Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  The opportunity to spread his net more widely arose when he was awarded the Frank E. Seidman Award in Political Economy, for which he was expected to deliver an acceptance paper. Given by the trustees of the University of Memphis, its previous recipients included Gunnar Myrdal, John Kenneth Galbraith, Kenneth Boulding, and Thomas Schelling. He took up the challenge he had passed up earlier and composed “Morality and the Social Sciences: A Durable Tension,” in which he picked up where The Passions and the Interests had left off, outlining the origins of the social sciences as a struggle to free inquiry from traditional moral teaching, separating learning from preaching.3 Machiavelli had wanted to study politics from the premise of man as he really is, not what he ought to be. Montesquieu had warned how useless it was to go on about how much political practice conflicts with morality and justice (“this sort of discourse makes everybody nod in agreement, but changes nobody”). And of course Smith had severed the self-interested “head” from the emoting “heart” with breathtaking effectiveness. Even Marx wanted “cool science” to guide his motion of capitalism. But Marx was a cue to a deeper current in the genealogy of the social sciences, for while he wanted neutral, objective laws to dictate his analysis, he was no less inclined to hot tempered “moral outrage.” “It was perhaps this odd amalgam, with all its inner tensions unresolved, that was (and is) responsible for the extraordinary appeal of his work in an age addicted to science and starved of moral values.” This particular point elicited a doubt from Daniel Bell, who thought his friend had missed the way in which Marx and Hegel thought about the unity of theory and practice—not as a pragmatic idea whose truth is revealed in use and consequence, but rather as the entelechy of history. So, socialism was “scientific” not in the sense of it being “positive” but because it was necessary and embedded in the order of things; the is-ought distinction was not one a true Hegelian would have recognized. It was not a major issue, but Hirschman tried to clarify: his point was that “Marx, of course, thought he had resolved (versöhnt, in the Hegel sense) these antitheses, but my point (to which I would stick) is that he hadn’t and that his works exhibit a simple juxtaposition of scientific apparatus and moralistic invective, wholly unversöhnt.”4

  All this was a prolegomenon to a larger point about the unsettled (one is tempted to say “unresolved”) friction between moral and nonmoral ways of understanding—not separation, not victory of one over the other, but rather “a durable tension.” Even economists, the pariahs of moralists, were turning their sights to examples of nonindividualistic behavior. Some were taking a closer look at altruism. Others pointed to the power of trust in others. Now, it is true, Hirschman lamented, that economists had taken special delight in intellectual expeditions into territories deeply cherished by moralists to apply a “so-called economic approach” to the study of marriage, parenting, and cravings, a world normally said to be governed by “complex passions” of devotion, hatred, betrayal, and love. They derived pleasure—and notoriety—from the shock value of applying cost-benefit calculus to domains hitherto understood only through moral codes. He regarded this kind of “analysis” as silly and self-indulgent, revealing far less than the pleasure it was supposed to deliver in bringing down moralists. But, Hirschman wondered, could it be “that this particular way of achieving notoriety and fame for the economist is running into decreasing returns?” He went on to illustrate the growing interest, first in microeconomics, and more and more in macroeconomics, in a return to the domain of the heart. He cited several of his friends: Kenneth Arrow’s work on the role of professional codes of ethics and Robert Solow’s recent presidential address to the American Economic Association, which had explained why labor markets were not so smoothly “clearing” as theory would predict because workers paid attention to principles of appropriate behavior among them. (Hirschman wrote to his friend telling him that “I detected not just sociological, but moral undertones” to his address.)5 “Wouldn’t you be surprised,” Solow had asked his colleagues,” if you learned that someone of roughly your status in the profession but teaching in a less charitable department, had written to your department chairman offering to teach your courses for less money?” So, moral-social norms were part of how the market functioned. When Arrow read Hirschman’s Seidman lecture, he felt it “really struck home. I have always felt this conflict (this may surprise you) but have tended to repress emotion in favor of the ‘cool’ head, though not without some considerable feelings of guilt. Your speech has given me some encouragement that it was in the long run the best way.”6

  But the question still remained: how does one practice a “moral social science?” The prescription was somewhat obscure—in itself a revealing contrast to his characteristically lucid description of the problem. It was the very durability of the tension that made this, as he confessed to Mike McPherson, his hardest essay to write. In the first draft, he had concluded that part of the problem among economists was that they had been groomed as “scientists” and thus suffered from what Thorstein Veblen had called “trained incapacity” to such an extent that they could not even “avow to ourselves the moral source of our own scientific thought processes and discoveries.” As a result, “quite a few of us are unconscious moralists in our professional work.”7

