiliations; he joined the Centro Interno Socialista (CIS) in Milan, directed by the doctor Rodolfo Morandi, just as Socialists and Communists were engaged in heated discussions over a broad coalition that would culminate in the Popular Front. In 1936, Colorni became the head of the CIS, whi
ch sponsored the Paris-based publication Grido del Popolo. He would eventually meet up with Rosselli at the Ninth International Congress of Philosophy in Paris and get intimately involved in the discussions over the ties between the Italian Socialist Party and Justice and Liberty.39

  The spirit of action was intimately bound up with a way of thinking. Italian exiles were not averse to Theory, or un’ idea forza, to justify, to explain, and to motivate antifascist praxis. Indeed, at the outset, the influence on Hirschmann was very much intellectual. According to Ursula, Colorni was set on helping “cure” the Hirschmanns, as if they were patients. For Ursula, Eugenio’s gentle but tireless persuasions were like Renzo Guia’s, a relentless breakdown of her Marxist sophistry, by the end of which she’d relinquished her faith in dialectical materialism. Unfortunately, this political cure did little for the romance between Ursula and Eugenio, and before long, their marriage ran into difficulties.40 Ursula’s brother worried that she did not fully appreciate her own husband’s gifts. Indeed, many years later, Albert had to clarify Eugenio’s turn of mind to his sister. Her memoirs had described him as a maitre à penser. Albert thought this reflected a misunderstanding. “Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault are ‘maitres à penser.’ Eugenio was actually the opposite: a constant critic, questioner, stimulator. That he was homme d’action and penseur critique at the same time was maybe his special trait.… Maybe you should change the title here to ‘Pensatore critico e uomo d’azione’ or simply ‘pensamiento critic e azione.’ ” She did not.41

  What her brother considered a “special trait” was too much for Ursula, who tended to lean on the azione side of the scales. But it captivated OA. Colorni’s restless, ecumenical style and concern to let the observations of everyday life shape one’s outlook would leave an indelible, permanent, and probably the most decisive mark. This also made Colorni a slightly undisciplined thinker. Often, his curiosities got the better of him. When he was infatuated with psychoanalysis, he devoured Freud. He would then skip almost instantly to Einstein and theoretical physics. Publishing the work on Leibnitz kept drifting into the future as new ideas crowded in. But his omnivorous curiosities threw open doors for Hirschmann. Free of the theoretical formalities of Germanic Marxism, Colorni eschewed the obscure and often circular language of its abstraction. His outlook grew from an early encounter at his liceo with the giant figure of Italian liberalism, Benedetto Croce; what fascinated Colorni was the aesthetic dimension of liberty, libertà, and the richness of positivism, the belief that actual experience and observation were the bases for authentic knowledge. Take a look around you, he told Otto Albert. Notice the world and let ideas be summoned from it. He exposed taboos. He espoused a kind of voluntarism, free of the inexorable course of History. People did not have to conform to the necessary sequence of social development, to wait for the “objective conditions” to ripen before taking action. This is what Guia meant when he laughed at Ursula’s constrictive language. To Otto Albert, the conversations with Eugenio drew his attention “to what we call the small ideas, small pieces of knowledge. They do not stand in connection with any ideologies or worldviews, they do not claim to provide total knowledge of the world, they probably undermine the claims of all previous ideologies.” These petites idées really stuck for Hirschman, who for the rest of his life would jot down observations on scraps of paper or notebooks hoping they might evolve from insights into ideas. “They are like aphorisms,” he explained, “very astonishing remarks, perhaps of a paradoxical nature, but which are perhaps true because of it.” Since these little ideas lay all around like leaves, the skill was in figuring out how to “gather them up” and make them into “a great idea.” It was not for an abstract system to define the significance of daily experiences and choices, but, rather, the other way around.42

