Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  What he was best known for, as so many visitors noted about Hirschman at the institute, was his part as gracious host, a role he relished. Daily lunches, family gatherings for dinner at the Hirschman home on Newlin Road, and the hallway conversations infected the Latin American visitors. “My constant talks with Albert Hirschman,” wrote Fernando Henrique Cardoso to Carl Kaysen, “alerted my mind toward the importance of looking, with passion, at emerging possibilities for unexpected changes in social processes.” This was now reflected in the essays he’d written while a member of the institute, a self-reflective preface and postscript to his influential Dependency and Development in Latin America, as well as a critique of the ways Latin American dependency theory was being “consumed” in the United States.35

  Often enough, the most distinguished member of a group is not its natural leader. The decision to step back from his involvement in the SSRC group, to become its patrón rather than its coordinator, was precisely what had to happen—and it is to Hirschman’s credit that he recognized this and kept the group treading water until a more appropriate coordinator emerged. In October 1975, when the Joint Committee finally unveiled the agenda for the Working Group on the State and Public Policy, it elected to focus on the nature of authoritarianism in the heavily industrialized countries of Latin America. Collier’s notes, memoranda, and planning gave it the entrepreneurial skills that Hirschman had lacked—and did not, by this stage in his career, feel any inclination to develop. Looking hard at authoritarianism combined the ethical concerns of the committee with a set of hypotheses about the fragility of democracy in South America. A relieved Louis Goodman was finally able to write to Collier that “since this project was first suggested several years ago, a number of scholars have been interested in it but no one had been able to develop the theme in a way that gave it an adequate intellectual focus or generated enough enthusiasm to make it worth pursuing.” O’Donnell likened Collier “to the good muchachos of a Western movie that I used to watch a kid. They go through thousands of dangers and as the end of the film approached it would seem there was no hope, but in the crucial moment they find a way to survive, conquer all evils, marry the chica and live happily ever after. Really, I congratulate you.”36

  There was another shift, as well. The 1960s era of reform had presumed that civilian rule was the framework. Now the landscape had dramatically and tragically changed. The inner gravity of the collaboration shifted from Hirschman’s agenda on possible policies to an examination of the structural constraints on democracy, with an emphasis on the overarching systemic ways in which capitalism had bolted together big social forces to limit or “determine” (a keyword of the day) the paths forward. In the late 1960s, O’Donnell had begun to fathom the economic factors lurking behind the rise of dictatorships to argue that generals were called in to resolve a crisis of economic growth: as industrialization faltered in passing from its “light” to its “heavier,” more capital-intensive phases, civilians lost control and despots moved in; as the process of industrial “deepening” ran into trouble, juntas imposed stability. In this fashion, the phases of capitalism in Latin America predicted the type of regimes governing them. His provocative thesis did double duty. It threw down the gauntlet to left-wing anti-imperialist dogmas by drawing attention to the domestic forces behind the new alignments. It also challenged American political science chestnuts about the region’s “chronic ungovernability.” A lot of the analysis relied upon Hirschman’s earlier notion that thickening and deepening the linkages around strategic sectors was the key to growth.

