Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  It was a long, heated, evening discussion. Geertz found the Olsonian proposition absurd and huffed at the whole notion of free-riding. Hirschman labored to explain principles he disavowed. Rawls retreated into silence. And Gintis was adamant that there had to be “an answer.”9 In the end, Hirschman managed to conclude with one of his favorite quotes from Rousseau: “What makes for human misery is the contradiction between man and citizen; make him one and you will make him as happy as he can be; give him wholly to the state or leave him wholly to himself; but if you divide his heart you will tear it apart.”10

  This did not satisfy Gintis. Rousseau’s plea for the integrated, if unsteady, man-and-citizen was not an “answer” to Olson; but it gave Hirschman some moorings to address ideological responses to declinism of the 1970s. Was there a way to imagine modern life as composed of societies consisting of citizens and consumers who were not forced, or asked, to divide their hearts? The accent had to be on combinations, not separations. Invited to a global conference to celebrate the 500-year jubilee of the founding of the University of Uppsala in Sweden, Hirschman spent the spring of 1977 considering ways to bridge economists’ stress on the virtues of competition and exit with political scientists’ interest in participation and protest. The path to a recombination began with a return to some basics. Like Rousseau. When faced with the prospect of a fight over a meal, the “savage” featured in Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men can win and eat, or lose and va chercher fortune elsewhere; even the savage had to choose. The point was that the two, talking and walking, were conjoined.

  There were, in effect, “polyphonic” solutions and a possible spirit of “problem-solving” between people and policy makers to create complex arrangements that were understood as complex. An example was how a country’s citizens contrived a fine-grained, local linguistic acumen as an everyday way of coping with the multitude of contacts and demands. To any development observer, as Hirschman recalled of his own experiences in Colombia, this local code was often as mysterious as it was effective in moving things forward. “Understood complexity,” as he explained in a letter to the political scientist Robert Keohane. Keohane was engaged in a parallel campaign against “realism” to show how governments cooperated and restrained themselves in the promotion of collective betterment and did not reflexively submit to the temptations of competition and conflict, combined countervailing processes of creation, and corrosion of public goods. The idea of “understood complexity” was one, however, that he left fallow. It is not clear why. Perhaps too much rested on the “understood” part of the formula—did people have to understand their local code for them to function as an effective means to problem solve?11

  The accent on language and understood complexity does, however, reveal the influence of Clifford Geertz, the traces of which are hard to pinpoint because so much of their relationship unfolded in conversation. Still, from the citations of anthropological fieldwork to the growing emphasis in Hirschman’s writings on local knowledge and idiosyncrasies as illuminations of how people made sense of and created meanings out of daily routines, Geertz was helping Hirschman find a way out of the divided social sciences. Geertz, whose own roots in literature dissuaded him from excessively abstract questions about the search for a common humanity or claims about its basic nature, was always far less interested in exploring what people were “really like” beneath the surface of it all than he was fascinated by what they were like in it all. In the 1970s’ rush to come up with universal theories and testable hypotheses that could be transported from place to place, and time to time, Hirschman and Geertz were kindred souls.

  They were also two souls on the horns of an institutional dilemma. Their Social Science initiative was still a shoestring operation, dwarfed by the other Schools at the IAS and beginning to run up against funding problems. By 1978, money was scarcer than in Carl Kaysen’s day. The new director of the IAS, Harry Woolf, had to impose budgetary restrictions and was constantly urging his faculty to hustle for grants. Hirschman had an ability to defuse tension with a gentle smile and a wry, aphoristic humor, and his interventions at faculty meetings, while occasional, were “always temperate and judicious.” He had “a marvelous ability to pour oil on water.” But he was no institutional spear-carrier for the longer term project of moving the Program of Social Change to become a fully fledged school within the institute. This was Geertz’s enterprise, and he could still get “quite worked up,” by the task. In the wake of the Bellah Affaire, it was not one he especially relished, perhaps because he knew administration was not a talent. “It becomes more and more apparent by the day that I was never made to be a bureaucrate [sic],” he confessed to his friend, “which I suppose is a sort of self-complement except that any ass ought to be able to handle our little problems better than I seem to.” He apologized to Albert for leaving the school in such hash and signed off one of his notes, “your hopeless colleague.”12

  Hirschman, it must be said, was not a lot less hopeless as an administrator; he’d certainly never kicked the habit of being a bit dans la lune. Hitherto, he had left much of the running of the show to Geertz. His international obligations proliferated. The publication of The Passions and the Interests led to a flood of invitations to lecture in Europe, where he was suddenly bursting on the academic scene. And institutional work was never, to put it mildly, a forte. He was only too happy to leave the legwork to others; over the summer of 1978 it was William Sewell and Quentin Skinner who cobbled together the beginnings of a large grant proposal. To make matters more complex, Woolf insisted, no doubt to get the institute to comply with Department of Labor norms, that Geertz and Hirschman give up their preference for hand-picking the visitors to the institute and that they place advertisements and conduct a proper selection based on merit, not personal connections. Hirschman was more willing to comply—even though he stood to lose more, since a number of the visiting members had been working on projects more adjacent to his own writing interests, than Geertz. When Hirschman mentioned Woolf’s idea of a part-time employee with an “advanced degree” (“for example, wife of a Princeton faculty member”), Geertz erupted. “ ‘She,’ that unemployed, overeducated wife sure as hell isn’t going to be making any scholarly decisions (at least, not as long as we’re around she damn well won’t).” He could not help but bemoan the departure of Kaysen. “Whatever his other faults may or may not be, Carl would by now be contacting Teddy Kennedy, Hamilton Jordan, and Joseph Kraft, but … ah …, the hell with it.” In the face of Geertz’s impatience, Hirschman remained unflappable.13

