Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman
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What emerged from their conversations was a lifelong friendship and an important collaboration. Hired by the Ford Foundation, they were dispatched to review CEBRAP (the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning), which had been cofounded by the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso in mid-1969 and was dedicated to social and economic research with the goal of supporting democracy under the shadow of the military dictators. Brazilian universities had been purging faculty from its ranks; CEBRAP was a sanctuary for free inquiry, and it quickly became the hub of debate for dissident intellectuals. However, their contrarian stance set them against the idea of American support, viewing it as a pact with the devil, especially after sensational revelations about CIA subventions to the Ford-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom. On the other hand, autonomy from the military regime required resources. CEBRAP’s leaders reached out to the Ford Foundation, and especially Peter Bell, a creative and progressive program officer in Rio de Janeiro, for independent support.21 It was not an easy decision and divided the founders. It also created trouble for the funders, for the Ford Foundation bosses in New York were nervous about becoming so affiliated with rabble-rousing intellectuals. Cardoso and Bell agreed to a review of the organization led by a prominent Latin American social scientist (who could tame the passions of the more radical Brazilian scholars) and a respected North American above the fray (and thus able to appease New York). Hirschman and O’Donnell were the team; the exercise worked. Not only did the review open the spigot for further funding, but CEBRAP soon became a model for social scientists evicted from, or constrained by, universities elsewhere in Latin America. Along the way, Hirschman and O’Donnell engaged Brazilian colleagues in intense but friendly criticism, setting a tone for an opening, eclectic dialogue that would remap the social sciences.22
The fate of the Brazilian outpost foreshadowed others’. The question of how to sustain social science research in the age of spreading despotisms sent Hirschman shuffling around Latin America’s major cities as an academic entrepreneur. There was also a spirit in the air to support critical voices unwedded to old orthodoxies, a spirit Hirschman was also keen to shore up. It was with these two goals in mind that he emerged as the broker of a network that would alter the region’s academic milieu. A hub of this network was the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) in New York and its Joint Committee on Latin American Studies, which had been revitalized in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, when Latin America suddenly became a strategic concern for Washington. Under the helmsmanship of Bryce Wood and with generous support from the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation, it promoted innovative research and eventually the formation of the Latin American Studies Association in 1964. Compared to other “area studies,” Wood’s was also unusual because it integrated distinguished scholars from Latin America. The combination of an active staff, energetic international networks, and resources laid the basis for a generational change in the social sciences. In 1971, Wood enlisted Hirschman to join him at a meeting at Yale along with younger scholars like Louis Goodman, who would eventually replace Wood at the SSRC, to consider the future of Latin American studies. To a promising Ivy League sociologist like Goodman, greeting Hirschman was like meeting an icon. But if Wood wanted a gregarious figure, Hirschman remained reserved and observant. When he spoke, however, all ears perked up: the crisis was an opportunity to open new directions in social scientific inquiry, insisted Hirschman. Bryce Wood saw his opportunity; he immediately brought Hirschman into the Joint Committee.23
It was a fortuitous moment in the Joint Committee’s history, for its chairman, Joseph Grunwald (Hirschman’s friend from Latin American Issues days and a prominent figure among reformist economists in Chile), announced that non-US scholars would be eligible for grants. This meant that now the SSRC could direct Ford money directly to the pockets of Latin American researchers. To this end, Ford gave the Joint Committee $1.5 million—a substantial sum in those days—to support scholars. On September 1, 1973, Hirschman replaced Grunwald.
Ten days later, Hirschman learned that the Chilean army was bombarding the presidential palace.
While rumors of a violent overthrow had been flying for months, the scale of the repression had few precedents. Like the news of Nixon’s bombing missions, this one brought Hirschman to new lows, not just because so many innocents were perishing, but because the coup was a mortal blow to his hopes for reform. “Besides the horrible news about the current brutalities and suppressions, there is the despondency one feels over la chance ratée.”24 Later, as it became clear that the Pinochet regime had come under the influence of the Chicago brand of monetary, sometimes misleadingly called orthodox, economic thought, Hirschman would reserve some pitiless words for what he considered overconfident peddlers of false certainties. They reminded him of the happy planners of the 1950s—only this time more dangerous—and would embolden his concern to challenge the narrowed gauge of Milton Freidman’s homo economicus.
