Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  One reason why Hirschman preferred silence was because Spain was a source of sorrow, of disenchantment with an ideal. It was not his propensity to fret about utopias destined to fall short of peoples’ high hopes. Nor was he one to hang onto miserable situations that had no solution; “Lascia perdere,” he often said of pointless efforts, let it go. But Spain was different. The endless debate rehearsed in Berlin and Paris over left-wing tactics was more than a farce, it was a tragedy of epic proportions, one which left the discrete hero wordless. He watched the ideological hardening as the Communists moved into the fray; he witnessed the first internecine fighting and initial fear of reprisals. Hirschmann grew frightened that the Catalan coalition would not be able to remain independent of Communist controls; he was by now hardening his stance on Stalin. It was not something he had full insight into, as he later recalled, nor was the extent of the cruelty and cynicism yet on full display, as it would be for Orwell, but it was most certainly in the air. Within the POUM there were heated discussions about how much to fold into the Communist-led front; some leaders echoed Rafael Abramovich’s skepticism about Stalin’s intentions, a position with which Hirschmann increasingly aligned.23

  It was hard to stop Stalin, especially once it was clear that the war would not end quickly and that Loyalists desperately needed his weapons and support. The price they paid was to cede autonomy. In September, the Loyalist forces were being reorganized into volunteer divisions under Communist command. Within months, the NKVD had its agents across the Loyalist territories and was beginning to assert control, fueled by the arrival of Communist militants or sympathizers from around Europe and North and Latin America. The French Communist Maurice Thorez and the German Willi Münzenberg proposed in September that the Comintern order the formation of International Brigades for the foreign volunteers like Hirschmann. At the end of that month, Italian and French Communists were folded into a column, putting pressure on other leftists to join the better-trained and better-supplied forces. It was decided that Hirschmann should go to Madrid to join the International Brigades. He was having misgivings about the politics behind the lines and was appalled at the manipulations and controls of Communists; fearing that the brigades would become another of Stalin’s pawns, he refused. This was a decisive move—for while he still believed in a left-wing coalition, he was not willing to submit to Communist authority and give up his autonomy. Beside, among his Italian friends in Barcelona, he was told that the antifascist movement in Italy was also ramping up its activities and that Eugenio was taking a leading role in Trieste. As Rosselli had prophesized, a new front was opening up against fascism elsewhere. The giellisti were on the move. Leaving Spain, therefore, was like joining another antifascist struggle, freer of Communist machinations.24 Hirschmann decided to decamp, his wounds mended, at the end of October; he took a train from Barcelona along the Mediterranean coast, bound for new activist horizons.

  Hirschmann’s departure coincided with an influx of new international volunteers, who walked into the midst of deteriorating relations behind leftist lines. While the brigades fought heroically in the defense of Madrid, the atmosphere in Barcelona, where the POUM had its stronghold, was venomous. One of the new arrivals was George Orwell, who stumbled into the struggle almost by accident, only to leave behind a memento of heroism and betrayal. Another arrival, albeit less famous, was Mark Rein, who had tipped off Otto Albert in the first place with his list of Neu Beginnen contacts and whom OA had hoped would catch up with him in Catalonia. Mark’s saga was less well known than the somewhat self-dramatizing account of Orwell. Mark arrived on March 4, 1937, began to work as an electrical engineer in a radio factory, and followed his father’s footsteps as an activist journalist, serving as a correspondent for the Swedish Social-democraten and Abramovich’s New York–based Jewish Daily Forward. Some of his articles criticized the Communist trade-union manipulation. He did not fight; his work was as a journalist and technician. But his writings created a paper trail to a target. A little over a month after his arrival, he vanished from the Hotel Continental while he was on a trip to Madrid—lured, apparently, by a woman who’d offered him inside information on the Communists and invited him to an interview. Given his father’s prominence in the Socialist International and close contacts with the Léon Blum government in Paris, Mark’s disappearance soon became an international cause célèbre. Inquiries by the French police, the young German journalist and former associate of Hirschmann’s in the Berlin SAJ, Willy Brandt, and Richard Löwenthal and the Neu Beginnen militants and desperate efforts by Rafael Abramovich, who immediately moved to Barcelona to spearhead the investigation, yielded nothing more than rumors. In all likelihood, Mark was captured by Stalin’s agents, determined to exact revenge for Rafael’s publicity of the terror in the Soviet Union. One fellow prisoner testified that Mark was still alive as of May 22. He was probably executed in the following few weeks. We know also that the NKVD went on a high alert in May in Madrid and Catalonia, taking out Communist militants it did not like and anarchists and socialists it mistrusted, using them as cannon fodder in untrained militias in Huesca and Zaragoza in the effort to gain control over the Spanish Republican cause.

