Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Hirschman was drawn to the body most of all in the form of a beautiful woman. The ladies of Marseilles were only too happy to forget their despair as the Nazis took over Europe in 1940 and dally with a mysterious young man who could speak many languages. Beamish’s grinning and cunning optimism was magnetic in the sleazy bars along the quayside, which came in handy when running money-laundering and document-forging operations. Some of the American (female) volunteers who worked on the rescue scheme marveled at Beamish’s skills in seduction. Even Varian Fry would shake his head at the pleasures of his assistant. Hirschman loved to flirt but was discriminating in his choice. The affection for the company of a woman—not to bed but rather to banter, as if the presence of feminine beauty were enough for the senses—was a habit that enabled him to endure cocktail parties and hors d’oeuvres he otherwise preferred to skip. Not a few women remarked to me in interviews that Hirschman was quick to search out the loveliest woman in a crowd and had no difficulty finding a suitable topic for conversation—a painting, a recent book, her project. If there was to be small talk, let it be embellished with aesthetic pleasures.

  Without a doubt, his passion for the company of a picturesque woman was one of the many ingredients that bonded him to Sarah. There was so much they shared—books, music, art, politics, and travel—that this dimension of their mutual attraction is easy to skip, not least because among literati the corporal experience is too often treated with some unease. But it is hard to deny that Sarah was a breathtaking woman and she must have struck Hirschman from the moment they met; in that instance, his seductive instincts went into high gear. The posed photos of her as a young woman have a rare combination of glamour and radiance. Nor did age seem to take its toll. The midlife portraits by the great Colombian photographer, Hernán Díaz, do not fail to capture Sarah’s striking elegance. So too do Christa Lachenmaier’s images (see the portrait in the last chapter of this book), taken in Berlin half a lifetime later. Indeed, the photos of the couple give us a sense of astonishing beauty, as if mutually attracted by each other’s good looks. It may well be—though yet again we are in the domain of the biographical unknown—that this underlying magnetism helps explain why a preternaturally flirtatious man who was not above thinking about the centrality of desire in world history was not a womanizer; many people have asked me about Hirschman’s infidelity, as if expecting it; because he was so obviously not the uxorious husband, a cloud of suspicion has hung over him. But nowhere in the archives or testimony is there a trace of a paramour. Albert’s heart of heart does not appear to have been divided or squeezed: it reserved its passion for Sarah.

  And what did he think of his own body? His ailments and troubles were a constant subject in his letters, and there is a slight whiff of the hypochondriac in some of the complaints; he took delight, for instance, in sharing tales of blisters from marching in wool socks during French army training in 1939, and embellished the stories with details of how he lanced them with a spare needle. There were bouts of hay fever as a child and bad pneumonia in Berkeley. But otherwise, it is safe to say that Hirschman was more than a fit man. “Exercise” is too American a term to describe Hirschman’s habits of regular long walks, often in Sarah’s company, attention to his diet, and vacations that included some form of physical activity. After moving to the IAS, climbing the Alps became a summer’s pastime. While not muscular (certainly by the chiseled standards of our air-brushing days), he was strong, well proportioned, and not without a manliness—a manliness of which he was most certainly aware. For as much as he loved to flirt, he was also ready for the right masculine pose. Here again, we are left to wonder about the story behind the pose—what was Hirschman thinking as he propped himself upside down for the camera to capture him in a headstand, or flexing his arms and chest in a semi-jesting (only semi!) bodybuilding stance? Sarah recalled the pride he took at being athletic in his youth. Good grades were a source of self-esteem, but it was his abilities on the rowing team, bicycle trips, mountain climbing, and eventually capacity to endure long marches in soldier training that brought out immodesty. Raised to comport himself properly at old-world parties, he was also a poised dancer; the institute would host annual dinner and dance soirées, and when Albert and Sarah stepped onto the floor, others would cede the center to the ball’s most graceful couple.