But this battle came a bit later. Now, there were lives at stake. Old acquaintances, like President Allende himself, were buried in the rubble of the presidential palace. Other friends and students, such as Jorge Arrate (a Harvard-trained economist and one of Allende’s close advisers), were missing. Dismayed, Hirschman wrote to Guillermo O’Donnell in Buenos Aires for his help in locating imperiled friends. It was against the backdrop of the overthrow of Allende that he was asked to appraise his Journeys toward Progress to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its publication. The ironic twist resulted in perhaps his most somber essay, for Chile represented a real fracaso, not an overperception. He strained to find in “this sense of shock” some room to “explore, almost from scratch, the mechanisms of interaction between economy, society and the state.” He had to admit, moreover, that his “return journey” brought him face-to-face with “negative side-effects” of policies that “formerly could legitimately be neglected.” Nowadays, they were essential to understand for any practical understanding of “the singularly Cold Monster that the State has become in a large number of Latin American countries.”25
Thus, a triple coincidence of the change in SSRC funding, Hirschman’s stewardship, and the Chilean coup marked an important departure in Latin American social science and placed Hirschman squarely in the middle of its evolution. Hirschman’s commitment to support younger scholars and his eclectic interests impressed themselves immediately on the functioning of the Joint Committee. There was an additional point: the Chilean tragedy was instructive for progressive social scientists, and he dearly wanted to be involved in the makeover. “The hugeness of the mistakes committed by the leaders of the Allende coalition makes one wonder whether the Left is not afflicted with an incurable Death-Wish,” he wrote.26 This was a disease he was determined to help cure. The Chileans Osvaldo Sunkel and later Alejandro Foxley, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Guillermo O’Donnell, the Peruvian Julio Cotler, and others all had important stints on the Joint Committee, which was staffed by Goodman, who recalled in particular how Hirschman and Cardoso “were brilliant together.” While they differed in style, in substance they were of a piece. Without telling anyone about it, Hirschman went back to his Marseilles experience and used the Joint Committee as a rescue instrument. He and the others found artful ways to earmark funds for a special, not entirely kosher, fund for writers like Tomás Eloy Martínez, who had to find sanctuaries and salaries. The SSRC, like a latter-day International Rescue Committee, laundered foundation monies. Then, no sooner did he move to the Institute for Advanced Study than Hirschman used its fellowships program as a haven for persecuted social scientists.27
Hirschman did not plunge into this adventure without personal misgivings. His interests in the outer world were competing for attention with new directions in his reading and writing. He told Carl Kaysen about a certain “cooperative research project on ‘policy making in the sixties’ which I thought I might want to coordinate. But the likelihood of this project falling into place and my desire to take it on are both receding fairl
y rapidly,” he wrote in November 1971, with no trace of regret. But a month later, when it became clear that the Ford Foundation was poised to extend major funds to an SSRC project, Hirschman updated his qualms. “Between us, I feel a bit like the revolutionary who has an opportunity to make a revolution at the moment he has lost faith in it, but who in fairness to his followers, doesn’t see any other course open to him but to go through with the ‘project.’ ” To Katia he relayed a resolve “to finally bury my Latin American project” after opening “more letters portending difficulties in getting the project back on the tracks.” It was becoming a “nightmare” dealing with many people “all wanting to make their own decisions.” The only downside was missing the opportunity to collaborate with O’Donnell—“I really regret not being able to work with him.” The same hesitation came up a year later, when Cardoso asked him to lead another review of CEBRAP for the Ford Foundation. He tried—unsuccessfully—to beg off. Though “it is one of the most interesting intellectual enterprises I have come across and I feel greatly honored to be called upon to participate in the discussion about its work that you are planning,” he was on sabbatical, lost in some remote readings, and was reluctant to travel because he was “deeply immersed in a new project.” In the end, though, he acceded; an invitation to be at the table when Latin American social scientists were going to discuss their fate was not something that Hirschman could easily turn aside. “This was too nice and honorable assignment to turn down.”28