  If O’Donnell’s original formulation became the unifying hypothesis, Hirschman was exercising his influence on the Argentine to loosen the structural cords of his analysis. It was too deterministic for his tastes. It confused some temporary growing pains of industrialization with a full-blown crisis. And it fell into the very logic that the generals and their social scientific advisors used to justify their harsh measures. One of the rituals at the IAS was for fellows to present their work to the other members. When O’Donnell’s turn came around, he presented the draft of a paper that revisited his own original theory of authoritarianism. Hirschman and Geertz went after him. When O’Donnell sent a revised draft, Hirschman “recalled that both Geertz and I were critical of your seminar presentation because of a certain economic determinism. Your paper now shows that the cure for unconvincing economic determinism cannot be less, but more and better economic determinism!” Hirschman tried to impress a more nuanced view of economics that could not be reduced to the imperative to create capital goods industries, as if that were the only logical sequence to earlier stages. This, complained Hirschman, exaggerated the role of backward linkages and overlooked other industrial options and problems. It also did not travel well as a model. What about Pinochet? Chile’s industries were in crisis long before Allende. And the Chicago Boys made no pretense about wanting any “deepening,” although they did make a lot of noise about price stability. Hirschman enclosed a copy of a paper of his own that revised the notion of linkages that had been so influential on O’Donnell. This is where he made the case for “micro-Marxism.” The paper urged readers to examine their copies of Capital more carefully: in the oft-cited passage where Karl Marx claimed that “the industrially most developed country does nothing but hold up to those who follow it on the industrial ladder the image of their own future,” he suggested that all capitalisms were bound to exhibit the same features no matter how late the start. Hirschman suggested a more extended reading: “One only has to read on in order to realize that Marx had a very acute sense of small and critical differences.” The very next paragraph (“which is apparently never read by those who quote the above sentence,” admonished Hirschman) has Marx illuminating a very different path of development for Germany than England.37

  For years, Hirschman had been making the case for the plenitude of historical tracks and no fewer possibilities for moving forward. By the mid-1970s, the quest to understand why social scientists were so immune to considering alternatives had Hirschman fathoming his own intellectual origins, leading him back to formative theories that “by mistaking, or ignoring one of the possible courses events may take” select their own blind spots. Reading Capital sent Hirschman back to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and thence back to Marx’s extended commentary on Hegel’s section on “Civil Society.” In this trail, he identified a gap in Marx’s reading—or more precisely a failure by Marx to see that Hegel had, by 1821, come up with an economic theory that gave a potential outlet for problems of capitalism, in this case in the form of an empire. Thus, Marx could not profit from Hegel’s insight about capitalism’s uncanny ability to open up unforeseen solutions to its problems because he committed the error of so many “theorists” who, “in their eagerness for structural change, often fail to appreciate the ability of a ‘tottering system’ to remedy its worst weaknesses or simply to hang on.” Not uncoincidentally, he was tracking Marx’s blind spots just as he was writing to O’Donnell. In the midst of this, he reopened his notes on Judith Shklar’s manuscript on Hegel’s Phenomenology and laid them on his desk. Then he went to Shlomo Avineri’s recently published Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (1972). This prompted him to ask Avineri in Jerusalem about Hegel’s economic thinking and tie-ins with Sir James Steuart. Avineri sent Hirschman to the Jenaer Realphilosophie.38

  Reading had become like detective work; following the clues revealed the early oversights and missed possibilities of predecessors. This had consequences for later (sometimes centuries so) social sciences generations. It is easy to skim the arcana that connected Hegel to Chilean inflation as a little pedantic, and some may think Hirschman was turning self-absorbed, withdrawing into ivory-towerish scriptures. But if the social sciences were going to be useful for a democratic Latin America, it had to move from the ground to which the Right and Left had converged—that capitalism was doomed in the region without some radical solution and complete break from what came before.

&
nbsp; It was clear enough to O’Donnell, who did not fail to get the point about the Cunning of History, that social scientists were not free from History’s traps. By implication, Hirschman positioned himself to O’Donnell as Hegel was positioned to Marx—with the obvious difference that he had the luxury of pointing out the blind spots to his younger colleague. Blind spots not only produced failures to see new patterns, but also blocked ways out of the very structural binds theories were meant to analyze. No wonder the circularity drove Hirschman to distraction. O’Donnell relented, to a point. He accepted that it was “vulgar and mechanical” to have “the productive structure” to explain “all of society.” “Of one thing I am sure, between your work and mine there is something more in what we are doing. As you can see, you can see what happens to me when I read you and am provoked by you, even if it leads to this waterfall of speculations.”39

