Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  Given the ambition of the lectures, which were now en route to becoming a book—to deliver a counterstroke to those who dismissed the possibilities of effective collective action and to usher a social science that did not ask Man to divide his heart—Hirschman’s decision not to follow up on the quality and quantity of suggestions is hard to explain. We know that fame now meant more and more travel, and Hirschman showed little inclination to separate the essential from the expendable. In the wake of the Janeway Lectures he was off to Bogotá with Guillermo O’Donnell to review for the Ford Foundation Colombia’s premier social science research organization, FEDESARROLLO. Hirschman was also a consultant for the OECD’s Committee on Science, Technology and Industry. He had accepted an invitation to Florence’s European University Institute to be in residence for a month and to deliver the keynote lecture, “New Approaches for the Study of International Integration,” a topic that returned him to his interests of the 1940s. But it required some scrambling. There was, to crowd his calendar further, a commitment to give the lecture “The Crisis of the Welfare State” at the American Economic Association and the “Rise and Decline of Development Economics” paper for audiences at Berkeley, in Mexico City, at MIT, and at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Meanwhile, he went back and forth to Washington as chair of the Academic Council of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and he took part in a conference on agricultural technology in Cartagena, Colombia, an easily declinable temptation if ever there was one. He was selected for the Frank E. Seidman Award, which involved giving a special lecture. And to cap things off, the prestigious École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris invited him—and he instantly accepted—to deliver the Marc Bloch lectures in 1982.

  All of this was in the year and a half he had to rework the lectures into a final manuscript. Even for someone as broad-reaching as Hirschman, this itinerary stretched him perilously, and the frequency with which he was travelling surely dug deep into the time that should have been devoted to the manuscript. “Where I agree with Lane is when he says at the end of his letter that I must have a full agenda,” he wrote to his publisher. “Nothing could be truer.”43

  The question nonetheless remains, why accept these extracurricular, if obituary-enhancing (to borrow his own bons mots), invitations? In some cases, he did try to back out. When Bob Keohane invited Hirschman to appear on a special American Economic Association panel on the welfare state, Hirschman at first declined, citing “over-commitment.” But his resistance was lukewarm; he went and wrote a paper (which appeared in the American Economic Review, his last for the discipline’s flagship)—though he did manage to ward off entreaties from the Harvard Business Review to “elaborate” his thoughts on one line from the essay about “the output elasticity of quality.” Some of the same resistance-acceptance behavior surrounded his OECD engagement. When the Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry issued its initial invitation, Hirschman explained that he had limited time but that as long as he was only a “consultant” in the drafting of the report, he would participate. But this, too, led to its inflation: recurring requests to “elaborate” or “expand” on this or that insight. And he was constantly squeezing his trips to Paris between other engagements. In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a certain dose of hubris was involved, which several of his nastier reviewers seized upon. In his defense against Lane to Sanford Thatcher, he described the reviewer as “hostile and aggressive, and this makes it difficult to develop a cool argument.” A peeved Hirschman tried to explain that he was trying to transcend surveys on satisfaction to write a “phenomenology of disappointment through the private and public sphere,” and found the survey results that Lane pointed to a detraction: “What I am doing throughout the manuscript is theory construction about motivations for changing life-styles—my ‘explanations’ are obviously meant to become hypotheses in the hands of some economist or political scientist who hopefully will devise some way of testing them.” In a move that reveals his yearning to make a mark as a theorist, he added that “this is what has happened with a number of other books of mine.”44 This was not just a heavy card to play, it implied intended theoretical aspirations that previous works did not have. In an age in which books of theory on such large matters were long, complex treatises—John Rawls’ Theory of Justice comes to mind—Hirschman’s revealed a gap between its claims and arguments, a fatal flaw for any theoretical ambition. His responses to the manuscript reviews were cursory, and the weekly invitations to speak at this or that gathering must have seemed like applause. Thatcher, with the success of The Passions and the Interests under his editorial belt, no doubt felt he had another winner on his desk and deferred to Hirschman’s judgment. Certainly, doing otherwise would have risked touching the nerve of his major author.45

  What Hirschman did was tack where he faced the least resistance. He elaborated the passages and arguments that were already strong. There were many more quotes from the classics. He added more detail on consumer theory as well as on theory and evidence of the history of political participation. There were top-ups to make up for bibliographic oversights. He did address, albeit in a few paragraphs, the role of ideology in the making of meta-preferences and added a section based on his reading of Harry Frankfurt’s distinction between first-order desires and second-order desires (that is, desires about desires). Cicero, too, per Skinner’s suggestion, makes an appearance. But little of this was evidence of the kind his readers yearned for. It did not really address the more fundamental issue of how the oscillation between the two connected spheres was supposed to be explained, since this was the internal motion of his endogenous theory. Page 114 featured an image he found in the Bibliothèque Nationale of a worker giving up his gun and bullets to cast a ballot, with the suggestion that universal male suffrage was a way to channel the desires of an “expressive” citizenry and thus give up the notoriously rebellious ways of Parisian rabble-rousers. Otherwise, there was not much history making the case. Hirschman dug in his heels and called the book “a conceptual novel.” The introduction explained that the book was by definition speculative and tentative and acknowledged that there were problems choosing the very term cycles to account for the swings between private pursuits and public action. But he soldiered on.

