Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Ten days after Colorni’s arrest, the reasons for cleansing Trieste became clear: ever the dramatist, Mussolini disembarked from the warship Camicia Nera in the city’s harbor to address an organized crowd of 100,000 supporters gathered before the city hall. He came to announce that Italy would pledge its support and resources for Hitler’s claims in Czechoslovakia in the event of a European war. It was Il Duce’s first visit to the city, and he used it to deliver one of his most important texts—not only to vouch for the legitimacy of German expansionist demands, but also to announce a new development in his own policies, to explain his recent campaign against Jews, for “the world of Hebrewism has for sixteen years been an irreconcilable enemy of fascism.” Italian Jews who have “proven military or civil merit” will be treated with “comprehension.” For the rest, “a policy of separation” would be applied. Italy was squarely on the side of a European civilizational campaign to purge itself of the unwanted.46

  This included Hirschmann, who, for the second time, was destined to stay in Paris by racial decree. Unlike the first flight, however, this one was less of an exodus. Despite his affections for Italy and his family in Trieste, Paris was the city “where I had always maintained my residence. I was … and considered myself when I was in Italy sort of as on leave from France.” The question now was how to make of his residence a home.47

  CHAPTER 5

  Crossings

  Test yourself by mankind. It makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  The Paris to which Otto Albert Hirschmann returned in the late summer of 1938 was not the same as the one that had greeted him in April 1933. The Depression clung to the city, the Popular Front had crumbled, the signs of war were all over, and the flood of refugees fed growing nativism. Paris was no longer the open city it had been five years earlier. Nor was Hirschmann the same man. He had a doctorate, had refined some tools in the social sciences, and came equipped to practice his craft of economic intelligence. Indeed, his July publication on the Italian economy for the Société d’études et d’informations économiques had opened doors to influential people who wanted to know more about the economics of fascism. He was also keen to establish himself. It was during his second Parisian sojourn that Hirschmann began to imagine himself a writer. The possibility of research and analysis had been planted by Barrett Whale. Reading Montaigne and conversations with Eugenio revealed a creative space between the writer and the world around him, one he now wanted to explore.

  A veteran of struggles against despots in three countries, at the age of twenty-three Hirschmann was experienced beyond his years.

  To see Hirschmann in France from 1938 to its conquest in 1940 is to see him finding his own way to becoming an intellectual from a “median state” of half attachments and half detachments, separated without being cut off from one’s origins or one’s hosts. This was Hirschmann’s condition as he planted roots in Paris while exploring the option of leaving. With nativism and war in the air, it was not clear how long he would be allowed to call Paris home, whether the city could be the place from which to hatch his intellectual aspirations. War, revolution, and dictators had already ripped so many people from their place in the world. Hirschmann’s solutions were, as a result, somewhat provisional, full of crossings—it was his ingenuity to discover that this condition, too, could be a location from which to draw a perspective.1

  There was no city in the world more full of crossers than Paris. By 1938, the city was less and less a sanctuary and more and more a stop on the way somewhere else. Paris was the crossroads of Europe’s problems. By fall of 1937, the city had received a flood of illegal refugees, especially eastern European Jews, mainly Poles on tourist visas ostensibly to visit the world’s fair. The minister of defense, Édouard Daladier, argued that unemployment and the mounting cost of feeding and housing refugees were driving the country bankrupt.2 By 1938, almost 200,000 refugees were in France. On April 10, 1938, Daladier became premier, right on the heels of the Anschluss, which annexed Austria to the Third Reich. Now there was an exodus of refugees from Vienna and other cities. On May 2, new laws imposed heavy penalties on those who assisted illegal migrants and gave the police extra powers to deport. The following month, a decree restricted foreigners’ rights to engage in commerce. And that summer, at the Evian Conference (July 6–15), France announced that it could no longer be a haven for the world’s oppressed. Then came the “concessions” over Czechoslovakia, and the flight of more refugees from Prague and elsewhere. Throughout that summer and fall, there were home invasions, harsh interrogations at the French borders, and efforts to drive out Czech and Austrian refugees or stop them from flooding the country. When Barcelona finally fell under the fascist heel in January 1939, Spanish Republicans poured across the Pyrenees. On January 21, the first camp (called an assembly center) opened in southern France to pen the unwelcome—immortally called the “scum of the earth” by the French police tasked to patrol the barbed wire fences.3

  While Paris was becoming a city of refugees fleeing Europe’s proliferating dictators, it was also a capital of intrigue and espionage. The French Sûreté nationale had to keep up with the secret service agents of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the Italian OVRA, the German intelligence branch of the SS (the Sicherheitsdienst, SD), and Stalin’s NKVD. Assassins and kidnappers made a swift business as their mercenaries, with relative freedom to swim in Paris’s refugee-stocked waters.