  Ursula and Otto Albert were in Trieste when the news arrived of Mark’s disappearance. Sitting in the Piazza Unità, OA had bought a newspaper, was having his breakfast, and happened upon a small notice about the disappearance and presumed death of Mark Rein. He went white and read the note aloud to Ursula. They were crushed, shaken. But even their grief got entangled in the internecine scheming. Soon, their thoughts turned to Rosa in Paris, a surrogate mother. Desperate to convey their sympathies, Ursula asked one of the militants who was shuffling back and forth between Paris and Trieste to take flowers of condolence to Rosa. This was Eugenio Curiel, a militant Communist, asked to now trespass into the home of the “enemy.” Oblivious of Abramovich’s standing in Stalin’s eyes, Curiel expedited the favor but soon found himself caught in the fog of suspicion that swirled around all Communist circles in Paris, but most especially among the Italians whose leanings were fuzzy. Having spotted him outside the Abramovich flat, in late 1939 the Comintern ordered that Curiel be secretly investigated as a disguised “Trotskyist.” This file—now declassified—is yet another glimpse into the paranoia that saturated the Comintern. Among Curiel’s primary sins was his association with Otto Albert Hirschmann—“a scoundrel” and a “Trostkyist.” Look, the report urged accusingly, at the fact that he traveled all over Europe with a German passport! He was a close friend of Abramovich and “his scoundrel son” as well as the “boyfriend” of his daughter! Hirschmann was toxic; Curiel got infected.25

  For Hirschmann, the shock was more personal than political; by then he was well aware of the lengths to which the Comintern would go to assert control. Show trials were in full force in Moscow. Later, when he got back to Paris, he went immediately to visit Rafael to share his condolences; over dinner they pieced together the clues—all of which pointed to the arms of Stalin’s persecutory machine. Sophocles once said that the worst tragedy is when parents have to bury their children; the Reins faced the rest of their lives not knowing if Mark was alive in a gulag or dead. To Hirschmann, it brought an end to any faith or trust in Communism. “It was no surprise that the Nazis were awful,” he noted. “But to see people whom one expected to contribute to one’s own struggle turn into the opposite was in some sense worse.” Hirschmann had to struggle to make of his painful loss a spirit to guide by example, not a phantom to haunt him.26

  The wounds went deep, but there was now some time to recover. Trieste, a city of over a quarter million on the borderlands with the Balkans and the old port for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had become part of Italy after World War I. Built on a series of slopes, it looked over a beautiful Adriatic harbor. Sunny, filled with open-air markets brimming with fresh produce and pastry shops on nearly every corner, Trieste was a far cry from Catalonia’s shortages. Its central square, with the elegant Verdi Theatre on one
side and Lloyds Bank on the other, was lined with coffeehouses looking out on the sea and was a contrast to Paris’ somberness. Another big difference was that it was a fascist city; Mussolini enjoyed enormous support in the old ethnic borderland between Italy and the Balkans. When Hirschmann’s train pulled in from Venice, the city was enthralled by the news of Italian troops’ conquests in Abyssinia; having driven Emperor Haile Selassie from his realm, Mussolini proclaimed the nascence of a new Roman Empire. Hirschmann had to ignore all this and head to his sister’s apartment; the first thing was to write to Mutti and let her know he was fine. “Back from Spain!” he said. But he left everything to his mother’s imagination. “I just now arrived healthy and happy at Ursul’s and Eug.” “That was certainly the most interesting trip that I have ever taken,” he ended vaguely. At this point in the letter, Ursula seized his pen to add: “He just moved to the table to eat, sweet bread, tea, apricot marmalade. He looks marvelous. He is only a little tired from the trip.… Now I will properly fatten him up first thing.” Then he took a nap. Eugenio, who had been at work, went to see his sleeping brother-in-law. When OA awoke, he found Eugenio standing over him; his “heart stopped”—and then he leaped into a fraternal embrace.27

  Ursula, Silvia, and Eugenio, Trieste, 1937.