  The to-and-fro between Hirschman and O’Donnell revealed a creative tension around which the group organized—to push, test, and recast a hypothesis about the ties between capitalism and democracy, which is what Hirschman had wanted all along. What came of these discrete acts of private tact was one of the keystone anthologies in Latin American social sciences, The New Authoritarianism in Latin America, edited by David Collier. When the page proofs were finally done, Collier sent them to Hirschman, Cardoso, and Serra. “This opportunity the past three years [has] been an important period of intellectual growth—and I suspect also of personal growth—for me.” As he wrote these lines, he was also in the midst of a move from Indiana to Berkeley. “Reaching this point in the project also leads me to think again of the crucial contribution that Albert has made to our efforts. Particularly through converting the Institute into a center of intellectual ferment for research on Latin America, and through his valued advice conveyed in the course of more phone conversations over the past three years than either of us would care to count, he has played a central role in the project.”40

  In the meantime, the long crisis in Argentina reached its awful climax just as Hirschman planned to leave for South America. The demise of Argentina’s civilian regime coincided with efforts, spearheaded by Oszlak, O’Donnell, Marcelo Cavarozzi, Horacio Boneo, and eventually Elizabeth Jelin, to pull together a group of independent researchers in Buenos Aires akin to CEBRAP. In the final months of the Perón government, with his father-in-law named minister of social welfare, O’Donnell was all too aware of the impending explosion. “Here we are with everything moving in sustained fashion towards the final collapse.” In the midst of “an incredibly profound crisis,” one has to marvel at “the real talent of the government to make it worse and to exasperate everyone it should not, which means, I fear, unlikely that we will reach tierra firme.” With gratitude and hugs for Albert and Sarah, O’Donnell signed off. Argentine generals toppled the hapless Isabel Perón in late March, which brought the authoritarian question into even more dramatic relief.41

  It was in this context that Hirschman wrote a series of penetrating essays that took him back to the kind of analysis that influenced him so much during the dramatic collapse of the Weimar Republic. His sense then was that analyses of crises had to account for possibilities for escaping them. There were more “roads” to be traveled for a developing society than many economists admitted; likewise, there were plenty of alternative political passages. Recovering the contingencies implied “special attention to intervening variables, in particular to the beliefs of ruling groups about the kind of policies and politics that are required to deal successfully with problems and emergencies in the economic sphere.” It was, he would argue in his contribution to the anthology, in the intervention of beliefs, perceptions, and ideologies that one might connect economic problems with political outcomes. Writing to Collier in April 1976, he explained that “my longstanding interest in ideology and perceptions makes me want to look at the connections between phases of economic development and political forms as they are mediated by ideologies and perceptions.” As he explained, “It makes a great deal of difference to the way in which politics are played whether elites perceive a certain cycle of industrialization as having run out of steam or not.”42 We are back to the concern to turn fracasomanía (the obsession with failure) on its head—only now the motives were as political and ethical as they were economic.

  The summer of 1976 took him on a five-country peregrination through a troubled region, beginning in Bogotá and ending in Santiago. In between, the hotels of Medellín, Cali, Caracas, Brasilia, São Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, and the Gran Hotel Dora on Maipú Street in Buenos Aires were there to greet him. When he got home, his pockets and suitcase were bulging with an accumulation of business cards. He rekindled old friendships, such as that with Aníbal Pinto, and made new ones, such as Alejandro Foxley and Juan Sourrouille. His notes from the trip bear all the trademarks of his style, as well as his exuberance about being back in the field. As usual, he reserved the most time for policy makers. Jorge García, head of Colombia’s Planning Office, told him about the efforts to direct funds into natural resource extraction and the “disasters” of government-sponsored investment, such as Renault and Alcalis. Hector Hurtado, the finance minister of Venezuela, told him about his efforts to salt more of the country’s oil rents away from the torta to consumers in favor of a “special investment fund.” From his meetings with businesspeople and engineers, his prose is laden with detailed excitement about their ventures. J. L. Bello, a mechanical engineer, waxed enthusiastic about the developments of Brazil’s machine tool industry. Meanwhile, intellectuals were largely a complaining lot. Francisco Leal Buitrago, a student of Colombia’s agrarian question, blamed the bourgeoisie for turning “into a bunch of speculators.” José Luis Zabala complained about how Pinochet’s free trade dogma was decimating local industries.

