Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Albert was shattered. He staggered back to his room overlooking the city to write Sarah an anniversary letter. Pure pathos came out. “It is pointless to describe to you what I feel—it is a great pain and a great loss.” A few days later, he confessed “that I can think of nothing else. I have the feeling that the wound this has caused me will only grow. It is only now that I realize what a fount of hope Eugenio still represented for me—what an example, what an idol I had.” Then came the self-incrimination, guilt, and anger at the army for holding him back: “I lacked the imagination I should have used to help him, to prevent him from exposing himself, and at least to find a way to see him again.”24

  His losses were piling up—his father, closest friend, now his brother. Losing Eugenio was like losing a part of himself. “I am completely broken by the news of Eugenio’s death,” he confided to his diary on June 23. “A large part of any interest life held for me is now lost. I now see how much faith I had in him.”25

  For a moment, the grief released some anger about his sister’s role in the tragedy. Albert confided to Sarah, in barely subdued words, that “I cannot prevent myself from feeling a certain bitterness toward my sister.” His diary captures a brother more torn between blame and empathy. “I ask myself anxiously what will be U’s reaction. Is she responsible? She will be to the extent that she feels responsible.” A bit later, the note shifted, albeit in wording that lends itself to more than one interpretation. “This has all the elements of a tragedy. I have no hope for the denouement. I feel that there will be ill-will between her and me, unfortunately.” Thereafter, he kept his feelings to himself, withdrawing under the carapace of his silence. An implicit pardon was the price to pay for his sibling affection. On the heels of Italy’s liberation, he could finally write to Ursula in Switzerland asking for news of the girls, as well as this man, Altiero. “It is pointless to tell you how much I desire to see you again, and the more the barriers and impossibilities disappear the more this separation becomes insufferable and maddening.” Eugenio quietly slipped into the domain of personal memory. Decades would pass before Albert would speak of Eugenio to his sister.26

  Then some news gave him a purpose. Someone told Albert that Eugenio had been killed with the proofs of Avanti! under his arm—and that his last editorial was called “Trust in the German Revolution.” “What a contrast to the exacerbated nationalism that is such a fashion now,” Albert exclaimed to Sarah.27 Now, to his search for books to read, he would add the search for Eugenio’s final manuscripts, which made him even more anxious to get out of Algeria. In the scorching heat and personal inertia of a North African summer, Albert’s life looked increasingly bleak. “All my days follow and resemble one another—I feel myself bit by bit overwhelmed by an African lethargy.”28 “This a great ‘check’ [échec] on my career and plunges me into a complete uncertainty.… I hope that you will still love me when I get back.”29 At the end of July, Algeria got the news that Paris had been liberated; the streets erupted in celebrations. Albert ventured to the public square to gather the news and watch the revelers; but he did not rejoice. “I am reading The Trial by Kafka,” Albert confided. “I am very receptive to this reading because my experience, though without the metaphysics, has a lot of points of contact with the heroes of this book.”30

  No sooner had he finished The Trial than he finally got the orders he had been waiting for. As the Italian campaign turned into a direct war with German armies, the OSS found a role for him. “Now I have to learn again how to be a soldier, farewell to the lovely hotel room and all modern comforts,” he snickered about his frustration in the American army. “For me this is like the 3rd time I will have been drafted: May 1943, January 1944, and now. All that awaits me is to be ‘dedrafted’ for the 3rd time to make this complete!”31 In early September, a DC-3 transported him to Monte Casserta—“my first flight was prosaic—much less exciting for example than crossing the Bay Bridge with you.” He was glad to land, and glad to finally join the campaign. His commanders sent him to Siena, “a most beautiful town” and picturesque location for a holding center for captured German officers at the DeVecchi Villa. When the Allies took Florence and SI moved, Hirschman moved with it. What he was doing was following the front as it inched its way northward against the Wehrmacht. His job consisted in translating for Italians who had crossed the front and could inform the advancing Allied troops about the terrain and position of the German troops. Occasionally, Hirschman was assigned as the interpreter for captured German officers. He was finally finding something to do. “My morale has improved considerably thanks above all to useful and interesting work. The obstacle presented in Africa has perhaps not been entirely lifted, but it has at least been turned.”32