The Chilean coup tipped the scales in favor of involvement. After the sobering trip in 1973, it was all the more important to get beyond the either-or of exaggerated hopes and paralyzing despair. Events only confirmed that free markets were “not a solution” and social revolution is “not available.” Hirschman wanted studies of policies that made differences; he wanted to nurture a social science that would liberate Latin Americans from their defeatism and its twin, the application of fancy “theories” derived from someone else’s experience.29 In the meantime, the SSRC had its hands full with a deluge of applications from beleaguered students and scholars in Chile and Uruguay. In the shadow of the Chilean tragedy, the committee gathered at the SSRC offices in New York in November. Hirschman began the meeting by suggesting that the committee support collaborative, thematically driven projects conducted in Latin America itself and avoid the tendency for “area studies” to be an American invention. O’Donnell (who was not on the committee) drafted an outline for a collaborative project on “public policy” in Latin America. Given the complexity of personal relations involved, Hirschman tapped a young Columbia political scientist, Douglas Chalmers, who regarded O’Donnell’s essay on dictatorships as a landmark. Chalmers penned a memorandum outlining a complex proposal to study “the State.”30
Getting an amorphous theme like “the State” into an integrative research agenda could not help but mean more discussion, not all of which helped clarify the point of the exercise. Hirschman had to press softly to create a coherent network that still enabled participants to realize their own agenda within it. To this end, Hirschman arranged a follow-up meeting at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires and asked Guillermo O’Donnell, the host, and Philippe Schmitter of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Geneva, to plot out for the group a framework centered on something that had concerned him since the 1950s: public policy. The O’Donnell-Schmitter manifesto argued that the project should focus on policy making from the perspective of “the State in action,” understood as the making of policies within the structure of the state and between the state and civil society. It was still pretty vague. From Buenos Aires, Hirschman set off on an academic shuttle diplomacy to enlist participants in Santiago, Bogotá, and Mexico City. Chile in the early days of the Pinochet dictatorship was a chilling atmosphere—but Hirschman tracked down a young economist, Alejandro Foxley, who was trying to assemble a group of progressive social scientists under the umbrella of a research center, Corporación de Estudios para Latinoamérica (founded in 1974), at the Catholic University. Foxley, a Christian Democrat, was eager to join the network. “I had an excellent impression of the group Foxley has assembled,” who, it so happened, shared his determination not to be overwhelmed by the grisly atmosphere: “They are intelligent, outspoken, determined to persevere and to react to the gloom over what has happened in Chile by hard work and independent thought.” Colombia presented a different landscape, for several important figures were joining the newly formed López Michelsen government, which was determined to revitalize 1960s-era reforms. This put some of the obvious partners beyond the reach of a research consortium. In Mexico, he contacted his former graduate student, Carlos Bazdresch, a rising star in Nacional Financiera; he would work with José Luis Reyna to draft a prospectus for Mexican research.31
So it was that Hirschman assembled the pieces of a large, multinational collaboration. If the initiative stimulated the beginnings of an important debate, some realities descended on the group. The global economic downturn took its toll on the SSRC’s big funders: Ford had to cut back its support of the Joint Committee at a time in which more money was being siphoned to scholars at risk. And, as with any large collaborative venture, this one had frictions to overcome. Some were personal. Not everyone got along; Alfred Stepan appeared to lose interest, so the project lost its Yale moorings. Others were matters of reconciling academic styles: there were some (such as Cardoso and Schmitter) who had theoretical inclinations; Cardoso urged that the group explore alternative conceptual coordinates rather than apply a mechanical application of a model that most of the Latin Americans involved were, in any event, leaving behind. Others (such as Hirschman, and to some extent O’Donnell) wanted more empirical case studies, believing that the new coordinates would come from some careful observations. “A storm has broken out” in the project, Hirschman told Katia. But rather than push his thumb on a scale, Hirschman let the steam blow. He found the tension productive. Cardoso’s intervention was “very inspiring;” he “stuck his neck out” by criticizing “middle-level modernization,” he noted gleefully to himself. The injunction inspired a little reminder: “What we need is a few shafts of light rather than total illumination.”32