  Like petites idées themselves, the turn away from abstract theory to observational practice took time to germinate. It did not immediately reintegrate fragments of what was once a fairly coherent intellectual style anchored in a particular place, Berlin, into a new one associated with another place. Yet, with time this alchemy of an exploratory intellectual sensibility and voluntarist political dispositions would be one that Hirschman could cultivate and refine over the rest of his life—in many ways because it was so itinerant; it was an intellectual temperament that complemented a restless spirit. The petites idées was “a really key thing throughout Albert’s life,” according to his wife, Sarah, “that he told me almost on the first day I met him, when we talked about Eugenio.” This was six years and several wars later, in early 1941—but it was as if he was still sitting beside his brother-in-law the previous day. In that first conversation with his future wife, Albert “taught me not to think in big theories or big things, but to treasure small ideas.” Thereafter, the affection for petites idées was also a bond, transmitted from Eugenio Colorni, between Albert and Sarah. “In our life we have had these things that you say to each other, like all couples, and for us it was our petites idées: ‘Wow, this is wonderful. It’s small, but it’s wonderful.’ And his letters have a lot of petites idées. He will see a picture, a painting, and he would get a petite idée. He would see something going on in the street; he would get a petite idée.” Small things could provide big insights without being reduced to them. The Big Idea, which Hirschman associated with the “claim to complete cognition of the world,” claimed “to explain multi-causal social processes from a single principle.” The alternative was “the attempt to come to an understanding of reality in portions, admitting that the angle may be subjective.”43

  Biographers—indeed their subjects—often latch onto a formative moment, a turning point, an éclat after which the subject has changed and whose future consists of its direct effect. This can be a trauma, a book, an external event. The tendency can easily oversimplify a story. Hirschmann’s encounters with Colorni were a formative moment. But to identify them as such should not imply that this was the moment that made the man; it would take him much longer to transcend conventional academic boundaries, to assemble a distinctive style from an exposure to different intellectual currents which, thanks to exile, Hirschmann was stockpiling along with his petites idées stashed in notebooks and scraps of papers.

  Some exiles hung onto their Marxism for security; Colorni reinforced Hirschmann’s sense that it was a false source. But what Colorni did not do was try to convert his brother-in-law to some new system. On the contrary, what Colorni conveyed was a sense that certitude need not be a precondition for constructive action or purposeful thinking. Eugenio, six years older than Otto Albert, had an intellectual style that took nothing for granted—with only one exception, his doubts. It was “the only sure thing.” Doubt is not the same thing as uncertainty, though it sometimes passes for it. Uncertainty means that you think you may be wrong; doubt means you are not sure you know. The first makes you less confident; the latter does not. Colorni believed that doubt was creative because it allowed for alternative ways to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable circles and self-feeding despondency. Doubt, in fact, could motivate: freedom from ideological constraints opened up political strategies, and accepting the limits of what one could know liberated agents from their dependence on the belief that one had to know everything before acting, that conviction was a precondition for action. Few things were more frustrating to Colorni, already a veteran of Italian opposition infighting, and to Hirschmann, who had lost his tolerance for doctrinal posturing, than theoretical arguments that masked apathy. One day, sitting with the Italian journalist Franco Ferraresi, an older Hirschman explained his debt to Colorni and his circle: “Those people did not consider their participation in a highly dangerous political activity as the price they had to pay for the freedom of thought, but rather saw it as a simple, natural, spontaneous and almost joyous response.” It was freedom of thought that mobilized dangerous political activity. Hirschman looked at the reporter and said: “I have always found this an admirable way to concei
ve of political action, and to unite public and personal life.”44

  Between them, Eugenio and Otto Albert shared a little saying: that they should “prove Hamlet wrong.” If the Shakespearean figure was the archetype of immobilizing doubt, Colorni’s ideas were intent on demonstrating that doubt could propel deeds.45

  Colorni’s influence was particular, but he was also part of a broader, Italian, current. By the time Colorni engaged Hirschmann in long conversations, he represented a generation that was trying to stand on the shoulders of two powerful Italian intellectual currents, one liberal through Benedetto Croce and Piero Gobetti (whose Liberal Revolution pointed the way to bridge individualism with social concerns into a political theory of action), and the other an inheritor of Marxist philosophy, Antonio Gramsci. These two great trajectories, according to Carlo Rosselli needed to be recombined. This was the message behind his manuscript, Socialismo liberale, which he published first in French in Paris in 1930 (the Italian edition did not appear until after the war). As the title itself denoted, Rosselli advocated a way of thinking that combined the liberal tradition’s emphasis on the importance of free will with the Marxist tradition’s stress on social justice into one brand, fused in a commitment to democracy. Renounce the quest for certainty, abandon astrological searches for the inevitable laws of History, and get past the sterile abstractions of past debates. This was all inscribed in a fundamental skepticism about historical laws, and the need to admit that one can act, learn by acting, reevaluate, correct one’s opinions, act once more—in the service of liberty and justice for their own sake.46