  If the climate for newcomers was decidedly hostile, for Hirschmann, with a degree from a grande école, with perfect French, and having nurtured his Parisian contacts over the years, it was easy to go undetected and legal. He found a comfortable room in a small hotel on the rue de Turenne, in the middle of the Marais, a crowded medieval neighborhood in the fourth arrondissement populated above all by Jews. Living in the Marais gave him his first opportunity to live cheek to jowl with Jews, and it could not have helped but remind him of the dangers facing Jews in Germany.

  This raised the question, especially as Hitler’s anti-Semitic decrees made life increasingly miserable for those who stayed behind, of what to do about his family in Berlin. Characteristically, Mutti insisted that Eva complete her Abitur, or she would never find a suitable husband. With this finished and Eva now eighteen, she took advantage of an agreement between Germany and Britain that gave visas to girls who signed a four-year commitment to work and study as a nurse. In July 1938, she embarked for London and was sent to a hospital in Dover. The timing of Eva’s departure was fortunate, for shortly thereafter it became more and more difficult to escape as Britain, France, and other countries threw up barriers to entry for refugees and Germans slapped greater passport controls on Jewish subjects. On November 7, 1938, a crazed Polish Jew, whose parents had been deported from Germany but were refused reentry to Poland, assassinated a German diplomat in Paris. Goebbels and Hitler unleashed a spasm of organized outrage and destruction—Kristallnacht, November 9. Mutti counted among the thousands of Jews who were forced to turn over valuable possessions to “compensate” for the diplomat’s killing. In March of that year, Jewish passports were confiscated or marked “valid only within the country.” Later, they were stamped with a J. Fortunately, Eva’s status as a nurse allowed her to sponsor her mother’s legal entry to England; her brother scraped some money together to help cover the fare. Mutti left Berlin in July, though she dithered to the last minute over her silverware, porcelain, and furniture. Then it became Eva’s turn to feel the screws turn. No sooner did many of the survivors from Dunkirk wind up in Eva’s hospital to be tended by German nurses, than the government ordered the internship of thousands of German refugees, most of whom were Jews. The men were ordered to a camp on the Isle of Man; nurses, suspected of extracting military secrets from anesthetized soldiers, were peremptorily dismissed from their stations. Eva and Mutti found help from a Jewish-American philanthropic group. Their escape to Britain had an ironic twist, for Eva and Mutti teamed up to recreate their
Berlin soup kitchen, this time in London for the jobless German-Jewish nurses.4

  Eva and Mutti’s exodus from Berlin allowed Hirschmann to breathe a sigh of relief. But the news from Italy went from bad to worse. In January 1939, Hirschmann received word from Eugenio, written in German to filter through the Italian censors who read all the outbound letters from Ventotene. “I can’t tell you how often during these years I had an overwhelming desire to be with you.” There was good news: Otto Albert’s second niece was born on the island. The conditions were bleak, but Eugenio found a way to dispel the gloom. “Notwithstanding the hardships, life here gives us a certain intimacy and at times we have lived profoundly happy moments. For total harmony only you are missing.” This was exaggerated; in fact, the marriage between Ursula and Eugenio was deteriorating once more. Eugenio’s health was also bad; for a long time he suffered from a severe nervous ailment that prevented him from being able to read and drained him of energy. Slowly recovering, he rekindled his interest in mathematics and was now branching out into psychology in order to write “antiphilosophical thoughts.” “You must read right away,” wrote Eugenio, always pleased to add to his brother-in-law’s reading list, “Robbins’ Essays on the Significance of Economic Science, which has suggested to me many ideas which give me the desire to discuss them with you.”5