All this aggravated the intrinsic problem: the consensus over the “concepts” did not make for a research plan that was at once coherent and collaborative—especially one involving several disciplines, countries, and intellectual traditions. One observer complained that the Buenos Aires meeting “got bogged down in highly rhetorical discussions of theories of the state, and that the linkages between these theories and available or future empirical research was not well developed.” Hirschman himself had to write to Schmitter with the good news that the SSRC had approved funding for the group to move ahead and draft a “concrete proposal,” but he was direct in his concerns about Schmitter’s participation. He urged him to write less “for the cognoscenti” and to develop “some positive contributions for the field. The project as presented by you and Guillermo was obviously too vague to warrant the commitment of sizeable funds.” Schmitter was drifting off anyway, becoming more interested in the democratic transitions unfolding in the Mediterranean world; as it would turn out, these transitions would have profound implications for how Latin Americans were thinking about the fates of their own despots. To compound matters, O’Donnell was engaged in a prolonged drama over whether to remain in Buenos Aires or take a position at the University of Michigan. Never inclined to lead with gusto, Hirschman was less and less inclined to head this project. He was on to something else. One evening, after a long day of meetings in New York, Hirschman and Goodman bid their adieus outside the SSRC offices. As they shook hands, Hirschman reached into his bag and produced some reading materials for the rest of Goodman’s evening. It was not another manifesto on policy making and military juntas, but rather ruminations about seventeenth-century anxieties about markets. Goodman looked at it, stunned to find that his chair of the Joint Committee had been laboring on something so re
moved from the concerns about despots in Latin America.33
The fact was, Hirschman preferred to lead by example, not persuasion. By settling into his new quarters at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, which became, de facto, the new home for the project after the Yale ties were cut, he could play a hosting role. But he was not a virtuoso organizer; the “revolutionary who had lost faith” knew it. The project’s fruition required someone else’s shoulders. These, it turned out, were supplied by the University of Indiana’s young political scientist, David Collier, who was visiting the Center for International Studies at Princeton University (which allowed him fluid communication with Hirschman down the road). Collier would fill in for Hirschman, who had once been drawn into providing leadership of the group, albeit ambivalently. The surviving core group met in Princeton in March 1975 and brought in David Collier. This was a partnership that clicked. Hirschman could offer up the IAS as a base without having to alter his personal writing program. The IAS also afforded the network some strategic support through its fellows program—every participant in the network had at least a year there; Cardoso had three years at the institute. And at times, the institute gave cover for beleaguered Latin Americans. After his first year in residence at the IAS, the Brazilian economist José Serra returned to São Paulo in May 1977 for meetings and to take care of some personal matters. Upon his arrival, he was detained and interrogated by the police. He was not tortured but grew more alarmed as he was dragged back to the constabulary three more times, and he began to fret when the police seized his passport; his wife, Monica, still in Princeton, was distraught. Hirschman got on the phone with Joseph Grunwald—who had recently stepped down as President Carter’s deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. Grunwald put him in touch with a list of prominent State Department officials, including Terence Todman, the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, whom Hirschman had met at previous Washington gatherings. It is not known whether his round of phone calls made the difference, but thereafter Serra had no further problems with the police, got his passport, and folded back into the network without a hitch.34 As with the operation in Marseilles, Hirschman remained discrete; the invisibility of his intervention maximized its chances of success. Serra never knew of this behind-the-scenes activity.