  The decision not to address the analytical problems was costly. None of Hirschman’s work had elicited such mixed reviews. Indeed, compared to the rhapsodies that greeted The Passions and the Interests, Shifting Involvements was a painful letdown. Hirschman himself may have anticipated this when he flew to Sweden in September 1982 to attend a conference to honor Exit, Voice, and Loyalty as well as Shifting Involvements. After the gala dinner, he was invited to share some remarks. There he confessed that the “shifting” activity was often unsmooth, uneven, and riddled with obstacles. This was at odds with the smooth, gravitational movement of the pendulum swinging away between the covers of his book. The failure to deal with these and the other questions it raised became a refrain. A reviewer in the American Political Science Review hit the same mark: though it weaves a lot together “Hirschman’s theory might unravel if we tug on its dangling threads.” The American Journal of Sociology found room to praise “the flowing style and flood of new ideas that we have come to expect from Hirschman” but complained that there was a basic asymmetry between private consumption and public action and concluded that “its major thesis is uncharacteristically strained.” The criticisms did not stop at the doors of the disciplines. Robert Heilbroner tackled the book for the New York Review of Books, treating the moment as one to introduce the author of Shifting Involvements to a wider public; he too found the evidence for pendular swings so sparse as to make many of the arguments “unpersuasive.” The chief merit, as far as Heilbroner was concerned, was in bringing to the fore the great issues of political economy in the tradition of Adam Smith. Jon Elster noted in the London Review of Books that Hirschman was in league with the world’s leading
social scientists and was “at the pinnacle of the profession,” but he worried whether Hirschman “had been spoilt by success.” Elster found “an element of self-indulgence, sometimes self-congratulations, that prevents him from achieving the same rigour and clarity that characterised his earlier work.” The engagement “in a highly speculative sociology of knowledge” Elster found especially bothersome. Skinner rushed to defend: “The modesty of his grasp of your thought seems to me to sit very displeasingly with the astonishing confidence with which he delivered himself of his Olympian judgments.”46

  It was not all so gloomy. In other domains, the book struck an instant chord—and struck hard. Lewis Coser reviewed it for the New Republic, using the occasion to add a long biographical profile as a coming-out narrative about one of the country’s greats—“America’s eclectic economist.” Peter Berger called Hirschman “one of our most distinguished economists” in the New York Times (which prompted Hirschman to fire off a letter to Katia, gushing that he had finally “made it into The Times!” though he added that the review was a little less than he would have hoped for). It was also translated more swiftly than any previous book into French and German—and treated to even more laudatory reviews. Michel Massenet called Hirschman “easily recognized as a true savant” in Le Figaro. Le Monde featured the book on the front page. David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd, wrote him and called it “an extraordinary experience to read and ruminate about this book.” Other friends shared some more critical remarks in a constructive spirit—but in the context of the reviews, they only added to the chorus.47

  Shifting Involvements may have been a flawed book, but it was a brave one. There was a political argument involved and directed at fellow intellectuals. As people leave the streets and plazas disenchanted with politics to seek happiness in the shopping malls, what will happen to them when consumption yields its own eventual diminishing returns, when the exit option of private pursuits don’t work? What will happen if the art of voice has been lost? Public life had its problems—it could be too absorbing and too boring. This was the point of representing actors as neither heroes nor victims, but rather as fallible choosers muddling through imperfect alternatives. The politics of his argument was made explicit at a conference at Berkeley in March 1980, just as he was revising his manuscript. He asked himself, “What was so moral about my inquiry?” When he got to the podium, he explained how Princeton students were rather “shaken up” by the original happiness lectures. Students were more accustomed to learning about human nature in terms of “the rational actor beloved by economists.” When Hirschman presented Man as “a blundering idealist, someone with interests and passions,” it sounded to them as a moral observation. Either-or commonplaces made Hirschman’s kinds of stories appear muddled and confused. Really, what Hirschman wanted was a human actor “as a more lovable character, somewhat pitiable, but also a bit frightening—hence tragic.”48