  Eva and Mutti’s departure for London and the arrest of Ursula and Eugenio must have given Otto Albert a sense that France may not be the eternal safe haven for foreigners, especially Jews. Hirschmann, like many refugees feeling the imminence of war, probed his own exit options. One was to leave for South America. Colorni had a cousin who worked for a bank that channeled investment funds to the industrializing societies of Argentina and Brazil. Hirschman, intrigued by new frontiers in Rio de Janeiro, applied for the position, was accepted, and proceeded to submit his documents to the Brazilian embassy to get a work visa. By the time this opportunity came through, Hirschmann had developed alternative means of existence, which allowed him to stay in Paris working in economic intelligence. He decided to stake a gambit on France.6

  There was also the idea of moving to the United States. Some time in the fall of 1938, Hirschmann wrote to Max Ascoli, the Italian Jewish writer who had taught philosophy and jurisprudence at the University of Rome until fleeing in 1931 to become a vocal antifascist in the United States, and who was lecturing at the University in Exile of the New School for Social Research. How Hirschmann came to Ascoli’s attention is not clear. It may have been Colorni’s doing; it may have been that Ascoli read one of Hirschmann’s essays. Either way, Ascoli, who was actively trying to get as many Italian dissidents out of Mussolini’s clutches as possible, turned to Eugenio’s case. Otto Albert assured Ascoli that the evidence against Eugenio had been flimsy: “The only pieces of evidence to convict him are some correspondences and mathematical manuscripts that the police have presented as subversive documents.”7 Ursula warned that “no great publicity [should be made] about his case because this might make matters even worse.” Hirschmann inquired if Eugenio could come to the New School; but getting the family out of Italy and settled in New York was going to be costly, and Ascoli was trying to muster resources to sponsor other families. Hirschmann himself could contribute only a small amount because he was also pulling together money to get his mother out of Germany. He suggested that Ascoli approach his old friend, Peter Franck, who had already moved to New York, “and he has written saying that he might be able to find funds.” Some of the urgency evaporated once Ursula joined Eugenio on Ventotene, and Otto Albert suggested that he and Ascoli wait a year to see if the situation might improve “so that we might be able to agitate more usefully.”8

  In the meantime, he had begun to explore his own departure for New York. While he did not raise the issue directly with Ascoli, his case was back-channeled through distant Hirschmann relatives, Otto Albert’s cousin Oscar, the son of Carl’s sister Betty. Otto Albert had written to Oscar explaining that his research commitments in Paris would only tie him down until August of 1939, and according to Oscar’s message to Ascoli, “He looks forward with keen anticipation to immigrating to this country at that time and that it would be wise for him to precede his mother here, arranging, in the meanwhile, to have her go to England, where his sister resides.” In the late winter and early spring, Oscar and Max Ascoli considered arranging for Otto Albert to come to the New School, only to hit the rising walls against Jewish refugees in the United States. Hirschmann, like so many others, was turned away by the gatekeepers of American visas.9

  While all this was going on, Hirschmann was settling into Paris. Indeed, he was beginning to enjoy some fruits of success. This took the wind out of leaving for New York or Brazil. So did a torrid relationship. Not since Lia Rein had Hirschmann had a serious girlfriend. In the fall of 1938, he met a distinguished French woman, Françoise, with whom he had much more than a casual affair. Her apartment on Pont Neuf gave them the privacy he had lacked in the past. The relationship went as far as discussions of living together and marriage—certainly according to Hirschmann’s memory. “As regards my mood,” he wrote to Ursula, “I am still in a state of completely unexpected rapture from what I might call my first love.” He confessed to “having given up all hope of having this sentiment when suddenly the whole edifice suddenly burst.” Unfortunately the relationship ended badly when Françoise replaced OA with a new soul mate. “The whole story is impossible to describe in this letter,” he sighed to Ursula. Still, not one to let a silver lining go by, he found in his misery some broader consolation: “I am beginning to have success with women,” adding that he was not missing the opportunity to turn the affaire into a learning experience by “deciphering” the “feminine psychology.”10 Here was a sign that Paris might be home. He applied for French citizenship.11

