Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Nine short but wide-ranging essays explored one of the soon to be most-cited analytical trilogies in the social sciences: “exit, voice, and loyalty.” So it was that the petite idée germinated into a panoramic book at the heart of which—nestled in the middle of his manuscript—was the answer to the Nigerian puzzle, a seven-page essay called “How Monopoly Can Be Comforted by Competition.” As he put his final touches on the manuscript, he reflected on the way in which this book “of vast scale and ambition” had evolved. It reminded him of the ways in which Eugenio had urged him to think of ideas and their unintended directions. “I have decided,” he informed his sister, who may have had mixed feelings about the gesture, to dedicate it to Eugenio, “who taught me about small ideas and how they may grow.”44

  Two general propositions shaped the book. One was that the institutions that arranged public life for at least the previous half century were “in decline.” Companies, governments, and organizations like universities, all were included. “Decline” was perhaps a misnomer; some organizations were in the throes of fundamental transformations and were hardly archetypes of sclerosis. At the time, it was not so easy to see this, and so the distempers of the late 1960s were seen as a symptom of demise. Hirschman was not alone in thinking this way, indeed decline and crisis were about to put an end to the flower-power happiness of the 1960s.

  The second precept followed: faced with decline, inherited patterns of loyalty no longer kept “consumer-members” in their place. General Motors’ loyalists were grumbling; some were defecting to other brands. Young Americans increasingly objected to the draft; some were bolting for Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere. The result was an expanding array of reactions, which Hirschman catalogued into two varieties: exit/desertion and voice/expression. One involved withdrawal in favor of another institution, product, or faith. The other meant that people raised hell at the status quo, arguing opinions, criticizing, and protesting. Each response tended to conform to disciplinary domains. For political scientists grounded in the theory of a social contract, voice was the operative term. For economists and their supply-and-demand laws, exit was likened to the workings of a market.

  The brilliance of the book was partly in casting basic, visible reactions in simple, accessible words, but it was also capturing the feeling that people were torn between them, sorting out the relationship of exit to voice. Do I withdraw, or do I speak out? When do I choose between them? Here is where psychology helped sort through the ways in which people and societies wrestled with and justified their choices precisely because real-world choices were not always clear-cut; people were seldom die-hard defectors or pure hell-raisers. Reactions sometimes substituted for each other, other times exit and voice were complements, and other times they undermined each other. It was the alchemy of mixing and switching between them that occupied the essays and for which the psychological forces helped account for choices. Thus, what was at first blush a simple book about alternatives quickly became complex; rather than stylize reality with a basic theory, Hirschman proceeded very differently. He deployed everyday words to capture some basic drives and then showed how their activity created a fluid, combined, imperfect reality. The world was hardly governed by pure competition, a fluxing universe of “exiters.” Nor could it sustain itself on an unfettered, cacophony of “voice.” Hirschman neither touted the exit-market option nor the voice-political one. Everything was computation. There may have been an “optimal” mix, but the blend was not a stable one. Even behind loyalty there was a churning, cognitive process. One of Hirschman’s favorite passages was Kierkegaard’s famous rendering of Abraham’s angst over the sacrifice of his son as a gesture of his fidelity to God. Before Abraham’s “infinite resignation” came his journey and choosing, and therein lay his freedom. For Hirschman, the interpretation “makes one realize that, in comparison to that act of pure faith, the most loyalist behavior retains an enormous dose of reasoned calculation.”45

  A final point needs to be made. For a Hirschman who appeared so confident—partly because of the simplicity of the formula, partly because of the grace and accessibility with which he wrote—he was also groping toward a more embracing social science. The two responses, exit and voice, and their disciplinary allocutions, economics and political science, were mixable alternatives not mutually exclusive. They were not polar opposites, one individual, the other collective. It was the interplay and interaction of the responses that was at stake. The citizen’s challenge was to be influential and deferential at the same time, a “consumer-member.”

  The hyphen, his trait d’union, applied as well to the disciplines, which required “communication” between them. There was an underlying nonneutral purpose, however, to the communication between politics and economics; his was not a call for transcending disciplines for the sake of some greater objectivity. There is a lingering prophetic tone to Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. For all the balancing and mixing of urges and responses, there were dangers. One was that people might forget their deferential obligations and let voice get carried away. The other was the danger that overblown exit options might “atrophy the development of the art of voice.” At first blush, this seems a strange worry coming at the end of the very loud 1960s; many social scientists were worrying about the overflow of voice, not its atrophy. Nowhere is there mention that the consumer might eclipse the citizen. But Hirschman had his eye on the hazard and would, within a few years, have to contend with it. For the moment, what was important was for the social scientists to keep their eye on this precarious mix at the heart of the republic.46

  Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) would be the first of a series of interventions that braided sociological observation with a methodological message for the social sciences. This helps explain why he kept circling back to revisit his triad for the rest of his writing career. The interplay of exit, voice, and loyalty, not their divisibility, had led to an insight that he labored to expand as the optimism of the 1960s gave way to a very different mood in the 1970s.