  It did not take long, however, for the ennui to resurface on occasion. The conditions—the winter of 1944 was bitterly cold, and the food was atrocious compared to the markets of Algiers—were bad. “Even with this the work can be even interesting.” Once again, he crossed paths with Hans Landsberg. The reunion had a different tone. “I have been able to collaborate a bit with him” here, he told Sarah, pleased, “after so many so many aborted attempts. In this fashion, I have had a chance to get a sense [toucher de la main] of some work that I might find even more interesting without those stupid obstacles.”33 By this point, Hirschman clearly had a sense that some invisible impediment stood in the way of his being entrusted with the more serious intelligence work he craved. He tended to put it down to bureaucratic incompetence of the army.34 “Someone from high up” assured him that “my present work is just provisional and that something much more interesting is in store for me. This has considerably improved my mood, so that even my current work is far from being totally uninteresting.”35 Tips like these invariably led nowhere, and Albert’s expectations would be deflated once more; he was certainly not immune to lapsing back into boredom and frustration, especially when he glimpsed the kind of labor performed by other OSS men. Sarcasm occasionally broke through: “I get some satisfaction from work—only 90% of my time is wasted … which is not bad for an army.”36 So too did some pent-up rage. On a visit to the Vatican in October 1945, he marveled at the art collection but concluded that the entirety was of “crushing massivity, of solidity of influence and power. While walking in there and upon meeting an abbot, one has as much inclination to be nice to him as to blow up the whole place.”37

  What prevented the boredom from lapsing into depression was his milieu. If the days were idle and evenings free, he could spend them among friends old and new. Wherever he was posted, he sought out the local intelligentsia and artists. Moreover, in contrast to the tensions of Algiers, he felt at ease wandering the streets of Italian towns and cities. And in contrast to the French self-satisfaction, he preferred Italy’s rejoicing at being free after two decades of dictatorship, but he acknowledged that there was much to be done by and for Italians to make up for the past. Letters that once complained of heat, lack of bookstores, and French nativism gave way to pointillist depictions of his paces, for despite the army censors’ requirements that he omit all references to place, it was not hard to miss that he was in Tuscany. As he wandered the narrow streets of Siena, he marveled at its history and the shops filled with antiques; his letters are filled with the smallest details portraying the precious little “things” that made the city so beautiful. It brought back memories of the National Gallery with Sarah; the local museum put on a display of well-chosen pieces “from this marvelous school poised at a crucial moment in the history of art, still respecting medieval and byzantine conventions and forms yet burning with new ideas and impatience.” When his interpreting work at the DeVecchi Villa was done, he’d drive to the house of Piero Sadun or Toti Scialoja, two of Italy’s emerging Abstract Expressionists, who were influenced by Soutine and Gorky. Both had been involved in the Resistenza, but by the time Albert happened upon them, politics was a source of fatigue; they were eager to recover the trampled world of art and literature. Bearing cigarettes, choco
lates, cans of sardines—supplies he absconded from the Villa’s stores—Hirschman became a minor celebrity among a people who had spent years under the weight of wartime rations. When Christmas arrived, his hosts put on a recital of seventeenth-century Italian songs in his honor. And when he left, his bags carried two of Sadun’s drawings and a pastel.38

