Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  If there was one author who captured Hirschmann’s imagination, it was Michel de Montaigne. The highly personal vignettes, meditations, and moral reflections shook Hirschmann to his core. He immediately grasped the power of the essays—Montaigne questioned absolute forms of knowledge by submitting everything to the interrogating eye of the observer, starting by looking at himself, turning himself over and over to capture the multiple points of perspective or the multiple forms of the self. “We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves,” Montaigne wrote. “Whoever would do what he has to do would see that the first thing he must learn to know is what he is.” The roofbeams over his library were painted with Pliny the Elder’s words:

  Only one thing is certain: that nothing is certain

  And nothing is more wretched or arrogant than man.

  Montaigne’s affection for the aphorism, for accumulating quotes, rubbed off on Hirschmann instantly, and he began to stockpile his own, starting with a mantra from Montaigne; “observe, observe perpetually.”

  Montaigne’s ode to humility and the spirit it shaped rang so true for the young Otto Albert, whose patience with the ideological certainties and blindness that had warped the Weimar Republic into oblivion, and were now tearing Spain’s republic apart, had long since run thin. Doubt was in fact the reason why Eugenio pressed the Essais on Otto Albert; Montaigne the jurist had been witness to the brutality of sixteenth-century religious conviction and strife in the same way that Hirschman was becoming witness to twentieth-century bloodshed in the name of ideological certainty; Montaigne’s “forlorn France” presaged Hirschmann’s “forlorn Europe.” The tales of personal experience, which filled the Essais, recounted a fascinatingly complex and playful challenge of the absolute distinctions between the subjective and objective worlds. After Hirschmann procured his own copy of the Essais, either from Umberto Saba or during one of his trips back to Paris, Montaigne’s ironic detachment corroded what was left of his obsession with outer truths and realities. “Except you alone, O Man, said that god, each creature first studies its own self, and according to its needs, has limits to his labors and desires. Not one is as empty as you, who embrace the universe: you are the seeker with no knowledge, the judge with no jurisdiction and, when all is said and done, the jester of the farce.”38

  According to Montaigne, nothing was too trivial for consideration, for what we lose when we give up certainty we gain with clarity. Conversations about Montaigne and Machiavelli led to what Colorni called piccole idee of jottings and aphorisms inscribed in what Montaigne would have called commonplace books. These evolved into Hirschmann’s own petites idées, the materials for worldly reflections deposited in his memory bank of observations and insights; he opened a file for his “favorite quotes.” Three decades hence, the principle was still alive; in writing a complicated book about World Bank development projects around the world, he told Ursula that he recognized this as his style and could return to it as a touchstone. While “everybody is now working on the year 2000—that completely paralyzes me,” he confessed. What beckoned him were the problems of everyday life in the present and writing a “ ‘real Hirschman’ as Lindenborn or Levinstein [two of his Collège teachers] once wrote in the margins of one of my essays. I very much like the expression that Machiavelli used in one of his letters for his own constructions: ‘castelluzzi’ [little castles, as easy for reality to destroy as for a fecund imagination to construct]—that is probably what Eugenio called a piccole idee and the only thing I can really do.”39 He would later describe the practice thus: “We can be distracted and diverted and divested by small things, since small things are capable of holding us. We hardly ever look at great objects in isolation; it is the trivial circumstances, the surface images, which strike us—the useless skins which objects slough off.” There were multiple implications from this brand of thinking: the notion of the playful imagination at the core of one’s exposition would be a model for his own writing and the proposition that the human imagination affected world affairs by shaping peoples’ beliefs, and beliefs actions, redoubled his interest in psychology and personal motives. Finally, the idea that doubt could invite moral reflection and action rather than thwart them finally emancipated Hirschmann from the obsession to premise all thought and praxis on understanding the totality of History. Montaigne had not sought to plot any basic scientific verities. But his power of the imagination and its compositional form in essays was a decisive influence on the method, style, and content of Hirschman’s approach to social sciences. As of Trieste, Hirschmann and Montaigne’s Essais would not be parted.40

  Under Il Duce’s shadow, the sojourn in Trieste pulled together some of the intellectual pieces laid down in other parts: literary masterworks that turned the understanding of behavior inward, the discovery of international economics, and the passion for sleuthing for data that tell stories contrarian to the ones peddled by dictators. And of course there was personal experience. The recombinations of Hirschmann’s thoughts were not pendular swings between praxis and theory. Living in Italy meant dealing with fascism cheek to jowl; reading in Saba’s bookshop already represented the taking of a dissident stance, especially as Mussolini’s gendarmes snuffed out what was left of independent intellectual and political activity. Colorni was actively involved in the formation of an underground resistance movement, spurred by the 1935 arrest of the Turin circle of the giellisti, with which he was attached; by now there was more active discussion of a popular front of democratic forces and socialists with Communists. With the giellisti abroad, publishing a storm in Paris and flocking to the Spanish front, Colorni was one of the opposition’s principal contacts behind the lines, running an underground distribution network, the Centro Interno Socialista, to circulate seditious publications smuggled in from Paris. Colorni collaborated especially with two: Angelo Tasca (alias Rossi, alias Leroux), a socialist, and Mimmo Sereni, his cousin, a Communist and head of the Centro Estero section of the party, whom Colorni and Hirschmann had helped usher from Milan several years earlier.