  To exemplify this point, he told a personal story that reflected a latent preoccupation with his own memories, recollections that he had, until the 1980s, kept carefully under wraps. When he sat down to write Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, it never occurred to him that there was anything more than his observations of the world at play. It was only when a German publisher asked him to add a special preface for its translation that a memory of his own exit in 1933 was triggered. Summoning the plight of Jews before the Third Reich, he recalled the response of “young and vigorous ones” to the rise of Hitler—by fleeing. The “community” of Jews left behind was gravely weakened by his and others’ decisions. His point was that “I was not aware of those deeper moral stirrings when I wrote the book.” Exit, Voice, and Loyalty had thus benefited as a result of this forgetting; it was more balanced with respect to the relative merits of exit and voice, more general, and more “scientifically persuasive.” Hirschman’s lesson: “One, perhaps peculiarly effective way for social scientists to bring moral concerns into their work is to do so unconsciously!” This was an odd argument and an odder example, not least because Hirschman never belonged to the Jewish community. It should remind us once more how difficult it is to track the emotional passage of early experiences, for if he felt guilty for having left his family, it was a very deeply buried sentiment. When Quentin Skinner read the passage he found it “disconcerting”: “Here you are surely too hard on yourself.” It also triggered recollections from old friends, like “Henry” (once Heinrich) Ehrmann, his former mentor in the Socialist Youth, who had fed the teenage Hirschmann an intellectual diet of Lenin and Luxemburg. When Ehrmann read the lecture, he wrote to “OA” about the “guilt feelings” associated with the traumas of almost a half century earlier. “I suddenly remembered,” he wrote, “that when ‘the Hirschmanns’ [meaning OA and Ursel] left, I felt they shouldn’t have, convinced as I was that the inaudible whisper in which we were engaged, i.e. the ‘underground’ was a duty.” By the time they were reunited in Paris, “the feelings had already evaporated”—not least because whatever was dutiful about Neu Beginnen clandestinity was being systematically crushed.8

  The idea that we might be better off as unconscious moralists to resolve the tension between moral and analytical understandings was also an unsatisfying, if not nebulous, conclusion—certainly an odd one for such an avowed social scientist. Several friends told him so. Dennis Thompson, a Princeton political theorist, asked, did it make sense to associate so strongly the head with reason and science, the heart with morality? “On some (perhaps the most respectable) views of morality, it is the head that is the source of moral principles and must control the immoral heart. (Rousseau intends to shock readers in The Second Discourse when
he blames reason for immorality).” More important, he objected to the proposition that social scientists smuggle their morality into their work unconsciously. While Thompson agreed with Hirschman’s concern that moralistic advocacy was not the best way to make moral points, “let alone secure other people’s understanding of what you are trying to say,” he charged Hirschman with making “a sudden retreat” at the end of the essay. Sure, it was not necessary to come to terms with one’s “deeper moral stirrings”—but this did not mean that social science could be ignorant of its moral principles or implications, and still be “moral.” McPherson also found the case against self-conscious moralizing puzzling. For one, much of economics was “saturated” with concerns about social welfare or peoples’ freedom to choose. So, wasn’t the problem not how to make economics more open to moral thought but rather to invite economists “to open themselves to critical reflections on the moral commitments they already have?” This last question elicited a long response from Hirschman, for it had clearly struck a nerve. He would think about it. “I applaud your formulation, not only on diplomatic grounds, but because it opens up an interesting line of inquiry.” Also alluding to Thompson’s criticism of the unconscious smuggling idea, he promised to give the paper a thorough review before finishing it.9

  The result was an overhaul of the final pages. The change is worth noting. He did not want moral features of the social sciences to be simply added on as afterthoughts, “like pollution abatement that can be secured by slightly modifying the design of a research proposal.” The morality of the social sciences “belongs in the center of our work, and it can get there only if social scientists are morally alive and make themselves vulnerable to moral concerns—then they will produce morally significant works, consciously or otherwise.” He concluded on an admittedly utopian note, for having become aware of the intellectual tradition of splitting the head and the heart, and the effects of doing so, a necessary first step toward “healing that split has already been taken.” One could then envision a moral-social science “where moral considerations are not repressed or kept apart, but are systematically comingled with analytic argument.” The final lines reveal how much his readers had pushed him to go beyond the idea of “smuggling” moral considerations back in to prophesize a social science “where moral considerations need no longer be smuggled in surreptitiously, nor expressed unconsciously, but are displayed openly and disarmingly. Such would be, in part, my dream for a ‘social science for our grandchildren.’ ”10

  The reception of Shifting Involvements revealed one thing: that imagining “a social science for our grandchildren” might be easier to show in practice than to resolve in theory. And it was to that that Hirschman turned: to lead by example. In September 1979, Stanley Hoffmann, chairman of the Committee on Universities and Human Rights for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), invited his old friend to a meeting in Boston to discuss a report that revealed disturbing facts about deals that American universities were making with foreign governments with appalling human rights records. Should there be a stand by the AAAS? The group met in November and floundered on the issue of comprehensive guidelines, never mind suggestions that universities seize the right to tell individual faculty members what and what not to do in their international dealings. Hirschman, with deep experience working with colleagues in Latin America, where human rights abuses ran amok, insisted that forcing Americans to “exit” dealings there would have self-defeating consequences. Still, he urged in a memo after the group dissolved, there could arise times for an arrangement. Some distinctions were also important to keep—between contracts involving individuals versus universities or governments, and between critical and noncritical areas of research. Perhaps there should be a protocol for universities to report their contracts and for the AAAS to circulate information to them about human rights worldwide to help them make better judgments over the decision to exercise exit, voice, or entry? It was important, also, to avoid making a laundry list of don’ts—and to come up with some positive recommendations and insights. Here, his experience in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil working with the Ford Foundation to create independent research centers after university purgings was a precedent, a “story [that] should be told, not just because it is an edifying tale, but because it is important to know of and to seek out such opportunities.” In fact, therefore, dealing with institutions and counterparts in settings where governments violated human rights could protect and enhance opportunities for voice. It would be important, he insisted in an essay that would be subsequently published in Human Rights Quarterly, to avoid simplistic alternatives and either-or questions propounded by idealists and so-called pragmatists alike, if American universities wanted to support intellectual pluralism in nonpluralist regimes.11

