Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  As Whale typed his letter of recommendation for the twenty-one-year old, the news from across the English Channel was getting worse by the day. The London press conveyed lurid accounts of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in late 1935, including the deployment of bombs and flamethrowers against troops on camels, and tracked the fruitless debate in the League of Nations over sanctions against the aggressor, until it was too late: by May the African kingdom was occupied. At the same time, Hitler’s armies marched into the Rhineland, though the African-American athlete, Jesse Owens, spoiled Hitler’s Aryan chest-thumping in June at the Berlin Olympics. Fleet Street was kept busy. Meanwhile, in France, bitter elections were fought in April and May 1936. The Right made decisive inroads on the middle-of-the-road parties. But a coalition of a Popular Front composed of socialists, radicals, and Communists helped ensure that France’s political instability would not go the way that Germany’s had in 1932–33. After a second round of ballots, the Dreyfusard Léon Blum became the French premier. Anti-Semites of the Action française and the fascist Cagoule went on the war path. Blum’s government, wracked by strikes, reactionary mobilization, and attempted assassinations on the premier, brought back bad memories.

  It was impossible to sit still; as gripping as his research and courses were, Hirschmann had a dilemma. He later confessed to his French translator that he was restless: “It is true, I wanted to study, but at the same time I sensed that fascism was progressing and that I could not stand back and watch events unfold without doing anything.”11

  In June 1936, with the final term of his fellowship over, Hirschmann packed his bags once more and returned to Paris. He had had a thrilling year and came away with an idea of himself as an economist, though still not fully “trained.” As equally unformed, but emerging, were research and writing ideas. The trouble was that he had no sense of how to work on them, no job, no income, and no prospects. He once referred to the hiatus after his LSE studies as very “personally difficult times.” “Psychologically, I was quite inconsistent and disquieted.” He wrote to his old mentor, Heinrich Ehrmann, who had also taken refuge in Paris and was active in the Neu Beginnen movement, that he wanted to participate in something. But what?12

  The question of what to do was determined by events on the other side of the Pyrenees. In Spain, as in France, a Popular Front government came to power in 1936; but unlike France, Spain more quickly and dramatically polarized. The cast of detractors, starting with the Catholic Church, was more powerful; so were the pressures from below, pushing to break down the relics of feudalism. The government, heeding trade-union and peasant pressures, quickly began to accelerate its reforms to break the hold of the Church and landlords—until the feared reaction. The military rose up against the Republican government on July 17, 1936. It failed; many in the army refused to join the rebels. The uprising might have fizzled there. But the decision on the part of Hitler and Mussolini to send weapons, reinforcements, and above all airplanes, enabled Generalísimo Francisco Franco, Caudillo de España por la Gracia de Dios, to airlift supplies from the Moroccan colony to the mainland and slowly push the Nationalist frontier forward. The British Conservative government persuaded the Blum government to stand off, though Blum would find indirect ways of trickling aid to the Loyalists. One effect of this refusal to support the Spanish government was to throw it on the mercy of Moscow—for Stalin saw as shrewdly as Hitler did that this proxy conflict was an opportunity to expand his own influence despite the puny size of the Spanish Communist Party. What ensued was a bitter civil war that started as a botched coup d’état.

  The precipitous internationalization of the Spanish conflict drew the world’s media attention, and by mid-July, it was splashed all over newspaper headlines. This coincided with Hirschmann’s return to Paris, where the debate about how to help the Loyalists was breaking open, especially given the dithering stance of the Blum government. Indeed, there was a not minor fear that the civil war would spread to France itself, with the extreme Right rattling its sabers by forming a “blackguard front,” while the Communists could not resist the temptation to proclaim the need to form self-defense units of its own. The line in Spain had become the symbolic front line in a pan-European conflict. Finally, there was a “main theater” for the fight against fascism.13 Hirschmann rushed to see Mark Rein, ever a source of advice and a model, who told him that he was thinking of going to Spain to join the Loyalists. Mark had never distanced himself from German socialism; in fact, he remained involved and had a list of contacts of Neu Beginnen sympathizers who were planning to go to Barcelona. The Spanish Civil War provided an important immediate cause for German socialists, and Hitler’s backing for Franco made Spain an opportunity to resist fascism on another front. For Germans in particular, the sense was: no repeat of 1933 defeatism. Indeed, the Spanish Civil War reignited a militant spirit that had faded since the spring of 1933. Neu Beginnen chapters in Prague, Amsterdam, and Paris came back to life to enlist volunteers. Mark told OA of this revival; finally there was an opportunity to redeem despairing radicals.

