Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  With Exit, Voice, and Loyalty out of the way and the Hirschmans back in Cambridge by September 1969, Albert plunged back into the world. Harvard did its part. “It’s an unbelievable center: everyone comes through here,” he noted with mixed feelings. In one week he lunched with François Bondy, who was returning from Buenos Aires, Rix Löwenthal, Henry and Claire Ehrmann; attended a reception with the deposed president of Argentina, Arturo Illia; and had a meeting with Andreas Papandreou, a friend of John Kenneth Galbraith and former economic advisor to his own father, George, another ousted democratic leader—from Greece.61

  Meanwhile Yale University Press wanted to publish an anthology of Hirschman’s essays. The exercise pulled Hirschman back to considering his own thinking about development and the flurry of essays he’d written about Latin America since Journeys. These essays were passé, so what to think about them in retrospect? What, as Tom Schelling queried, does one think about oneself over time? “What do you notice about your writing style? Do you recognize the same contemporary Albert Hirschman?”62

  These were tough questions, and Hirschman labored to contend with them. He made sure that if this was going to be a challenge, he might as well rise to it in an ideal setting. June and July of 1970 saw him in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation’s villa at Bellagio. In his application for the residency, he explained that he needed to write an introduction to a new anthology, a paper that would also double as the Harvard Lecture at Yale the next autumn. “I would like to get at the ‘system’ behind those connections between economics and politics which I keep uncovering in almost everything I write.” The concern that was buried in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty continued to simmer in his mind. If the villa’s director, John Marshall, was looking forward to his famous guest, he was soon disappointed. When Hirschman was not hiding away and writing, he was away from the villa touring the countryside around Lake Como with Ursula and Sarah. Ursula made herself at home in the villa, inviting herself to join Marshall for dinners.63

  What emerged was probably his most elegant essay, “Political Economics and Possibilism,” which brought his aphoristic style to full bloom and subtly introduced himself, perhaps with Schelling in mind, as an exhibit character called the possibilist. This essay was also probably his single most important. Hirschman’s notes convey an urge to stake out the ground between revolutionaries who felt there was no change without big structural change and an emerging tide of conservatives who felt all change was structural change. What was needed was a clear statement of reformist principles. “The real criticism of the reformer,” he scribbled on a small yellow sheet, “is not that he is ineffective but that he might just be effective and that he may thereby deprive the oppressed from achieving victory on their own terms.” Included in the principles was the impossibility of complete knowledge and embracing uncertainty. “Go faster than Popper,” he told himself, “Not only is history unpredictable but there can be no change without its unpredictability.” It was too bad that social scientists were getting so fixated with the perfection of their prophecies: “We always try to predict change.” What Hirschman proposed was a word swap—why not try exchanging possible for probable? This quest led him back to Kierkegaard, whom he had read on the Italian campaign during the Second World War, and the distinction between the probable and the possible. “Aren’t we interested in what is (barely) possible, rather than what is probable?” The drive for certainty and prediction reminded him of Flaubert’s injunction against la rage de vouloir conclure as sure to lead us to a world of “pseudo-insights,” foreclosed outcomes, and lost paths. This essay was often passed over by scholars who—especially in the context of the early 1970s—tended to consider Latin America as synonymous with turmoil and modernization gone wrong and so then did not look at the compendium in the same light as the more universally minded Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. And yet, we can see in possibilism the most lucid statement of a different stance on the social sciences. Rejecting the prevailing concern to catalogue preconditions for successful outcomes or doomed fates, he wanted attention focused instead on possible paths, oddities, anomalies, unexpected and unintended effects, and of course his perennial affection for inverted sequences to chart a different way of thinking about social improvement. It was also a very different attitude to social research than one could find in, say Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), or in Seymour Martin Lipset’s famous 1959 field-defining essay, “Some Social Requisites for Democracy.” Indeed, had Hirschman’s essay not been pigeonholed as an introduction to a volume of essays about Latin America, it might have ranked as one of the great set-pieces of the social sciences.64

  Hirschman’s collection was called A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America. He planted a flag against creeping disenchantment with reform and development by introducing the world to a figure called the possibilist and to a kind of freedom that Hirschman defined as “the right to a non-projected future,” which would serve as the possibilist’s compass. The introduction was a salvo against revolutionaries who could only envision a post-alienated life as a complete antithesis to the present, as well as to those master social scientists wielding their predictive models over those condemned to be unable to understand them.

  The composition reveals an author struggling to formulate his own voice, to speak out to the pessimists and the fatalists. We can also see him searching for a political economy of which the microactivity of choosing in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty was a part. As the disenchantment with Latin American reformmongering set in, and more and more of his students as well as colleagues in Latin America advocated radical alternatives, he felt compelled to articulate an alternative. On his desk was a manuscript by Judith Shklar, the Harvard political philosopher, a long-awaited study of Hegel’s Phenomenology. It inspired a scribbled, self-clarifying, note to himself:

  I part company with radicals at point where I believe that unintended consequences of human action are very powerful, that ‘ruling class’ is unable to control even by that it will set in motion events that will lead to territory on which it never wanted to step—ie. I believe in dialectics in a very basic sense.