  Money was one challenge for Social Science. So was broadening the faculty base. When Geertz went on sabbatical to Oxford for the academic year 1978–79, he left Hirschman solo, a Hirschman who was luring invitations to travel. Administratively thin on the ground would be a generous way to describe the state of affairs. Skinner and Sewell, who had stepped into the roles as builders and hosts for the program, were leaving in the spring of 1979. To compound matters, Albert had health problems in the fall of 1978, when one eyelid grew droopy and a pupil contracted, followed by headaches. He grew alarmed when someone mentioned these as the symptoms of Horner’s syndrome. His doctor sent him to a hospital for extensive testing, including a spinal tap. What they found was a viral incursion—which meant zinc therapy and waiting for the symptoms to subside. “So as you can see,” he wrote to Geertz, “you left our School in rather weak hands.” Bill Sewell effectively took over the chairing of the seminars. The affliction was not, however, so severe as to crimp Hirschman’s travels to Latin America. A few months later he was off to Bogotá at the behest of the Ford Foundation to evaluate a think tank, where he “met with an uncomfortably exciting atmosphere as there are some danger signals indicating that the country may be going down the path on which Argentina, Uruguay, etc have long traveled.”14

  What the founders lacked in administrative skills or zeal were made up with stature, which they parlayed into a unique intellectu
al venture. Perhaps it was their common background in literature and philosophy. Perhaps it was their joint appreciation that “Western culture” was not normative when it came to understanding others. Perhaps it was their relative lack of interest in disciplinary conventions. Either way, the shared fascination with language, meaning, and context led them to stake out an identity for social sciences at the institute that would serve as a counterpoint to prevailing currents. While philosophers had long been arguing about the prospects for “a real science of society,” it was Max Weber, a touchstone for Geertz and Hirschman alike, who argued that social science’s mission was to account for the actions to which social meanings were attributed by the actors themselves. Motives, ambitions, and memories, not to mention passions and interests, had to be freed, as Geertz once put it, from “systems of closed causality.”15 It meant less interest in analyzing how structures determined behavior than how people made sense and understood the world around them—and how they argued about it—as a condition for their actions. They both rejected the ingrained expectation that a modern social science would grow up from its humanistic infancy to maturity as a hard science and leave behind its childhood interests in value, judgment, and personal insight, thereby freeing the scholar from his passions and to deploy the unconstrained use of reason. Geertz and Hirschman were part of, if not leading figures of, the interpretive turn (which is often, mistakenly, associated with post-modernism—which Hirschman and Geertz considered risible). In the 1970s, with social distemper on the rise, with old confidences and certainties on the ropes, a space opened up to pose more fundamental questions, specifically by training a more hermeneutic eye on human society. “Strong readings, (Charles Taylor), “thick descriptions” (Geertz), “deconstruction, (Derrida), and “open cognitive styles” (Hirschman) became key phrases for the movement for an interpretive social science.16

  In 1978, Geertz and Hirschman, motivated by applications to the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding, sat down to compose “Our View of Social Science.” Because Hirschman was the fledgling school’s executive officer, he took the lead initially, with the idea of proposing a three-year program under the heading “Advanced Study of the Process of Social Change.” But first, it was felt, “Our View” had to get sorted out; with the help of Skinner and Sewell, they hashed out a vision for an intellectual life at the institute. It is worth quoting them directly, for the choice of words was considered.

  The main focus of our attention is more interpretive: we are mainly concerned, as we always have been, with investigating the meanings of social behavior and the determinants of social change, and continue to be resolutely multi-disciplinary, comparative and international in our approach.

  They anticipated the objections:

  We are aware of course that this approach stands in need of some explicit justification, especially as it may appear that we have decided in effect to turn our backs on the mainstream of American social science in order to explore a humanist backwater.

  They felt no need to shy away from their alternative formulation to the “mainstream”: “Its methods and procedures have resulted in over-specialization, present-mindedness and unwarranted scientism without much compensating capacity to provide satisfactory solutions to the pressing social and economic problems of the day.” The text goes on, at times repetitiously—suggesting multiple hands at work on the document—to make the case for an intellectual atmosphere that leaned away from “a tendency to focus exclusively on questions of social causation at the expense of studying social meanings.” They piled on their criticism by arguing that “the mainstream” was not only under assault within the United States, but it was hardly mainstream elsewhere. “From the perspective of international social science,” and one can hear the echoes of Hirschman’s running irritation with American “expertise,” it is the mainstream American view which is in danger of becoming a backwater.” Their proposal thus aimed to redress the imbalance within the social science disciplines and make American scholarship less provincial.17

  It is important to underscore the choice of Social Science, in the singular.