  For similar reasons, Italian exiles also joined the crusade. “Today in Spain, tomorrow Italy,” intoned Carlo Rosselli, the leader of the Justice and Liberty movement from Paris. By 1935, Rosselli was more captivating as a proselytizer than as a planner. As the 1930s unfolded, Justice and Liberty had moved progressively to the left, partly in response to the integration of more socialists, and partly in response to Mussolini’s Ethiopian “adventure.” Prolonged exile left Rosselli chomping at the bit for a direct assault on Mussolini. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War several months after Mussolini’s victory in Africa gave Rosselli his crusade. Echoing Machiavelli, he declared that the “prophets are no longer disarmed.” Scarcely days after Franco assumed command of the Moors and Legionnaires of Spanish Morocco and launched his attempted coup d’état on July 17, 1936, the G-L (Giustizia e Libertà) leadership caucused in its offices on rue Val-de-Grâce; Rosselli rallied the giellisti to form a volunteer brigade for Spain. Not everyone was convinced that this was a good idea. But they could not stand in his way. Arriving in Barcelona in early August, he struck a deal with local anarchists and trade unionists to create the Ascaso Column (named after the anarchist Francisco Ascaso, who died in the first day of fighting in Barcelona against the rebels) composed of giellisti and Italian anarchists. Rosselli took command of this group of 130 volunteers and then returned to Paris to enlist more fighters. One of them would be Renzo Guia, Hirschmann’s former Italian tutor, who would die early in the conflict, the victim of a Falangist bomb.

  Spain was, according to Rosselli, where the line against totalitarianism would be drawn; it was here that a “motorized revolutionary force” could also cut its teeth in preparation for an assault on Mussolini. Rosselli waxed eloquent about the nature of the uniforms that soldiers would wear for this war: “The intellectual who dons the overalls for the first time feels an ineffable sentiment of joy. Here, I slough off my past, my bourgeois habits and wants, to consecrate myself to the cause of the workers. I enter the revolution with only blood and soul. We will be brothers, comrades in overalls.”14 This declaration of a permanent war on multiple fronts sealed his fate: Mussolini took aim at Rosselli and his brother, who were later stabbed to death in June 1937 at the hands of fascist assassins. Paris was shocked. The funeral brought out 200,000 mourners. In the ensuing grief and uproar, two days later, on the twenty-first, Léon Blum resigned as premier of France, bringing an end to the Popular Front.

  This was the environment in which Hirschmann enlisted, finding himself doing things he did not fully understand but felt compelled to do anyway. We do not know exactly on which day, but we know that he took the train to Barcelona with the very first German and Italian volunteers. By 2009, this was a detail that had long since slipped from his memory. But what was not hard for him to forget was the reflex. Colorni had spoken to him of moments of courage, a topic upper most on his mind, not least because of Mussolini’s tightening grip. Shor
tly after his brother-in-law went to Catalonia, Eugenio felt compelled to explain the need to write and act in defiance of those who used power for immoral ends. But in characteristic fashion, he insisted that the courage of one’s words depended on their sincerity and the readiness to be self-critical, “to be always on guard against oneself.”15 What Spain presented to Otto Albert however, was not a moment for words; he did not go down to “report,” as Arthur Koestler did, but for action. It was clear to Hirschmann that this was his moment for courage. Simply put: “when I heard that there was even a possibility to do something, I went.”16

  He spent almost three months in Catalonia, from July to the end of October 1936, part of the first wave of volunteers. This is important to underscore because the initial fight against Franco was not so much mounted by the Republican government, which was too weak to pose a real counterthreat to the military, as by the trade unions and peasant leagues, which had responded to the coup with general strikes and a rush to form spontaneous militias. Indeed, by the time that Hirschmann’s train pulled into in Barcelona, the city was in the hands of the workers. Socialist and anarchist talk dominated the atmosphere. Until late October, when the USSR began to ship arms and its envoys began to seize control, a fervor of revolution for and by the commoner prevailed in Catalonia; one must imagine a twenty-two-year-old German socialist walking the streets of Barcelona where tipping was banned because it was considered demeaning; where the words Don and Señor were outlawed in favor of comrade; where cathedrals, deemed citadels of Reaction, were desecrated or burned; and where giant red-and-black banners announced which factory was now owned by which trade union. For a brief moment, here was the socialist revolution that Germans had failed to mount to save Weimar.

  In those early months of the war, furthermore, there was little organizational structure and a constant improvisation of command. This would also change when the Communists muscled onto the scene in autumn. Until then, the Italian and German émigré battalions, including Rosselli’s Ascaso Column, aligned under the general umbrella of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), which were marched off, after a peremptory rifle training, to the front.17

  To the volunteers, the POUM was just one of a plethora of movements, one in a “plague of initials,” as George Orwell put it. Orwell himself would arrive in Barcelona just as Hirschmann was leaving; there is no evidence that they met. While it is possible to reconstruct a sense of what was transpiring in and around Barcelona in those initial months, Hirschmann’s precise whereabouts in the mayhem cannot be confirmed. The POUM amalgamated a broad, unstable spectrum. Formed by Spanish Communists, led by Andreu Nin, strongly influenced by Leon Trotsky’s notion of the permanent revolution (which had influenced the Neu Beginnen group as well), the POUM defied Moscow directives. From its formation in 1935, it was at odds with Moscow and leery about sacrificing its autonomy under the Popular Front. It was friendly to anarchists and non-Marxist radicals and thus far outscaled Spain’s official Communist Party and its Catalonian wing. Orwell, who joined the POUM ranks six months after Hirschmann, noted a growth in its membership from 10,000 to 70,000 between July and December, months of radicalizing euphoria that coincided with Hirschmann’s. The POUM story would end, as is well known, in internecine bloodshed when the increasingly Communist-controlled Catalan government arrested Nin and much of the POUM leadership in July 1937, torturing and executing many of them under NKVD (Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del) supervision. It was Orwell’s witness to this kind of butchery and betrayal that motivated his Homage to Catalonia.