  Throughout his field notes on conversations, Hirschman sprinkled in his petites idées (only some of which appeared later in print) characteristics of his preference to observe, aphorize, and double-check his hunches with follow-up questions. Brazil, especially, captured the paradoxes he found so fascinating. “Rapid economic growth legitimizes or is believed to legitimize. The tunnel effect had actually worn off in 1974 perhaps because there was no progress achieved along political lines. As a result there arose a lack of belief in the reality of expansion. (Remember how Roberto Cavalcanti was booed at the Brasilia Congress for saying real wages had increased during the last year or so: people just could not believe it.).” On the other hand, he noted a few pages—and interviews—later, the government had a self-destructive habit of believing its own growth-promoting myths. “High growth rate makes for white noise that drowns out other noises coming from other problems of society. This isolates the policy makers.” This led him to a reprise: “Amendment to the tunnel effect,” he noted:

  In the period of rapid growth it is possible for the policy makers to believe that everything is in good shape; propaganda and the real worries about the maintenance of the growth rate are then drowning out information about the non-conformity of the ‘ungrateful’ masses (shades of Churchill after the war). Also the concentration on economic discussions may mislead the government into thinking that the principal problem is economic when what people really want is something quite different. In this manner the government becomes victim of its own manipulation of freedom of expression.43

  Over and over, he intoned to himself: “Make connections!” Between politics and economics, beliefs and behavior.

  The booing of the aspiring politico Cavalcanti referred to an occasion in Brasilia that exemplified the kinds of openings that Hirschman was searching for in the dictatorship. Though the country was in the grip of autocrats, he sensed that there was a prospect for change. In fact, he did not have to look too hard. Strikes were spreading; the government wavered between letting go or repressing. Cardoso himself was sticking his neck out. Hirschman flew to the Brazilian capital to join him at the meetings of the Society for the Progress of Science in time to witness his frie
nd delivery a fiery speech denouncing the government. When Cardoso returned to his seat, Hirschman leaned over to say in grinning admiration, “I never imagined you as a pamfletario!” Rumors started to fly that dissidents were about to be rounded up, which filled the meeting with paranoia. Every time a door opened, everyone jerked their heads to see if storm troopers were barging into the hall. “This might be the strangest conference I have ever attended,” Hirschman told Cardoso. That night they dined with Severo Gomes, the minister for Commerce and Industry, a moderate within the dictatorship. As long as Gomes was at the table, no one would get arrested. Cardoso noticed Hirschman poke away at his dessert to forestall the end of the meal—and the possible storm troopers. In the end, the meetings were uneventful. The next day, Ruth and Fernando Henrique Cardoso took Sarah and Albert on a long voyage into the Brazilian backlands to visit the old city of Goiás, the home of Cardoso’s ancestors. In the governor’s palace, a portrait of his great-grandfather still hung. They toured the Baroque city and then bounced along the washboard roads to Fernando Henrique’s cousin’s rustic ranch near Jaraguá. When they finally reached their destination, Albert was astonished to find a recent edition of the New York Review of Books lying on a rickety old table, and they all sat down in the shade to spend an afternoon eating steak and discussing French literature. Such was the diversity of Brazil, and the reminder to Hirschman of his affection for Latin America.44 After one trip to visit Cardoso in São Paulo and O’Donnell in Buenos Aires, he confessed that “I rather enjoy the position of being the intellectual and personal friend of the people in these centers.… In addition to the intellectual endeavor there is involved here a cause one has in common and that makes for a great deal of warmth and friendship.”45