  The “moment for courage” had not come to a close in Spain. If anything, the resistance had to grow lest the power of dictators spread and consolidate. Hirschmann enlisted for his next cause. With an unblemished German passport, and now student credentials, Hirschmann could pass across borders much more easily than Italians, who were in any event prominent on the list of suspects held by Mussolini’s OVRA (Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo) secret police. Otto Albert procured a special suitcase to carry letters and documents back and forth from Paris to Colorni’s group, which would find a way to put them into underground circulation. When it became clear that false-bottom suitcases were devices well known to the border police, he got a replacement, this time with false covers, so that materials could be hidden in the tops; Sereni had contrived this device in Paris and gave it to Otto Albert to carry back on the train to Trieste. How many trips he made with the valise is unclear, but it appears they increased with frequency in 1937 and 1938. Because trains were vehicles for communication and escape, invigilating them was a way of choking the opposition; indeed, OVRA had its origins in clamping down on rail workers who held up schedules to attend political meetings or paralyzed them in the chronic strikes after the First World War. Its agents prowled the rail corridors linking Italy to the rest of Europe. Hirschmann’s valise was one humble part of a vast cat-and-mouse operation for importing and circulating news and analysis to buoy an independent citizenry.

  There is something characteristic in the image of Hirschmann riding the night train with his Montesquieu and extra socks in his suitcase while hiding illegal newspapers, the old German schoolboy (literally his role in this game) hanging on to old habits. But it also speaks to the nature of his war as it moved him back and forth across the lines, precisely because words had become weaponry. By now, his motivations were complex. No doubt being a secret courier was a continuation of his political engagements since his Berlin days and
allowed him to keep up his ties with Paris. But there was another motive at work—he was quite anxious to be as close to Eugenio as possible. Eugenio’s overwhelming intellectual energy had by then immersed him in Freud and was about to switch to theoretical physics, while the younger Otto Albert thought he was still at square one with Flaubert and Montesquieu, feeling somewhat like a younger brother struggling to keep the pace. Then there were Eugenio’s political dealings, which were also increasingly ornate and enigmatic. Otto Albert desperately wanted to be “in” the secretive crowd. When Eugenio Curiel, who was also a brilliant young physicist, returned to his home town of Trieste in 1937, he immediately won his way into Colorni’s aura. Curiel was critical to Colorni’s emerging passion for the study of theoretical physics. What’s more, Curiel then actively shuffled back and forth between Paris, Trieste, and Rome, until his arrest in Trieste in June 1939; it was he who had taken the bouquet of flowers from Ursula and Otto Albert to Rosa Rein after Mark’s disappearance. Curiel’s politics brought him close to Mimmo Sereni, which gave the clandestinity more of an air of an extended family affair, cutting into Otto Albert’s special place. Curiel emerged as precisely the kind of engagé intellectual that Otto Albert aspired to be; the two had a frosty relationship and competed for Colorni’s favor. “To tell you the whole truth, I was perhaps a little jealous of Curiel, because he seemed to have developed the close intellectual-emotional relationship with Colorni to which I myself was always aspiring (and was occasionally achieving).” It did not help that Colorni kept chirping to his brother-in-law that the physicist was an “interesting and intriguing figure.”41

  It is important to see Hirschmann’s ideas and actions as parts of a more general sensibility that would usher in a more decisive break with his Berlin origins. The old stress on a firm ideological worldview as a condition for action was long gone. But the years of reading economics and literature and following the example of Eugenio and others’ informed voluntarism, freed from the straightjacket of having one’s “analysis” right as a condition for “praxis,” began to fill the void, enabling him to recombine ideas and action in a much more open and free-spirited way. This was not an automatic conversion, and the years 1937 and 1938 saw Hirschmann working his way through it. As he recalled five decades later, “by 1937, at age 22, I had myself lost some of my earlier certainties, but with my German upbringing, I still sensed it as a real defect not to have a full-fledged Weltanschauung.” Nonetheless, the freedom from any particular ideology but the strong commitment to politics as an antifascist was a compelling one. There was an “intimate connection between intellectual posture,” which stressed the absence of a “firm ideological commitment,” with “the commitment to perilous political action.” Proving Hamlet wrong not only motivated action; events gave democratic resistance to fascism its urgency.42

