Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  By November, the outsider-insider witness to German reunification went to work, applying his model of exit and voice to an “essay in conceptual history.” His rambling notes explored the varieties of artful East German exits, Dostoevsky, and currency unions. He was especially intrigued not by the hard-line party loyalist, but by the reformist Communists who worked from the inside to oppose the party line. What about them and their struggle in the name of “true Marxism-Leninism,” those who lose their positions that depend on the very existence of a party line? The whole formula of voice and exit got mixed up in unexpected and therefore exciting ways. He had always thought, for instance, that loud exits were akin to the use of voice—like “banging the door upon leaving.” “But it turns out that silent exit,” of the type he heard testimony and witnessed in those heady weeks in Germany, “carries its own powerful message, just because of its silence, the inability to communication: with voice you can argue, with those silent AusreiBern [runaways] no discussion is possible.”31

  It is perhaps fitting that Berlin would be the scene for Hirschman’s last field work; it brought out a half-century’s habits. He reached for as many testimonials as possible, filling his notes with names, short quotes, and the marks of an impressionistic style one might associate with a painter’s first etching. For all his gifts, Hirschman was not a systematic social historian, and the actors he described would not find themselves expressed in what was an exercise in—quite accurately—conceptual history. What he meant by conceptual history were the mutations of his own concepts. What readers could not sense, however, was the depth of personal history behind the concepts. “Having been away,” he wrote a few months later,

  from Germany for well over half a century, I felt, that the concepts I had shaped could provide me with a precious point of re-entry. With the help of this key I might be able to open up recent and perhaps more remote German history and also consider, in turn, how much the key itself has to be re-shaped as the result of its encounter with a privileged historical testing ground.32

  This historic convergence of self and history, concepts and contexts, became the themes in commentaries and interviews on German reunification in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Berlin’s Tagesspiegel. Memories stormed back. When Peter Gourevitch accompanied Albert and Sarah to see some old sites in the spring of 1991, they walked through Potsdamer Platz. Albert pointed out where the Weimar cafés and newspaper once stood. When they reached Grunewald Station, they encountered the new memorial to Jewish Berliners deported to extermination camps. An enormous concrete block carved with the silhouettes of humans en route to their deaths led the way to the station and the infamous Track 17. Was this where his uncle had been herded? Albert was silent, but his face, recalled Peter, was defiant, as if to say “I survived. I am back. You lost.”33

  Thus it was that Hirschman oriented to two geographic poles: Latin America and Berlin. Each was going through its convulsive, and to some extent convergent, transitions, and having to deal with their respective pasts. His frequent returns to Latin America presented him with one monumental question: how could new civilian governments in Brazil and Argentina possibly solve all their problems at once—massive foreign debt, rising inflation, stagnant growth, and a woeful human rights record—without bringing the tent down on their heads? This was the mood dominating the meetings at CEBRAP in December 1985. “Dilemmas [not ‘Promises’] of Democratic Transition” brought together some of the leading lights from Buenos Aires and São Paulo, including some of the veterans from The New Authoritarianism project. Hirschman urged his colleagues not to fall prey to pessimism. Work on what is possible, if necessary “sail against the wind”—tacking back and forth between alternating priorities; slay inflation, then consolidate democratic institutions, then focus on growth, and so forth. “I submit that it is far more constructive to think about ways in which democracy may survive and become stronger in the face and in spite of a series of continuing adverse situations or developments.” Once again, he positioned himself as the hopeful contrarian. When Hirschman was called upon to sum up, he warned again not to get too hung up on preconditions for success; the new governments enjoyed a reservoir of legitimacy that gave them some autonomy from the past, and room for creative policy making. Upon his return to Princeton, he sent his thoughts from Brazil to Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books. Given the drama of South America’s democratic recovery—in contrast to the carnage of Central America and Indochina or the repression in Eastern Europe—Silvers quickly arranged to place the essay in the April 10 edition.34

  While pressing his possibilism on Argentines and Brazilians and bolstering hopes for Chileans who still lived under Pinochet’s jackboots, the trips rejuvenated Hirschman’s interest in talking with colleagues and policy makers in the region. Twenty years after his paean to reformmongers, here was another round of prospects for change. In June 1985, the Alfonsín government laid out an audacious anti-inflation plan call the Plan Austral; a year later Brazilians launched one of their own, the Plan Cruzado. This was not an environment that Hirschman could keep himself from. A week later he was back in São Paulo to confer with CEBRAP people and watch the early weeks of the Cruzado take effect. He checked into the Trianon Hotel and mapped out his lecture in Portuguese. Hirschman redoubled his message to resist drawing self-fulfilling pessimistic conclusions about policies that were still in their infancy.