  He went on:

  I part company with liberals because I believe that these two changes can come about only through conflict, crises and often that last bublichik of violence qu’il faut avoir le generosité de recevoir.65

  As ever, the word choice was meaningful. Bublichik came from one of Tolstoy’s fables for children. Feeling hungry one day, a peasant (mujik) bought and ate a large bun (kalach); still hungry he bought and ate another one; still hungry he bought and ate a third bun; still hungry he then bought and ate a bublik, a kind of small, round pretzel, and was satisfied. The peasant rapped his head and said: “What an idiot I’ve been! Why did I eat so many buns for nothing—all I had to do is start with eating one bublik!” The bublik was the small thing that made a big difference.

  Paying attention to the small things could make a difference to political economy. But how? Change could not be planned, nor did it come naturally: “One can only grope for it,” Hirschman argued. But did this mean the groping was all in the dark? Not quite. It meant being open to hidden and hiding connections between spheres, like politics and economics, which compels the social scientist to be more modest about claims and more open to surprise, like history with mixed sequences or the paradoxical effects of perceptions. Instead of grand schemes, he advocated the study of “smaller-scale processes of economic-political development.” This was the spirit behind his growing classifications of mini-building blocks for a systematic structure. What is sacrificed in ambition is gained in flexibility and realism. Hirschman’s agenda began with a change of vocabulary:

  Social scientists are looking for optimal policies and states, and that generally means that they are looking for optimal combinations of desirable, but mutually antagonistic ingredients of such states. Thus we look for the correct combination not only of contact and insulation, but of cent
ral control and decentralized initiative, or moral and material incentives, of technical progress and social justice, and so on.

  He suggested that we

  devote at least a portion of our time and efforts to understanding the possible usefulness of alternation and oscillation, as opposed to optimal combination.66

  “Political Economics and Possibilism” was a lucid and impassioned plea wrapping a fundamental problem. If disorder and disequilibrium shaped his conceptual scheme, Hirschman was still looking for a way to make it the premise for an integrative approach in the social sciences, notably weaving economic approaches to politics with understandings of political dimensions of the economy. He had an approach or style—words that concede that we are still short of anything smacking of a theory—that expanded the spectrum of possibilities because it stressed uniqueness over generality, the unexpected over the expected, and drew attention to the possible over the probable. It did so by widening the limits of what could be perceived as possible. “Is there [a] role for the unique event in the social sciences?” he mused to himself. Creating such a role would allow us to write different histories and yield different insights. Did we really have to write as if “everything conspired to bring a certain event (revolution or reform) about,” or identify “every single element [that] was needed to bring it about,” even if the event was a narrow victory? Herein lay the challenge that would consume the ensuing years of intellectual labor. Making room for small, anomalous events made unified theorizing a difficult, if not futile, task. How could one integrate the social sciences without a unifying theory, an idée maitresse? Once again, we see Hirschman setting an agenda for himself—but by now, small ideas were adding up to a big problem.

  Hirschman’s writings of the 1960s had the cunning ability to be both of their moment, capturing its dreams of progress, while at the same time standing at a remove, questioning its euphorias. It took the crisis of the 1970s, a vicious turn in Latin American politics, and lethal blows to reform in Europe and America to pull the possibilist back from the limb onto which he had climbed in pursuit of new ways to hope. But dark times would not dim his quest.67

  CHAPTER 15

  The Cold Monster

  To perform the negative is what is still required of us, the positive is already ours.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  No sooner did Bias for Hope roll off the printing press than Hirschman packed his bags. His destination: Latin America. By now, he was approaching intellectual celebrity. Unable to rival Jean-Paul Sartre, whose visits to Cuba and Brazil some years earlier were those of a star, he had no interest in the French philosopher’s predilection to preach; fame never weaned Hirschman from his ironic disdain for the pontificating foreign expert, “the visiting economist syndrome.” Still, the eagerness of major intellectuals, ministers, and reporters to meet him was a reminder that he was not immune from the affliction. When in Buenos Aires and assured by the advisor to the Argentinian military junta that it adhered to his recommendations about unbalanced growth, Hirschman had been aghast. These embarrassments were the price he paid for influence; they were also reminders that some insights could lead in unwelcome directions.

  When he set off for Mexico City, São Paulo, and Santiago, what he encountered was a portrait of contrast. Brazil was in the thick of a hardening dictatorship, the legitimacy of Mexico’s one-party state was cracking apart after the violence of 1968, and Chileans had recently elected a Socialist president, Salvador Allende, whom Hirschman had interviewed and liked during the Journeys tour eight years earlier. If there was a region in the world where crisis and hope were interwoven, it was Latin America.