  Families, especially of the well-heeled, nearing-affluent sort, often have their favorite spots for vacations. Sometimes these are the grandparents’ home, sometimes a country house. For itinerants like the Hirschmans, there was no single destination. But there was one constant: whether it was Boston, Bogotá, or Bahia, the beach was a favorite spot to relax. This idea of vacationing, drawn from memories of a childhood on the sands of the North Sea, reproduced itself in the Hamptons, on Cape Cod, and in Santa Monica. Once, while Sarah recounted her mixed feelings about family visits to Los Angeles, she was about to catalogue what she disliked about the city when Albert chimed in: “Unless it was to the beach.” This was in August 2005, by which point he was all but inaudible and incoherent; yet these words shone through, and to drive home the point, he repeated them. A legacy that allows us to reconstruct some sense of physical self-regard are the family photographic albums, which are filled with records of beach vacations. Because Albert was most often the man behind the lens, we have fewer images than we might like for such an exercise. But it is nonetheless revealing that when he did step out for a focus shot, he did so with performative élan and composure, what they call in German Haltung: always keep up a certain poise, never let yourself go or be caught by surprise. The pose, in this sense, was a question of dignity and can easily come across to our eyes as narcissism. Here is more amour propre on display than amour de soi. By the same token, there is no evidence of an effacing subject caught by surprise with a swollen midriff. Nor do we have evidence of shame or embarrassment about narrow shoulders or spindly legs that a more self-conscious man might conceal with a towel. The fact was, Hirschman did not just have a striking body, he knew it. And not only was he unashamed to put it on appropriate display, he was more than happy to exhibit its abilities. He could hold a headstand, a pose that combined athleticism with playfulness, for an astonishingly long time.

  Impressive for a man born a half-century earlier. Hirschman was also not above showing some of the buff of the sculpted figure and would occasionally pose accordingly.

  Hirschman knew he was an attractive man. People, starting with his own mother, told him so. Albert Camus’ second wife, Francine, told Albert that he reminded her of her (then philandering) husband; Albert was vain enough to know that this should be taken as a compliment. Even by then, Camus was an emblematically photogenic intellectual—made even more famous by the 1947 picture by Henri Cartier-Bresson of the existentialist with cigarette and upturned trench-coat collar. Hirschman was also a smoker, though his was a social habit; perhaps the cigarette was, as in the Camus portrait, another prop for the vanities. The resemblance of Camus to Hirschman is hard to miss: the hairstyle, the lined forehead, clean-shaven with almost movie-star looks.

  If he thought well enough of his physique, Hirschman cared as much about what covered it. It’s hard to say which part of the letter that Machiavelli wrote to Francesco Vettori in 1513 Hirschman liked more: the idea of conversing with ancient philosophers after a hard day scrabbling for a living, or the ritual of dressing up beforehand. What we do know is that Albert never dressed down, and his refinery made an impression. Perhaps it was the figure on which his clothes hung; perhaps it was the clothes themselves. Either way, his Columbia graduate students admired the fit of the Brooks Brothers shirts and jackets. By the 1970s, he had abandoned that rather staid look for something more casual but no less noteworthy—loose-fitting, silk-blend jackets procured from a clothier behind the Odéon in Paris. The tie was now a thing of the past, but the new combination gave him, if anything, even more flair. In so many of my conversations with old acquaintances, his apparel was memorable—as if a counterpoint to his equal
ly unforgettable pausing, almost murmuring voice, which some took for a stutter. Robert Darnton, himself no slouch when it came to attire, recalled how Albert “liked to cut a figure sartorially” and how much he enjoyed entering a French restaurant appropriately garbed to eat and talk well.2

  With an attitude to life such as this one, it is not surprising that Hirschman aged without having to give up some of the traits of youth. The degeneration in his features from childhood to mature manhood was at most incremental, and one can still see the uncanny mixture of the twinkling eyes of the curious opportunist and the visage of the dreamer, about which so many people commented, into his seventies; he could still reach an Alpine glacier long after retiring. True, the forehead grew more lined, the swept back hair thinned out. But the breathless grace and easy self-regard remained.