  Ursula and Eugenio’s marriage was already in trouble by the time Otto Albert arrived. Ursula has left readers with a revealing memoir about a highly intellectual and political union, often lacking in personal romance or affection and afflicted by sexual frustration. Eugenio left no such disclosure. Matters worsened in the summer of 1936, when Ursula was pregnant with their first child, Silvia. Her terrors about labor, her moods, and her sense of being trapped in a city isolated from friends drove them apart. When Silvia was born, she was frequently ill, which aggravated the stress.28 Eugenio was not without some skill at handling the situation, which gave the marriage a lifeline. He consoled her. He cared deeply for Silvia, doing what he could in the midst of his escalating political involvements and his plunge into theoretical physics and the philosophy of science. And he took a fascination for the baby’s every development, finding, characteristically, in the observations of his little daughter a source for larger questions. “Has nature arranged its laws to fit the needs of man or is it rather man who has taken advantage of a certain number of things in accordance with his needs and has arranged them for his convenience? And then, after so arranging them he has said: ‘Here are the most perfect laws of nature as they have been arranged by Providence for my use.’ With these laws of his own making, man has built up his own concept of nature.” He closed his musings with the kind of aphorism that would become a hallmark of Albert Hirschman’s own writings: “Nature, believe me, is like a mirror that reflects the image of him who scrutinizes it. And man, the most intelligent of all animals, substitutes his own image for the mirror.”29 Otto Albert was almost certainly aware of the difficulties Eugenio and Ursula faced as the winter of 1937 saw the marriage sink to its nadir. He and Ursula shared everything, and Eugenio had grown into the older brother that Albert never had. It must have been painful to witness.

  In the meantime, however, Trieste was a hub of antifascist sedition—which helped smooth over some of the fissures at home. But for Otto Albert, arriving in Trieste not only opened a new front in the war against despots, his head was still brimming with ideas about pursuing his research interests in recent French economic history. How many of his notes from his work with Barrett Whale he had with him, we do not know. Nor do we know if he carried with him his copy of Keynes’s General Theory. It is most likely that he managed to gather them during one of his courier operations to Paris. Either way, with Eugenio’s help, he was put in contact with a group of statisticians at the Istituto di Statistica at the University of Trieste, led by Pierpaolo Luzzatto-Fegiz, to deploy one skill that Hirschmann did have from his years of statistics and accounting at HEC—how to conduct fairly sophisticated counting measures. Luzzatto was en route to becoming an influential social scientist, but his math was not as strong as his background in jurisprudence, and so Hirschmann could compensate; he went to work on a study of Italian demographics, a discipline for which he developed a lasting fondness. Poring over censual data to measure fertility and child mortality rates, and from them to develop more accurate estimates of population growth rates, Hirschmann drew insights from the pioneering British demographer George Knibbs, who argued that the wrong meanings can be derived from the same data. Knibbs insisted that population growth had to consider age and complementarity between the sexes (to get beyond the standard “neuter” approach), so Hirschmann tabulated the fertility rates of Italian “Donne” by age of marriage and numbers of offspring—to show that women played a distinctive role in Italian fertility. The consequence was an ironic finding that warmed Hirschmann’s heart: fascist pronatalist policies, which rewarded women for reproducing, could lead to higher fertility rates and higher child mortality rates. As under Whale, Hirschmann made some basic insights go a long way. Knibbs’ massive Mathematical Theory of Population was Hirschmann’s guide in developing a more nuanced model for Italian demographers, and one can detect already at this stage a fondness for paradoxes produced by human behavior.30