  This tragic character sometimes needed some help. It was the job of intellectuals to be constructive, because the existence of public life as a refuge for disenchanted consumers required a practice that intellectuals had played a special role in refining, the art of voice. To throw up their hands now, to concede defeat of “public man,” and to give up hope that the citizen still had a pulse within the body of the consumer was, Hirschman argued, self-defeating. Hopelessness would be self-fulfilling. The ethical implication was that intellectuals had a place in all this as the guardians of voice, even in the moments of its atrophy or disfavor. Be ready, Hirschman argued, for day in which the citizen swung back into public action; the ability to deliver rewards for returning to the streets and plazas depended on their capacity to imagine social change, not as total overhauls that were bound to fall short of great expectations—and thus drive the citizen back to private ways. Instead, help the fallible citizen, this imperfect subject, to imagine alternatives without making them impossible. This argument was not so easy to distill from the long excursions through consumer choice and the oscillations of the suffrage. Having missed his mark, uncharacteristically, this was a big idea that would consume him for years to come.

  In the meantime, Hirschman bristled with disappointment. Insecurities that lurked below the serenity of his outward appearance, a carefully groomed style crafted to rise above the disciplines and precision that now found him wanting, broke through. As the reviews came in, he pored over them, underlining the lines of praise and leaving the criticisms conspicuously untouched. His letters also reveal traces of bitterness. Writing to his friend Reisman, he noted that most reviews reacted to the public-private cycle, “whereas this for me was more like a rod and hangers which for me merely served to lend support to a series of carefully crafted garments. These people criticized the rod and hangers and didn’t say anything about the garments.”49

  He lived up to his own model, however: faced with disappointment, find pleasures elsewhere. As he did so often in his life, he set his sights on new horizons.

  CHAPTER 19

  Social Science for Our Grandchildren

  A belief like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  In the summer of 1979, a trio of Berkeley professors decided to organize a conference called “Morality as a Problem in the Social Sciences.” Aiming at the functions and malfunctions of a “value neutral” social science, it was dominated by heavy-weight philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor. There were other notables, such as Norma Haan and Michel de Certeau. Bellah asked Hirschman to come; Hirschman accepted, on condition that Mike McPherson be included. He felt it was important to have economists in the midst. McPherson welcomed the opportunity as an honor—and then trepidation: when the program came out, he gasped to see that the famous German philosopher, Habermas, was going to be his commentator.

  The event stirred Hirschman to stake out a social science that dealt more directly with ethics, not so much the study of ethics but rather the ethics of social science. But he was determined to avoid the moralizing tone that hung over the deliberations. He urged the attendees to consider humans as endowed with self-as well as other-regarding propensities. What is more, these urges jostled with each other. Why do we have to choose what kind of self to favor? This was the same complex self that populated Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, The Passions and the Interests, and most recently, Shifting Involvements. All of these called for a more integrated social science—and indeed one might read them as a serialized manifesto, or an unfolding agenda, for Hirschman and Geertz’s ambitions for integration. But it was revealing that none of Hirschman’s works offered a unifying social theory. To offer one would undercut the purpose of the IAS school, which favored the study of social meanings rather than causation. At a time in which one was called upon to choose between “rational actors” or some communitarian spirit, Hirschman put the spotlight on humans’ happinesses and disappointments and the ways in which they bungled and blundered their ways through choices.

  This combined but unstable subject was a cornerstone of an integrated social science. But it was not easily molded to a unifying theory.

  Hirschman’s effort to be “positive” and value free while smuggling in “some strong moral message” went completely unnoticed at the Berkeley conference. The call for a rapprochement among social scientists of different breeds did not appear to have any effect on the gathering. Rather, the conferees seized the moment to pummel “positive social science” and “empiricism” (these being the aspersions of the day) and whipped themselves into a collective fury against mainstream American social sciences. Hirschman remained silent, observant, filling his yellow pads with notes and doodles. There were points at which he found the one-sided exchange too tiresome to remain silent. Delicately, he offered some constructive criticism of the chorus. At one point, he reminded others of the irony that empirical social science is what had allowed the disciplines to be taken seriously in the first place—with the not-to-discrete inference, surely missed
by the ranters, that rejecting empirical research was a passport to obscurity.1

  His interventions did not appear to have left traces on anyone’s thinking. But the event forced him to consider how one might get past what he considered a sterile debate between two kinds of understanding: moralizing and analyzing. He wanted to find a position that was neither mindlessly “detached” nor—unlike some at the Berkeley conference—reverting to social science as moral advocacy. As he explained to the German sociologist Wolf Lepenies, “I would not like to have to say: to restore moral considerations we must pay a price in terms of scientific rigor; rather, I like to show that we are losing important insights because of the failure to ask moral questions and in general to spread our net more widely.”2