  CHAPTER 18

  Disappointment

  It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgment by that name; in fact it is a permanent court-martial.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  No sooner did The Passions and the Interests come out in 1977 than Albert and Sarah went to Russia for ten days. These were the waning hours of détente. Hedrick Smith’s prize-winning The Russians dominated the New York Times best-seller lists, but East-West relations were turning frosty over human rights. The Hirschmans’ trip was an opportunity for Sarah to reconnect with her native tongue and share the pleasures of seeing Russian plays in Russian with Albert. Sarah promised to translate. Their white-night meanderings—through dilapidated churches, days in the Hermitage Museum, fancy (and overpriced) meals, discrete nudging of each other to point out the books people were reading, and gazing through car windows at passing potato farms—eventually took them to the forests outside Vladimir. One Sunday, they finally asked their driver about the scattered garden plots in the countryside. He owned one himself, he explained, and invited them to visit his wife and two sons. “Our driver’s lot,” noted Sarah, “is a marvel of horticulture.” Forty by twenty-five meters, it was densely packed with vegetables and fruit. The strawberries were ripe, and the driver’s wife was preparing to make preserves, taking advantage of her vacation as a nursery school teacher to prepare for the winter and make some extra jars to sell to neighbors. “What a strange concentration on a wholly private pursuit for the citizens of a socialist state!” the diary of their trip concluded.1 This observation about collective and “private pursuits” was no casual, offhand remark. It was becoming an obsession.

  Part of the obsession was directed at Albert’s fellow economists. Hirschman felt compelled to write to Mac Bundy, the president of the Ford Foundation, with some thoughts about his creed. Bundy had expressed an increasingly common disparaging view of the dismal profession: economists enjoyed “the inside track” in thinking about development—and he was deeply unhappy about this. Hirschman did not disagree with him about “the preeminence of the economist as a policymaker.” The drive to make behavior calculable and predictable had narrowed the sphere of what economists might consider economic. But, by the same token, the other social sciences neglected problems of concern to economists. Hirschman considered it pointless to get outraged at or exhort economists directly. Economists were too important to the business of problem solving. Rather, he urged “developing some countervailing power on the part of other social scientists” in order to enrich economic thinking.2 He wore his credentials like a badge, though he knew he stood orthogonal to his discipline.3

  In the ensuing years, it became a mission to clear new ground for a more connected social science. The general sense of crisis and breakup of intellectual coordinates pushed Geertz and Hirschman to redirect the concerns of the School of Social Science away from the strong focus on developing societies to address, starting in 1977, advanced industrial societies. Perhaps Hirschman’s return to Berlin played a role as well. For the first time, European social scientists such as Alessandro Pizzorno and Claus Offe came to the school. Offe’s arrival was a pretext for Hirschman to dust off his unused German—which struck the young sociologist as a throwback to his grandparents’ tongue; Hirschman’s German had fossilized in a bygone era. Also, America’s leading liberal philosopher, John Rawls, joined the assembly for one semester. The group composed of Pizzorno, Offe, Rawls, Martin Shefter, Herbert Gintis, and Robert Cooter decided to meet Monday evenings in peoples’ homes. With a backdrop dominated by the buzz about the “crisis of the welfare state,” spreading strikes, the meltdown of New York City’s finances, and winters of discontent, the Monday-evening group fastened on the hot topic of the “governability of modern democracy.” By any reckoning it was an impressive group. Rawls and Offe (a student of the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas) led an evening’s discussion of Habermas’s Legitimation Crisis; another evening Hirschman and Pizzorno spearheaded a talk of Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action.