  His work at the Istituto di Statistica afforded a lot of autonomy. It led to his first publication, in Giornale degli Economisti, a technical essay stemming from his reading of Knibbs about how to correlate matrimony, mortality, and fertility rates in a way that would reveal celibacy patterns (choices governing when, who, and how men and especially women would have sex).31 But he also became a specialist in the Italian economy, building on what he had already learned under Whale about France. As fascist rulers controlled the official press, it became harder and harder to figure out how the economy was really faring. Hirschmann was one of the few to be able to understand—and read between the lines of—official fascist data. To this he added a habit of stockpiling data from quarterly reports and the financial press (Il Sole, Ventiquattro Ore). In developing his own tables of industrial output, real salaries, and balances of foreign trade, he “took pleasure in this kind of detective work,” especially when it “revealed patterns that the fascist authorities tried to hide.”32 His findings came to the attention of several French economists, who solicited Hirschmann’s second publication for the Société d’études d’informations économiques. A descriptive account of Italian public finances, monetary policy, prices, and commercial balances, it showed that the Abyssinian war, rearmament, and the recent shift to autarky and the closing of international trade were putting enormous strains on the fascist political economy. Already in 1938, Hirschmann described the signs of spending deficits, creeping inflation, borrowing from private banks, and government controls to contain consumer prices. He revealed a façade of “prodigious techniques” to hide the impression of Italy’s “breathlessness.” Crafty uses of reserves and the expedient of bank borrowing got the fascist economy thus far—“but the future is coming under auspicious clouds.” This was Hirschmann’s first stab at “economic intelligence,” which Whale had predicted he would be good at, in the service of stripping the economic robe off the Emperor in Rome.33

  The University of Trieste also afforded him the time to return to his interest in the French balance of payments and the franc Poincaré. He found a way to register at the university to receive a laurea (formal doctoral programs came into existence only after the fall of Mussolini). Several research papers—an analysis of the Philippines balance of payments problems, a short analysis of Italy’s monetary policies, a brief on the devaluation of the French franc—entered his file of accomplishments. Mussolini’s Milizia Ferroviaria may have gotten the trains to run on time, but when it came to regulations on doctoral training at the University of Trieste, the rules were hardly strict. From what we can tell, Hirschmann labored on his own in these shorter papers and on the eventual doctoral dissertation, a 160-page (a standard length at the time) expansion on his study of the ill-fated franc Poincaré.
In this portrait of French public finances, the mixed success of monetary controls, and the end of the gold standard, Keynes makes no appearance. Nor do contemporary debates about international economics. Hirschmann was more interested in the futility of traditional state controls in increasingly interdependent economies. It would satisfy the requirements for a Trieste laurea degree, which Otto Albert Hirschmann was awarded in June, 1938—and which he would later translate as a doctorate.34

  Delving into economics and demography felt more and more like a way to make good on his commitments to social improvement without having to be too concerned with the chronic pressure to account for one’s “position.” By dumping the illusory quest for ideological consistency, which dominated much of the left-wing debating, he gained some freedom to search for something else—more analytical coherence and observational insight. This is what he honed as he turned the figures of the Italian economy inside out. Helping him to refine this sensibility was Eugenio. When Franco Ferraresi interviewed Albert Hirschman for Corriere della Sera in October 1993, he broke into the journalist’s depiction of Colorni’s “rigorous ideological coherence.” His correction: “Coherence yes, but not ideological.”35

  What Colorni had, and which Otto Albert had pined for since his departure from Berlin, was books—many books, which Hirschmann was at liberty to borrow. Colorni’s personal library was supplemented by the shelves at the famous antiquarian bookstore on Via San Nicolò operated by the Jewish poet Umberto Saba, where the city’s literati would gather—to procure their books, read, and discuss in a secure and friendly atmosphere. Saba’s was the unofficial center of unofficial cultural life. After the Spanish crucible, Eugenio appreciated Otto Albert’s need for new intellectual directions and so fed him a steady diet not of social science (which Hirschmann picked up more on his own), but of literature. It was in Trieste that the full literary impact of Colorni’s influence came to bear. Flaubert’s Correspondences, his Education sentimentale and Madame Bovary, Saint Simon’s Mémoires, Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe—all of these OA started to read after leaving Spain. If Hegel had been his rite, the Flaubert was now an elixir. Hirschmann became fascinated by his attention to the particularity of each word in his prose and correspondences; the search for the right word, le mot juste, was as worthy as a political cause.36 Eugenio added Croce and Leopardi’s poetry. It was a long list whose unity lay in the microscopic view of psychologically motivated plotlines about the making and unmaking of romantic and familial unions. Hirschmann immersed himself in the inner lives of actors and authors, the relationships and the worlds they spun from their mind’s eye. Sarah recalled the discovery of his fascination for how protagonists, placed in particular circumstances, engaged in cognitive and emotional processes that motivated their decisions and actions. A foundation was laid, especially by the French masterworks, for Hirschman’s interest in the psychological processes lurking behind individual and group behavior. “He admired,” recalled Sarah of his encounter with Colorni’s reading suggestions, “how [authors] contrived these situations to bring out psychological outcomes rather than the other way around.”37