  Florence could not help but rekindle memories of Eugenio. While working in “a grand Renaissance castle,” Albert found lodgings among “very charming peasants,” and looked forward to sleeping on a mattress instead of army-issued cots. They gave him the royal treatment by placing his bed near the prete pot, full of glowing embers, that hung from the ceiling and by inviting him to special meals. He also happened upon an old friend, Umberto Saba, on the shores of the River Arno, gazing out at the city’s ruins. The withdrawing Germans had blown up its famous Renaissance bridges to impede the pursuing Allies; Saba was watching, mournfully, as American engineers were erecting makeshift crossings. By this point, the former bookstore owner from Trieste and famed Italian poet was in a depression. He had been inclined to bouts of deep melancholy, but the effects of war and dictatorship plunged him into a near suicidal state—“he has aged enormously and has passed an awful year here.… He is one of the rare people that one senses in his very flesh the foul things that have happened.” Saba was delighted to find Hirschman. That evening they dined while Saba recited several of his old poems “that he liked, but in a very pure and beautiful language that evoked his hunger to tell me of everything that would be impossible and inexistent from here on.”39 Saba and Hirschman then shared their grief over the loss of Eugenio. The poignancy of the moment found itself in the opening lines of one of Saba’s poems:

  In quel momento ch’ero giá felice

  (Dio me perdoni la parola grande e tremenda …)

  At that time when I was still happy

  (may God forgive me the great and awesome word)

  They appear almost five decades later in the closing pages of one of Hirschman’s books to remind American readers that the excessive compulsion to be happy deprives the word of its intensity, in part because it obscures the relationship with its opposite.40

  Saba also introduced him to a group of friends who had taken refuge in Florence, in particular, the writer, Carlo Levi, an old associate of Piero Gobetti and the Rosselli brothers and one of the founders of the Giustizia è Libertà movement, and who had been part of the Italian underground wing, along with Leone Ginzburg and Colorni. Hirschman found himself, therefore, among old friends and occasionally stayed in an apartment on Piazza Piti that served as a kind of nerve center. He spent his days translating for the army, and his evenings with Italian writers discussing the future of Italy, how to build a new democracy, and how to tackle the country’s crippling poverty.41 “These intellectuals are practically all Communists and a few are Actionists. Sympathetic, intelligent, fraternal, and by habit (and exaggerated by necessity, it must be admitted, unfortunately) half conspirators.”42 In the nocturnal discussions, Albert was especially struck by the eloquence of Carlo Levi, who shared a manuscript of a book he was completing called Christ Stopped at Eboli, which recounted his own austere experience as a prisoner under Mussolini. On April 12, Albert was reading a passage of the manuscript depicting how impoverished Italian peasants hung two portraits in their houses, one of Christ and one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; when the news arrived that the American president had died, Florence went into mourning.43

  In North Africa, it had been hard to come by books. As the war ended, procuring them became easier and easier. Kierkegaard, whom Hirschman was reading during his many idle hours, had coined the expression “passion for the possible,” which etched itself immediately into Hirschman’s imagination; it would become an aphorism he would use like a thread sewn into his future work: to perceive the range of the possible, to widen the perception, even at the expense of abandoning the pursuit of the probable. Here was a mantle Hirschman could make his own, a petite idée he would cycle back to for decades. His peregrinations around Italy also allowed him to scour the country’s bookstores. He found an Italian translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revo lution, “which I am finding very interesting,” he told Sarah. “I have always wanted to read this book!”44 He seems to have read Camus repeatedly. He marveled at this “most acute and militant journalist” and asked himself, “Is it possible that a profound conviction about the ultimate inanity of everything makes you more able (because you are more distant than others) to defend in a most combative way some basic principles of honesty, justice, etc. which are basic to the debate but in reality far from being realized? I believe it.”45