  His response to Stanley Hoffmann reminded him that it was important also to keep an eye trained on the outer world as a source for guidance. The point was driven home again when Richard Lyman, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, asked Hirschman in March 1982 to join him in a discussion about how the agency “might encourage a more reflective tradition in the social sciences in Third World countries and contribute, thereby, to deepening understanding of the development process.”12 Hirschman had issued some parting words for development when he wrote “The Rise and Decline of Development Economics.” He sealed this with a personal retrospective essay for a volume about the “founders” of the field of development economics. “A Dissenter’s Confession,” as he called it in honor of a lettered tradition of public disclosure, explicitly questioned the treatment of development as something requiring its special brand of social science.13

  But the field would not leave him alone; indeed, the careers of some of his concepts were now in full flight, which pulled him in multiple directions at once. Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter joined forces with Abraham Lowenthal at the Wilson Center in Washington to explore the idea of transitions to democracy in southern Europe and Latin America, enjoined by Hirschman’s “possibilistic” herald to consider potential political tracks and not plod through the list of conditions to make predictions for the future. Hirschman happily joined the discussion but got more interested in the way a graduate student from Stanford, Terry Karl, was applying his notion of economic linkages to explain the fate of big oil-exporting countries. “I was terrified,” she later recalled. Surrounded by the famous men (and they were all men) of the field, she now came face-to-face with what she considered the closest human to God. Not only that, this near-deity was her commentator. But instead of picking the paper apart, Hirschman praised its strengths and afterward pulled her aside for a long one-on-one conversation about “getting some of your economic arguments right.”14 Shortly thereafter, CEBRAP brought him back to São Paulo with a young American historian of Cuba, Rebecca Scott, to attend a seminar on the politics of export societies. To economize on his overcommitment, he shared “some further reflections” on his “Linkage Approach”; by this time his returning to popular, earlier innovations was becoming a bit of a habit. Since there were only so many new concepts or findings to discuss, Hirschman was increasingly taking a fresh look instead at some of his older propositions. He followed this with another habit, participating in external reviews of institutions that straddled the world of academia and public policy. Along with Bryan Roberts and Edelberto Torres Rivas, Hirschman was tasked to appraise CEBRAP. By now, the landscape in Latin America was shifting; Hirschman had played an important role in creating a latticework of social science institutions across South America as dictators purged universities. By the early 1980s, political opening was in the air. Now the challenge was not so much how to rescue social science from despots, but how social scientists should balance their passions for democratic transition with more dispassionate distance from the emerging regimes.

  If this was a challenge, it was also an opportunity. It reaffirmed the exhilaration he drew from working with Latin Americans. Part of the disappointment of Shifting Involvem
ents was that it was the product of internal conversations and fervent arguments with himself and others—mainly conducted in his head and on paper; it was an extension of the dialogues he had had with Machiavelli and Smith, Olson and Sen. What got lost in all the folding inward was his eye for surroundings, the petites idées drawn from watching everyday behaviors. Not a few reviewers made this point and it must have made him wince—for his ability to observe was something of a badge of honor. He could have holed up at the IAS, sheltered by its seclusion and privilege to seek redemption in a new book, or, as many do, used his place in the world as a fortress from which to volley attacks on his critics. Or, he could easily have cut and pasted a new version of old thoughts, another occupational hazard of the scholar. Instead, he opted for an entirely different tack. He left the institute for the world. It was in this context that he decided to take his yearning for a social science for one’s grandchildren—one that would transcend the debate between an objective and a normative approach by rediscovering the pleasures and inspirations of looking outward, not inward—to rethink big issues by going back to some of his origins.

  The pretext came from yet another routine invitation to review some programs for the Inter-American Foundation. This evaluation became anything but a text for institutional consumption. Created by Congress in 1969 to support popular initiatives to defeat poverty in Latin America, the Inter-American Foundation presented Hirschman with an opportunity to go back to the field, and to the one he knew best, Latin America. Ironically, it would lead to his least well known publication—but one that is arguably his most effective empirical study, the work of the eye of a seasoned observer on a mission to show how wrong the rampant individualists were. If Shifting Involvement had failed to make the theoretical case, Getting Ahead Collectively: Grassroots Experiences in Latin America (1984) made it in a different, and one might argue, more compelling way because it brought out a surer, more confident Hirschman.