  Despite the hardship and the restrictions on foreigners, Hirschmann cast some professional lines. At first, he picked up odd jobs as a tutor to French economics students preparing for the aggregation exams to become school teachers. They would receive their questions twenty-four hours in advance and have to cobble together oral presentations. Hirschmann was their coach.12 More and better opportunities came along. He sought to capitalize on his expertise on the Italian economy as the demand for insight, thanks to the looming war, was growing. His knowledge of what was going on behind the fascist curtain brought him to the attention of Charles Rist and Robert Marjolin, the editors of a quarterly economic bulletin of the Rockefeller Foundation–backed Institut de recherches économiques et sociales of the Sorbonne. Rist, the senior of the partnership and a more conservative economist, aligned with Lionel Robbins and the anti-Keynesians. Marjolin, only four years older than Hirschmann, had studied sociology and economics at Yale with a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation and would go on to a storied career after the war; he became something of a mentor to Hirschmann.

  Writing for the Institut bulletin was a thrill. For the first time Hirschmann was paid for work he enjoyed and for which he had prepared. What emerged was a series of reports on the state of the Italian economy focusing on the hidden disequilibria of Mussolini’s autarkic industrialization and militarization. Carrying over his earlier work, Hirschmann explained how state spending was leading to inflation and budget deficits. “We might ask,” he wrote, “why the Government has revealed this year that the ordinary budget has a considerable deficit while last year they had tucked it all away in the extraordinary budget. The reason is probably that it wants to prepare the public for future sacrifices.” It was this kind of shrewd analysis of Rome’s deceptive handling of the economy that drew, in particular, Marjolin’s attention. He was also keen to place Italy into the context of a more open economy—and tracked the ways in which the despot’s fiscal habits and protectionism had the perverse effect of worsening the country’s balance of payments, making it more dependent on imports of crucial raw materials, especially energy, and machinery. The invasion of Abyssinia, Hirschmann argued, was not just a poli
tical gambit; expansionism was driven by Italy’s perceived need for more colonies to make up for its dependency on imported raw materials and petroleum. “With these measures la mise sur pied of war by the entirety of the Italian economy has made more advances,” warned Hirschmann.13

  The bulletin essays reveal some early traits. The first is his ingenuity in using sources. To gauge the level of gross domestic economic activity beyond the dubious official figures, Hirschmann kept a careful record of monthly freight shipments on Italy’s rail system; he tracked the imports and exports of particular commodities, such as cotton or olive oil, rather than rely on the government’s aggregated figures. When it came to discussing Felice Guarneri, the fascist technocrat who rose to become the minister of foreign trade, and his claims that the Italian economy’s commercial balances were in fine shape, Hirschmann tallied the declining occupancy of beds in Italy’s hotels to show that tourism was in crisis, raising basic questions about the veracity of the official line. He sought the economic story behind the story. A “freelance economic journalist” is how he later thought of his first forays into publishing.14

  There was more to Hirschmann’s developing style. He also now had the time to reconcentrate his attentions on squaring Keynes’s General Theory with his interest in international economics; by now the book had been lugged back and forth between France and Italy, and his concentrated work for Rist and Marjolin afforded the time to figure out his own position. Hirschmann began to see himself more and more in an area ignored by Keynesians, though not by Keynes himself. If many Keynesians tended to think of national economies as closed entities, Hirschmann saw them as open ones—and the intersections of foreign trade and national policy, which first came to light in his study of the franc Poincaré, was looming ever larger as a compelling field of research interests. His kind of analysis, and the regard from his mentors, relieved him from the pressures of figuring out whether Keynes had all the right answers. Hirschmann drew readers’ attention to the fact that Mussolini’s model of autarky meant that it had to cover its dependence on imports from some places by accumulating and forcing surpluses from others, notably its “colonies.” Second, Hirschmann emphasized the need to understand an economy against the background of a political system; “macroeconomic” policy making could not be so easily severed from the ideological commitments of a regime—a right-wing dictatorship, a socialist government, or a pluralist liberal one. From the start of his thinking about economics, Hirschmann never let his eye stray much from underlying political concerns—less because he had his own ideological agenda than because ideology stamped the decisions of policy makers in ways that escaped the attention of much economic analysis.