  Hirschman was not just reading whatever he could lay his hands on. There was an underlying current to his selection. For instance, he found Sartre “une intelligence lumineuse” but was clearly more impressed by Camus’ style and politics. Kafka captured Hirschman’s sense of deep alienation in the army; the nature of the organization oppressed individual creativity and initiative, and all manner of efforts to try to give his service some meaning found poignant echo in The Trial’s rendition of Josef K.’s struggles to cooperate with a legal process he could never comprehend and a fate he could never escape. Of course, Hirschman could not have guessed at some of the reasons why the OSS dragged him through Italy with little purpose. But it reinforced a drift from German idealism toward a greater accent on individualism that was captured by the Italian crusade for liberal socialism. As the war was coming to a close, Hirschman’s suspicions of big theories and all-encompassing explanations of the world—exemplified by the dogmas of fascists and hard-line Communists alike—was evolving into a more skeptical stance toward anything that sacrificed the individual to the group. It is true, his army experience was unhappy, and one should hesitate before magnifying a private’s weariness into an intellectual shift. But when he found a copy of Friedrich von Hayek’s recently published (in London, in March 1944) The Road to Serfdom in a Rome bookstore, a nerve was struck. “Reading this book is very useful for someone like me who grew up in a ‘collectivist’ climate—it makes you rethink many things and has shown me in how many important points I have moved away from the beliefs I had when I was 18 years old. The experience of the army has also confirmed or rather demonstrated forcefully the advantages of a monetary society, anonymous, and where one preserves at least a sector of private initiative.”46 In the cramped, subaltern life of the soldier, it is not surprising to find someone pining for privacy and choice. But this passage was more than that; it is an important disclosure of how the army experience reinforced deeper intellectual faiths and deepening disenchantment with grand, collective schemas that ignored personal ingenuity.

  Even more than a reminder of his skepticism of statist planners, Hayek got at something Hirschman felt strongly: the need to acknowledge the basic limits to the “intelligibility” of our complex world. Leaders were wont to claim complete knowledge when they did not have it and thus to squash the individual’s ability to make adjustments “to changes whose cause and nature he cannot understand.”47 Hayek’s vision of spontaneous, unguided, and hidden forces at work presumed an inscrutability about life that Hirschman shared, in which its ironies, paradoxes, and the possibilities of unintended consequences provided the underlying engines of change. This did not mean a nostalgia for the free spirit of laissez-faire capitalism; Hirschman’s National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade made clear that a will to power and concentration was inherent. What was appealing, rather, was a sensibility that reminded him that Kafka’s Josef K or Camus’ Meursault were, not unlike him, individuals caught in vises of indifferent systems that made no sense while proclaiming their unbending commitment to the system’s abstract meaning. In this sense, Hayek’s jeremiad crystallized a premium that Hirschman would place on personal liberties and his deep reservoir of skepticism about perfect knowledge. It was not mere coincidence that Hayek featured an epigram from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, ano
ther of Hirschman’s staples, that rung true for him as he read it stationed in a war-torn Rome. Here it is, from volume 2, section 4, chapter 7: “I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.”

  Books and friends had been Hirschman’s solace during the disconsolate Italian campaign. In them he was reminded of his belief in individuals, their courage and their choices, their foibles and fears, as they contended with the demands and pressures of larger, anonymous, and often oppressive systems. Personal grief or frustrations did not become premises for general despair. In this sense, while he shared some of Hayek’s concerns about collectivism, Hirschman never opted for the prose of lament for a bygone era. Quite the reverse: his mind remained focused on the intrepid ways in which people could make the best of bad situations (as he did, relentlessly) and of their own activity create foundations for reform. In Italy, he observed this—and participated in it—firsthand. When entering a city, he’d scout the local bookstores. Dollars, rations, and cigarettes were powerful means to get his books. They were also the salve to reconstitute a moral economy around sharing scarcities; Hirschman had been attentive to this side of life since his studies of Italian currency controls. He was watching the system through a private’s eye—albeit one with a PhD and a book about global trade and empire—and he could not resist penning some observations. Hirschman translated a short, lovely, eulogy to the black market in Italy. Written by Manlio Cancogni, the Italian writer, the essay echoed Hirschman’s mood. The authoritarian state stomped on peoples’ freedoms and condemned them to eat moldy, disgusting bread whose “digestion is a feat.” The hero was the black market, where, in the face of efforts to extirpate human ingenuity, people found ways to get what they needed or find what they wanted; the state stood for sterility, apathy, a fossilized life; the black market was a refuge for creativity, initiative, and independence. A paean to Hayek, the story was shorn of his pessimism.48