  Crisis and hope gilded Hirschman’s message. As people packed seminar rooms to hear the sage of radical incrementalism and the apostle of reformmongering, he told Chileans that “underdeveloped countries” had more “opportunity for voice” than other countries where exit was a preferred response, such as the USSR. Echoing the hopes of the early Allende years, he waxed ebullient: the progressive chorus could enhance “the search to invent new channels for voices to be heard,” thereby amplifying the possibilities for reform and checking the threat that exit might atrophy voice. The Brazilian dictatorship presented a different landscape. For Brazilians it was important to find the right balance, a “punto de encuentro,” of less exit and more voice, to scent an invigorated opposition and grow ferment among progressive social scientists. To this point, Hirschman was upbeat. By the time he got to Mexico, he arrived in a country in upheaval. The shadow of the student massacre of 1968 still hung over the capital. His friend, Octavio Paz, had come out in vociferous condemnation. Strikes, social tension, and a “general feeling that the foundations of this regime which have been so stable for so long, are trembling badly” occasioned the need for sober rethinking. At the Colegio de México, one of the country’s main intellectual hubs since its founding by Spanish exiles in the 1930s, Hirschman raised some reservations about the optimistic key of the exit-voice-loyalty triptych. Latin Americans were at a crossroads. Tempted by the “illusion” that it was easy to redistribute income to solve all problems, the urge to hit the rich and polarize societies “could damage growth” and “augment disequilibrium.” Perhaps what he saw in Chile had planted the seeds of unease that began to germinate by the time he reached Mexico, where he ended his lecture speculating “that it is possible that there might be too many variations of voice—from petition to revolution.” Still, Mexico did inspire at least one pun: “Why didn’t it ever occur to Mohammed and the Mountain to meet half way?”1

  It was not just Latin America that gave cause for self-reflection. The economic crisis of the early 1970s was a more general crisis of ideas—and of their institutional brainchildren. Entire paradigms and analytical systems began to crumble.2 Since the election of Richard Nixon, the United States was in more upheaval than ever. Ditching the Bretton Woods system made the world economy more turbulent. Inflation began its inexorable creep upward, economic growth slowed, and the war in Vietnam escalated. The gloom of the 1970s reversed what seemed in retrospect a festive, hopeful 1960s. In the summer of 1972, Tom Schelling asked Hirschman to write an essay for a special issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, prompted by Staffan Linder’s book, The Harried Leisure Class, a Swedish broadside against the effervescence of consumption, which typified the changing mood. To Linder, affluent societies were caught on a treadmill of their own making. The preference for long courtships, time-consuming cuisine, and monogamous dating was giving way to sex, television, and jeans with ready-made holes. Hirschman questioned Staffan’s dismal view. As with the swings he noted in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, he predicted diminishing rewards from “obituary-improving activities” and a return to civic life and old style romance. As with markets, self-corrections might stave off the trap of harriedness. This was a bit abstract; it is hard not to see him struggling to resist disenchantment.3

  The reelection later that year of Richard Nixon aggravated the more general malaise. In the early spring, Hirschman joined a “professors’ march” against the Vietnam War, after which he quipped that there were real problems fighting Nixon: “One always suspects that everything he does is some sort of trick—one can’t quite take him at face value.” He joined the ill-fated campaign of the Democratic candidate George Mc-Govern, writing a brief on US policies toward Latin America. If the electoral defeat were not enough, the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam unleashed B-52 Stratofortresses to shower Hanoi for ten merciless days. In response to the downing of some of the bombers, President Nixon ordered the extension and intensification of the carnage. Hirschman watched in horror. “I don’t remember having been so shaken by a political event,” he confessed, “feeling so strongly in my bones the need to do something since the Spanish Civil War broke out.” These are revealing words for a man who walked around with wounds from the Aragonese front.4

  While the world was shaking Hirschman’s faiths, he was also increasingly unhappy at Harvard. The passage of time did lit
tle to alleviate his anxieties about teaching. By the end of the academic year 1971–72, he was exhausted and complained to Katia about how “everyday a new dissertation” and “two seminar papers [are] plunked down on my desk.” His stomach still churned before teaching. “He lived for writing, not for teaching,” recalled Stanley Hoffmann.5

  To this was added a poisoned atmosphere in the university after the upheavals of 1969. Many of his former colleagues and friends would no longer speak to each other. Tensions ran especially high within the economics department. The faculty could not agree to a single appointment for three years. There were also deep methodological divides opening up. It affected Hirschman personally, though not because he sided with one or the other camp. Rather, it was the very existence of the divide that dispirited him. More and more, he found himself at odds with Shura Gerschenkron over student demands. In the spring of 1972, a group of graduate students asked him to open a departmental track in Marxist and neo-Marxist theory. Ever the ecumenical, he agreed, though in short order he confessed that it “has become a lot of work and nerves (and I don’t know if anything will come of it). The brittle coalition I think I have put together may well crumble.”6 It did; the idea went nowhere. Increasingly, rather than get involved on either side of the various quarrels, Hirschman withdrew into a polite, respectful silence. He would rather preserve friendships than drop his gloves over a dispute he felt had been blown out of proportion. Henry Rosovsky, his former chairman and eventually influential dean, recalled that Albert “grew rather distant from the affairs in the Department.”7