  At some point, Eva visited her brother and sister in Trieste, probably in 1937. It would be their last reunion for many years. Eva recalled that her brother was absorbed in his studies with a determination that seemed unprecedented. He did take a few days off from his work to take her to Venice, a few hours by train from Trieste, and they wandered around the Renaissance city, with OA telling her stories about European history, guiding her through the alleys and canals. As their trip wore on, he grew ever more “sage,” dispensing advice and good cheer to indulge a younger sister’s adoration. The day she had to leave Trieste to return to Berlin, Otto Albert took Eva to the station; they hugged and she boarded. From the window of her train she watched him walk away, then turn around and return. She leaned out toward him to ask him, “What is it?” He beckoned her forward and whispered into her ear, “Don’t ever forget to brush your teeth at night,” smiled into her eyes, then backed away into the crowd.43

  This was the last time he would see her for almost a decade. By the end of 1937, Italy was aligning increasingly with Germany and Japan; expansionists all, they marched out of the League of Nations. In April of that year, the Milan leaders of Colorni’s CIS—including its founder, Morandi—had been arrested. Colorni assumed directorship of the clandestine movement. As Communists asserted more and more control over the Spanish government, Rosselli reconciled himself to bringing the giellisti into a common “unity of action” pact until he himself was stabbed to death. In March the following year, Otto Albert was summoned by the Prefecture of Trieste to register and provide additional documents of citizenship under orders of the Political Police Division of the Ministry of Interior. Two months later, Hitler visited Italy to inaugurate a series of summits—and visit a few art galleries along the way. May 3 was declared a holiday in honor of the Führer, and the proceedings were broadcast by radio across the country. As part of a more widespread campaign to segregate the “national character” of Jews from those of Italians, in July a group of Trieste scientists endorsed the “Manifesto of Racist Scientists,” which attested to the biological races and “proving” the Aryan origins of the Italian “race.” The university administrators began to make ominous sounds about putting the institution at the service of the nation’s purity and security. Young Blackshirts attacked a synagogue and began to harass Slavs in the city. That summer, one of the economists that had taken Hirschmann under his wing, Giorgio Mortara (of the Giornale degli Economisti), warned him that the situation in Italy was bound to get much worse: “this cholera” will need much time to pass. Mortara recommended that Hirschmann not publish any more essays that questioned fascist data and policies so long as he remained in Italy—and indeed urged him to consider returning to Paris and offered to put him in contact with several of his colleagues there; Mortara himself would soon flee to Brazil, where he would modernize Brazil’s census system.44

  Then came a series of decrees, which were all too familiar to Hirschmann, stripping Jews of rights to access to schools and universities, or working in them, and prohibitions on marrying gentiles. In July, Ursula, OA, the toddler Silvia, and Eugenio went for a short vacation to the Dolomites; Ursula was pregnant once more. No doubt the conversation dwelled on what to do. By then, Eugenio had made his commitment to the underground. Everyone was telling Hirschmann that he could be more useful in France than in Trieste. When they returned from the mountains, OA went on one of his trips back to Paris with the infamous valise and began to look for jobs, not sure if he would return to Trieste. On September 3, Eugenio wrote to Otto Albert to tell him that he was happy that he got back to Paris safe and sound, for they had been very worried. The letter, written elliptically to elude the Italian censors, implied that they did not expect him to return: “I do not despair—and I hope—that some day we will meet again and maybe forever.… There are affinities between us, as well as a mute sympathy which is not easy to find.” He continued: “In the meantime, you should probably have seen your Russian girl [Lia Rein] again.” Colorni gave him some brotherly advice: “You should absolutely marry that woman.” Also, “Try to do your best and—above all—to find a stable job and to earn a lot of money, so you will be able to host me.”45

  These were Colorni’s last words to his brother-in-law as a free man. On September 9, 1938, Eugenio was arrested for his “activities hostile to the Fascist State,” interrogated by OVRA agents, and transferred to a prison in Milan. The considerable evidence of his involvement in the circulation of clandestine materials from antifascist groups in Paris was trotted out to justify a penal commission’s condemnation that he be “interned” for five years on the island of Ventotene. His own trip in 1938 to a philosophy congress timed to coincide with the Paris International Exhibition was also used as evidence—and prosecutors presented his mathematical notes as code for antifascist communiqués. That he was a Jew only added to his guilt. Less harsh than a prison sentence, he still had to survive with payments from his family; when the war finally broke out, he and others were reduced to starvation rations. Eugenio was among the first to be interned in the Bay of Naples; he would be joined by Communists like Luigi Longo and socialists and “Actionists” such as Altier
o Spinelli, Sandro Pertini, and Ernesto Rossi; Curiel arrived in 1940. By the end of 1938, the anti-Semitic decrees ordered Umberto Saba to sell his bookstore; the hub of Trieste’s unofficial cultural life closed down. Saba fled to Paris with thousands more refugees.