  “Our View” was persuasive. The Mellon Foundation contributed $476,000 for three years to match a grant from the federal government.

  With these infusions, the modest Social Science group expanded its visiting fellows program and began to think about its third permanent member, which would help elevate the initiative to a School. And so the discussion began over who else might be brought in as a third permanent colleague. Hirschman and Geertz went back and forth over the right person and appropriate discipline—which did not always come paired. Geertz and Hirschman agreed on one thing: they wanted Skinner to stay—but he was already in the midst of a return to Cambridge as Regius Professor. Other curricula vitae populated their desks: Shmuel Eisenstadt, Neil Smelser, Suzanne Berger, Amartya Sen. What they were hunting for was someone to come for a year while they figured out if the chemistry worked. One of the problems, as Geertz knew from previous battles, was finding someone to navigate the “History Scylla” and “Mathematics Charybdis.” Finally, in 1979, Michael Walzer, a political theorist from Harvard, was nominated and approved with the same acclaim that ushered Hirschman’s candidacy. Walzer decamped from Cambridge for Princeton in the summer of 1980.

  If Hirschman helped Geertz to get Social Science off the ground with its “interpretive” moniker, he also served as one of the bridges within the IAS. In his second year, the institute faculty chose him to coauthor a general report to the trustees, owing “probably to my fairly successful peacemaking activities last year.”18 He was aided by the arrival of other bridging figures. Some were visitors, like Skinner. Others, such as John Elliott, were permanent. In the fall of 1977, he and John Elliott submitted a joint proposal from the Schools of Historical Studies and Social Science. The theme was “Self-Perception, Mutual Perception, and Historical Development,” in which one can see the convergence of Hirschman’s fascination with the ways in which people looked at the world as a factor in their behavior with Elliott’s work on Spanish thinkers’ obsession with decline and decay and its imprint on the empire’s policies. The three-year proposal sought to formalize the occasional overlapping activities to further a discussion about “the interplay between self-interpretation and action as a generating force in history.” The hope was, they pitched to the Mellon Foundation, to “help to break down interdisciplinary barriers both between history and social science, and among the various branches of history on the one hand and of social science on the other.” To coordinate this venture they proposed the Princeton University historian, Robert Darnton—already closely tied to Geertz—who could also help build much-needed ties between the university and the institute. To Elliott, the fortnightly evening gatherings at Geertz’s house over wine and cheese, which began finally in 1979, and the flow of active, dynamic younger scholars, such as Amal Rassam, Theda Skocpol, and David Cannadine, found in his fraternity with Hirschman a more intellectually lively alternative to the atmosphere governing the School of Historical Studies. For his part, Hirschman played the role as the “effortless, multilingual, cosmopolitan.” To Cannadine, Hirschman appeared “very grand”—and was ever the quiet source of “interesting insights from unexpected places delivered with enormous charm.” Skinner had the same impressions: Hirschman exemplified what it meant to be the worldly intellectual rather than the obsessive scholar. An intellectual’s halo hung over him.19

  As the years rolled by at the institute, going back to development economics was all but impossible. Several other intellectual fronts now commanded Hirschman’s attention. There were the conversations with the ancients about peoples’ motives and the pursuit of “a more humane polity.” There was the effort to understand dictatorship during the collaboration with O’Donnell and Cardoso. And the prolonged effects of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty included continual reformulation and international symposia. By contrast, development economics was on the rope
s. The high hopes of the “development decade” gave way to a pile-up of disasters that shattered the confidence of an entire intellectual field. In April 1979, Carlos Díaz Alejandro invited Hirschman to write an essay for a festschrift in honor of William Arthur Lewis, who was retiring from Princeton University and who represented so much of what Hirschman questioned about the field: the commitment of general planning, the defense of large-scale foreign aid, and the depiction of peasant rural economies as mired in backwardness. The two had traded barbed reviews of each others’ work. When they found themselves together in Princeton, there was a tacit agreement to share the mutual politeness of an arm’s-length relationship. Sometimes, the overlap could not be avoided. When Hirschman presented a paper in Princeton’s economics department about his linkages concept, Lewis was openly scornful. It was no secret that the tensions within the field of development economics harbored a personal, and scarcely personalized, rivalry. When Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics later that year, not a few observers concluded that this doomed Hirschman’s chances at the prize; Geertz shook his head and told people around him that it was a sad day. Hirschman himself said nothing, though Sarah must have known his feeling, as she conceded to others that he was crestfallen. While he questioned whether the so-called Third World needed its own peculiar subfield of economics, he did not include himself among those economists who questioned whether “development” even deserved a Nobel (as one economist put it to me, “development was a dog’s lunch”). It was clear: if there was going to be a Nobel for a development economist, there would be only one. Lewis got it.