  We might then consider the book that would make him famous as itself a hyphen linking an “early” Hirschman concerned with economic development in Latin America to a “later” Hirschman working from a broadened intellectual palette. The connections emerge if we see them as thoughts in motion, concepts building upon themselves as he pushed at links between economic development and social change, between disciplinary dominions of the social sciences, between social contract and supply-and-demand settings. So much basic social science presented order (for political scientists) or equilibrium (for the economists) as the theoretical premise from which concepts derived. This propensity had the added attraction of propagating ever-more sophisticated versions, explanations, and models; they became so sophisticated that it became harder and harder to see the order-equilibrium principles at their conceptual core. Cases of disorder and disequilibrium were explained as the result of a malfunction inspired from outside—exogenous to—the core principles. Uniquenesses, exceptions, and anomalies were waved away from the basic conceptual settings. Hirschman wanted to turn this way of framing problems on its head, to look at the ways in which instability, disorder, and disequilibrium lay at the heart of the matter, how understanding their operation might provide keys to an endogenous approach.47

  One advantage of small books, and this one’s main published text barely exceeded 120 pages, is that they usually are quick to produce. That was the case here. Harvard University Press sent it to Kenneth Boulding, then at the height of his career at the University of Colorado, for review. It was a curious choice, for although Boulding shared Hirschman’s interest in overcoming social science’s disciplinary divides, his work was increasingly abstract; caustic reviewers thought him a flake. At least he was, Hirschman conceded politely, “broad-gauged.” In a page and a half, Boulding urged a few edits, praised the style as “distinguished and occasionally brilliant,” and suggested a different verb from “exit:” it sometimes “gets confused with excite.” He also suggested that �
�re-entry” merited elaboration. It was, for all intents and purposes, a carte blanche recommendation.48

  In one respect, Boulding was quite right. “In a sense,” he wrote, “the ideas which it [the manuscript] contains have been around for a long time, but it represents a felicitous rephrasing of old concepts in new and lively language and a perception of relationships between them which have not been clearly apparent before.”49 Hirschman tapped into vintage debates. The brilliance was in putting them together and casting them in the current parlance of consumption and civic protest. What is more, the enterprise was framed in terms of social responses to the “decline” of firms, states, and other organizations—capturing a Zeitgeist of impatience fueled by corporate malfeasance and a worsening war, not to mention a feeling among many younger scholars who snapped up the book that the archaic ways of the university were crumbling.

  In another respect, Boulding anticipated an issue that Hirschman would have to wrestle with in the future. The book was heavily tilted toward voice and exit, nouns that mutated into verbs, in part because they exemplified keywords of the age. Loyalty, possibly what Boulding meant by “re-entry,” got short shrift. Loyalty was part of the coinage that was not so easily transposed from noun to verb. Indeed, loyalty all too often denoted no action at all, like a default setting or a background condition that shaped the more active choice between voice or exit; loyalty affected the algebra of whether to exercise voice or to make for the exit. “On ‘re-entry’—I shall think about it, but doubt that I shall want to do much more,” concluded Hirschman. His treatment on the subject was earmarked in chapter 7, “A Theory of Loyalty.” In fact, however, the chapter did not offer a “theory” of loyalty, but a precept for everything else. Where people are more loyal, they tend to favor voice over exit; “as a rule,” he noted, “loyalty holds exit at bay and activates voice.” Still, even if it was not examined with the same dexterity as voice or exit, loyalty was central; it “is a key concept in the battle between exit and voice.”50

  In the end, Hirschman did no revisions to this corner of his triad, while the other two consumed him. This was a shame. The fact was, articulations of loyalism were brewing below the surface noise of protest and “dropping out.” It should have been audible to an otherwise astute observer like Hirschman. For starters, right-wing reactions, from the Latin American despots to the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, vowed to turn back the clock on the rabble-rousers in the name of restoring basic values or rescuing the nation from (disloyal) insurgents and welfare bums. Loyalty was a blind spot in an otherwise enormously influential and illuminating book. It is hard not to imply a relationship between this lapse and the arc of a life made of constant uprootings and displacements—Hirschman could see the importance of loyalty, but he could not grasp it in the same way he did exit or voice.

  The reception of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty was unlike anything Hirschman had experienced. There were the reviews, almost uniformly rapturous. They came from all quarters. Hirschman had finally straddled the divides. A leading journal in economics, the Journal of Political Economy, published an extended review by Joseph Reid Jr., elaborating the multiple directions and possibilities of Hirschman’s work, treating it as a manifesto for a new political economy. “Rigorous building on Hirschman’s new foundation will significantly extend the relevance and scope of political economy.”51 Political scientists had Roger Hanson’s evaluation in the American Political Science Review, which accented the analysis of voice as the political features of the book.52 The reception, however, was uneven. Though the book was “inter-disciplinary,” sociologists and political scientists greeted it with more gusto than cousins in psychology and economics—possibly because it was written from psychology and economics to other social sciences and thus may have appeared “dumbed down” to the insider. Hirschman was delighted at the reception, though as he told Ken Galbraith, the enthusiasm of political science made the reception by economists look pale. Slightly cravenly, he revealed that the reception among his disciplinary peers was smarting a bit. “Can you tell me some time, in all frankness,” he asked of his neighbor, “whether I can tell the Press that one economist has something nice to say about the book, too?”53