  Hirschmann’s Spanish Civil War was a different one. He was there when the POUM headquarters at the Hotel Falcón on La Rambla became the epicenter of a rush to defend republicanism and workers’ control. This spurred the hastily organized militias to hold the line against Nationalist advances. Until the Communists began to assert leadership, most international volunteers had room—and took risks—to fight alongside and under the command of Spanish socialists and anarchists, many of whom thought that foreigners knew more about war than they did. This made for mayhem. There were no uniforms, at best corduroy knee britches, which were about the only gesture toward uniformity. Black or red handkerchiefs around one’s throat gave away one’s anarchist or socialist affiliations. Training consisted mainly in marching drills with some basic instruction on how to fire rifles, which jammed in the dust and mud. Most militiamen did not get a weapon until they reached the front, often taking a gun from the soldier they were relieving. Such was the chaos that when the main Catalan anarchist column left for the Aragonese front by train on July 24, they were several hours from the station when they realized that they had forgotten their munitions. Command at the front, if it can be called that, was in utter confusion. Bereft of training and supplies, what the volunteers lacked in preparation they made up with enthusiasm, a resource they would come to rely upon to endure the summer heat and dust, fleas and lice, and the comradely boredom of filthy and chaotic barrack life.18

  These were the conditions under which Hirschmann went to war under the POUM flag. The Italian and German volunteers cut their initial teeth at the Battle of Monte Pelato. On August 28, 1936, after weeks of dithering and reorganization, the Ascaso Column, formed only ten days earlier, went into battle along the Aragonese front. Outnumbered and underequipped, it held the line against advancing Franco forces. Given the scorching heat, firing began in the relative coolness of dawn and ended before 10:00 a.m. to allow troops on both sides to scramble for water and food. When the smoke cleared, the Freemason commander, Mario Angeloni, and several other giellisti were dead; Rosselli was also shot, but alive. Was Hirschmann at Monte Pelato? We cannot be sure, but it is likely. This was the sector that was the only one conducted by an independent, mainly Italian fighting force during the time he was in Catalonia, and it was under the affiliation to which he naturally gravitated. His most detailed disclosure, from an unnamed US government agency around the time of his 1943 petition for naturalization, was a signed declaration that places him in the Zaragosa sector of Aragon from August until October 1936 and that says his units “suffered enormous losses” and “engaged in heavy fighting” before the remnants were sent back to Barcelona.19 What he recounted subsequently of the nature of the fighting and the enemy is also consistent with what occurred at Monte Pelato. He recalled that his enemies were Black Francoists from the Moroccan divisions. He also remembered the endless crawling in the Aragonese dirt. After a chaotic exchange of screaming and bullets and tumbling about in trenches, he looked down at his trousers and found them soaked. At first he thought he had been hit—only to discover that his wine flask had broken and that he might have involuntarily relieved himself in fear. It could have been wine, urine, or both for all he cared; he was alive—slightly injured, but alive.20

  While the column lost 10 percent of its fighters, it gained in reputation. In Paris, among the émigrés, the battle was heralded as a triumph against fascism; in Barcelona, the Italians’ commanders were invited to the war councils. This may have been a decision the Spanish Loyalists came to regret, for Rosselli, in spite of his injury, was keen to play a leading role and quickly got into a tussle with Spanish and Italian anarchists over control. It was not just that the adrenalin of war, especially after so many years of waiting, had gone to Rosselli’s head; there was a vacuum in the whole structure of the Catalan command. This would worsen in September, as Communists entered the scene. But for the time being, Monte Pelato stood out in what was then still a low-intensity war as both sides got organized and began to stockpile weapons and dig trenches.21

  This is as much as we know about Hirschmann’s experience on the battlefield. On the whole, he was reluctant to discuss the Spanish Civil War after he left Catalonia. His wife Sarah—who met him years later—found him silent on the topic, and sensing his unease, she didn’t press him for details. Once, when they went to a film together about the Spanish Civil War, as they left the theater Sarah turned to Albert and asked him: �
��Was it like that?” He replied evasively, “Yeah, that was a pretty good film.” When I asked Sarah about this reserve—on both their parts, his to speak, hers to press—she was somewhat philosophical: “You know, I’ve always felt through these long years perhaps that that’s my secret: how I could stick with one person for that long [and not know]. I think everybody has a right to their own memories.” Tightly guarded recollections were part of a pattern when it came to bad memories, which he preferred to keep to himself: “I felt this kind of reticence [sometimes] in Albert,” she confessed. “He’s had quite a few areas like that. I never tried to force him [to talk].” Still, the scars on his neck and leg made it impossible for her to forget.22