  Having diagrammed his views of the original arguments for capitalism before its triumph, and prompted by the Monday-evening gatherings in Princeton, Hirschman sat down to settle scores with Mancur Olson’s highly influential 1965, almost prophetic work, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, a near-biblical argument for a model of capitalism after its triumph. More than any other, Olson’s book nurtured the emerging field of institutional economics and popularized coinages such as “collective action problems” and “free-riders.” The nuts and bolts had been around for a while; Olson’s accomplishment was to pull them together into a single, indomitable, and to some depressing, intervention that anticipated many of the arguments that would gain currency in the gloom of the 1970s. At the heart of Olson’s argument was that modern societies create incentive systems that induce individuals to invest their energies in private goods but thwart the pooling of these efforts to create public goods. Moreover, these propensities were bound by an immutable “logic.” Efforts to coax people into collective action to provide public goods inevitably lose their steam as defectors respond to the incentives to “free ride” on the backs of others. In contrast, individuals don’t free ride when groups support private goods—a conclusion that gave ballast to a rising neo-conservative movement that advocated private solutions to social problems. Olson did not necessarily think that free-riding was driven purely by selfishness; it was the government provision of public goods that made free-riding a rational response. Some neo-cons simply touted the virtues of private greed. Either way, the result was an impossibility theorem about sustained collective solutions to social problems that explained why there could be no real influential mass action.4

  Olson’s book burrowed under Hirschman’s skin; the optimism and mystery of his Hiding Hand of the 1960s was losing to the bleak, iron logic of the Invisible Hand of the 1970s.5 It did not help that Olson had written a wrong-headed review of Journeys toward Progress, which presented Hirschman’s work as a catalogue of corruption, misgovernment, and hopelessness in Latin America. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty was a book that reviewers frequently set alongside Olson’s Logic of Collective Action as a counterpoint: the former explaining collective action movements while the latter pointed to their futility. One reviewer took Exit to task for failing to take fuller account of Olson’s demolition of the prospects of “voice,” which left Hirschman steaming; Hirschman was nothing if not sensitive to reviews.6

  Ten years after the publication of these counterpoints in the social sciences, the mood seemed to have declared Olson the winner. By 1978, the spirit of ’68, which had been so decisive for Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, was looked upon as a rash, aberrant, quixotic outburst. The rising tide of neo-conservatism was only too pleased to announce its triumph as the restoration of a natural order. Hirschman took advantage of one evening’s discussions at Cliff Geertz’s house to take Olson as Exhibit A for what he would then spend the next decade and a half trying to expose: the rhetoric and politics of the ideological underpinnings of the Right.

  Hirschman picked apart Olson’s claims. There were empirical “flaws.” Olson did
not deal with entrepreneurship. He ignored leadership and neglected “explosions of public activity.” Olson’s principal points had been “well known since Hume”; Hirschman was always pleased to demolish claims to originality with a nod to the classics (over whom he was accumulating an increasingly formidable command). But none of this was especially important, and Hirschman knew it; Olson had observed a phenomenon that could not be so easily waved away: the resilience of private solutions to public problems. Even more: Hirschman did not disavow them. He acknowledged the book’s “merits,” the chief one being that he “debunks [the] idea that interest group formation is almost automatic and that one can somehow rely on these groups and their interplay for [a] public interest outcome.” He also applauded the effort to explain individuals’ decisions “not to join” as “not necessarily apathy but the free ride phenomenon.” Olson’s was not an argument easily dismissed by invoking empirical exceptions or even more a rival ideology. The issue was that Olson presumed a necessary divide, a basic partition between exit and voice, markets and democracy, which left no room for Hirschman’s mixed model of Man vulnerable to contingency and possibilities that kept toppling any logic (a word that made him shiver) governed by a single, if powerful, drive.7

  His notes on Olson reveal someone who had lost his customary cool. The “paradox of voting” (why do people bother voting if any single ballot is trivial?) “is a paradox only if it is considered that participation is costly,” Hirschman scribbled vigorously. So, he went on: the “act of voting = people exercising sovereignty for one day = feasts of fools.” This was, he believed, not just empirically false but a caricature. There are, after all, he wrote to himself, activities whose “striving … cannot be neatly separated from possessing [an] object.” He brought in Pascal’s thoughts on food, play, prayer, and politics where a “cost-benefit calculus becomes impossible.” Having seen the distortions caused by over-confident “theories” of development planning dressed in a similar cost-benefit calculus, this must have come across as déjà vu. But this challenge was more daunting—which helps explain the unusually emphatic reactions. “Olson is wrong”: he had captured one point, one response, among the several that people could choose. He had contrived a “theory” to make the contingent, the chosen, seem inevitable, converting one possibility into a necessity.8