  If this was a tactical effort to elicit influence among disciplinary colleagues, it was unlikely to work; as far as most academic economists were concerned, Galbraith was one in name only. It certainly reveals a yawning divide between Hirschman and his discipline’s moorings, which went on full display in a rancorous review by one of the gurus of the emerging field of public choice economics, Gordon Tullock. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty burrowed under Tullock’s skin; the issue had nothing to do with voice, Tullock insisted, and everything to do with the venality of monopoly. Hirschman’s argument in chapter 5 was that a level of competition might induce exit from the monopolist, and thus diffuse angry, vocal customers. Competition, in this scenario, “comforts and bolsters” the flaccid monopolist by ridding it of “its most troublesome customers.” So, we get a hybrid world of lazy giants and welcome competition—just the kind of complex, mixed systems made of apparent contradictions. This, of course, had been the enigma of the Nigerian railways, recognized as inefficient but able to soldier on. The US Post Office was another example. These kinds of realistic portraits—and not the fantasies of pure monopoly or pure competition—called for theoretical reflection—for Hirschman. For Tullock, the proposition was an amalgam of the dangerous and the naïve. A real railway monopoly was less likely to yield to voice or a “political” expression to the problem; it would have led to more gouging of taxpayers. Voice would never be an effective response to lousy service as long as monopolists could displace the costs of their inefficiency on hapless users or innocent tax payers; “political” solutions were no alternative to “market” ones. Tullock curled his lip and declared that “clearly there is room in the literature for a 155-page book on the responses of customers to declining efficiency on the part of their suppliers, and on the differences between changes in quality and changes in price. Unfortunately, this is not the book.”54

  This stung. Mancur Olson, the president of the Public Choice Society, tried to patch things up, explaining that the movement had no partisan leanings, that he himself was a Democrat. But he conceded that “perhaps the ideological gap was too wide to bridge. As Gordon would be the first to emphasize, he is at the far right of the old classical liberal or laissez faire conservative tradition, and you are surely not on that side”—though it is telling that Olson could not quite peg Hirschman and for this reason was anxious to keep him engaged: “It would be a real shame if you were to be permanently cut off from the Public Choice Society by the accident of a bad review.” To have Hirschman at odds with Public Choice would be “as though Bob Solow had no part in the Econometric Society.” This was a courteous stretch. Hirschman knew it. He agreed that he should not cut himself off from anyone “because of the manic writings of Gordon Tullock.” Still, he came to the curt conclusion that “as you correctly surmise, I feel that I should not take part” in the society’s activities.55

  The longest, most perceptive critique came from the edgy political philosopher Brian Barry, after a global symposium on the book at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy in 1973. The symposium was the idea of the president of the International Political Science Association, Stein Rokkan, and included a cross-section of global social scientists, including Shmuel Eisenstadt from the Hebrew University, Jack Goody from Cambridge, Giovanni Sartori from Florence, and economists Oliver Williamson and Olson from the United States. According to the Bellagio Center director, “Historians and old-fashioned political scientists would have felt quite out of place, if not out of sorts, at this gathering.”56

  Barry treated Exit, Voice, and Loyalty as the consummate “in” book at a time in which books by big time social scientists, like the rock album, were starting to be the in thing. The in book was one that combined simple essence with great ramifications. Even before the reviews, word
of mouth had turned Exit, Voice, and Loyalty into a riptide. As Barry himself marveled, the book was an event in part because it crossed all the disciplinary divides that carved up the modern university, and in part because it synthesized the tenor of its time. It was a “talking point” from the moment it hit the shelves, an instant “model” for application and the immediate subject of dissertations. Barry worried that the book might become a “fad” before it became taken seriously. It was not Hirschman’s worry; he lapped it up.57

  The vocabulary of exit, voice, and loyalty immediately shaped scholarly discourse. When a group of Harvard professors wrote a collective letter to Henry Kissinger in 1971, urging the National Security Advisor and former colleague to resign from President Nixon’s administration, they employed the language of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. When their colleague, David Riesman, refused to endorse the petition, he used the same language. Riesman’s reasons were that he feared above all that Nixon’s men were considering the use of nuclear weapons and preferred to have Kissinger in the upper echelons so that his threat of an exit and public resignation would serve as a deterrent.58 After all, Hirschman had called for a greater “measure of spinelessness” among opportunistic policy makers lest the governments they serve dispense public evils “of truly ultimate proportions.”59 What Henry Kissinger thought of all this is anyone’s guess. Hirschman sent him a copy of the book, and Kissinger thanked him with no mention that Hirschman had suggested that the book might offer insights into exit in the wake of the Cambodia bombings.60