  Back from his second trip to Brazil, Hirschman learned he had won the Kalman Silvert Award from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). The honor’s quid pro quo was a lecture for the association’s membership. Hirschman scrambled to pull something together. There was a conference in Venezuela on inflation organized by his old CEPAL friend, Aníbal Pinto, and brewing discussions in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Victor Urquidi, who had just stepped down as head of the Colegio de México, invited Hirschman to visit for a week and offered to help set up meetings. The Ford Foundation gave him a $5,500 travel grant to cover a seven-week whirlwind through the region with the idea of writing a series of diagnostic essays about the conjuncture. In return, the foundation asked Hirschman to share his views of the conjuncture with the organization’s regional officers in Mexico, Rio, Buenos Aires, and Santiago. As deals go, this one was hardly onerous. It culminated with a flurry of Mexican meetings with Carlos Salinas de Gotari (then minister of programming and budgeting, prelude to becoming president), Jaime Serra Puche (director of the Economic Center at the Colegio de México, prelude to finance minister), Pablo González Casanova at the National University, dinner with Arturo Warman, and a large reception in his honor the evening of May 13 at the Ford Foundation headquarters. By the time he got back to Princeton, his suitcases were bulging with books, notes, and a detailed diary coded in excitement.

  Excitement? The dominant mood in Latin America was anxiety and doubt! But what made many worry gave Hirschman hope. Instead of wailing about the crushing burden of the debt crisis, Hirschman observed that it was forcing policy makers to explore alternatives to the unpalatable medicine doled out by the IMF and to engage in pragmatic experimentation after many years of orthodoxy. Is this the “end of ideology in LA?” he asked himself.35 Until about 1980, the heavy hand of structuralism and fracasomanía dominated perception and practice across the spectrum. Now, having delivered self-fulfilled legacies of deindustrialization, wasted oil bonanzas, and inflation and debt all around, here was an opportunity to pull possibilities out of the wreckage—Hirschman’s favorite type of economic redemption act akin to that of Europe after the war. The essay, tellingly subtitled “Seven Exercises in Retrospection,” was a dig at the familiar cognitive styles that dominated the Latin American social sciences and his old sparring partner, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, whose “Seven Erroneous Theses” from the 1960s was a widely read manifesto. Written in the flush of a democratic revival and the early days of heterodox shocks to stamp out inflation and tame the debt crises instead of obsessing about insoluble “fundamental” problems, his spee
ch to LASA’s membership extolled the pragmatic daring, the practical innovation, and the refusal to conform to orthodoxies. To him, this was a remarkable turn from his observations on ideology and policy making from 1950s.36

  Hirschman was coming full circle, feeling vindicated that the dragons he’d been fighting all these years were finally slain. His idea of “retrospection” was a veiled exercise in self-redemption. The messy breakdowns of dictatorships in Latin America and the financial ruin they bequeathed reminded him that crises could also be opportunities. Stephen Holmes sent Hirschman the draft of an essay on the German legal thinker, Carl Schmitt. One might think the Nazi jurist would have made Hirschman’s skin crawl. Indeed, Hirschman agreed with Holmes that the fad to rehabilitate Schmitt as a “critical” thinker was troublesome. On the other hand, Hirschman saw in the concept of crisis, of Ausnahmezustand (a state of exception), an insight. “I sense an odd convergence of my thought with his,” he explained. “I think he was right in looking toward more exceptional situations and toward the capacity to seize them via ‘decisionism’ as the avenue to escape from ‘the laws of motion’ of both Marxist and non-Marxist (Weberian) social scientists.… For I have long talked of exceptional constellations that make possible the escape from vicious circles and forbidding ‘prerequisites’ for development or democracy … of course the use I make and the hopes I connect with these exceptional situations are totally different from his.”37

  If the memories of a vanquished Nazism brought out the victorious survivor, watching close friends in Latin America become the thinkers behind a new, democratic order born in crisis was a proximate elixir. Finally, in March 1990, Chileans opened a new chapter in their history. Pinochet and the military were being forced to hand over power to Patricio Aylwin and a coalition of Christian Democrats, Socialists, and others. Weeks after the Berlin Wall was torn down, Norbert Lechner of Chile’s FLACSO, wrote to his “estimado maestro” inviting him to participate in a special event to honor international colleagues who had supported academic freedom to coincide with Aylwin’s inauguration. Alejandro Foxley sent a similar invitation from CIEPLAN. Hirschman could not say no. Who knows what immediate thoughts came to mind: his friendly conversations with Salvador Allende, his debates with Aníbal Pinto and younger radicals at FLACSO in the late 1960s, or the fear that hung over those who survived and stayed after 1973? The trip was clinched when Aylwin sent a personal note asking Albert to participate in the inauguration ceremony. On the day of the swearing-in, Albert locked arms with Peter Bell and joined the parade to the once-ruined presidential palace.

  Albert and Peter Bell at the Aylwin inauguration, Santiago, 1990.

  Chile’s was a momentous political, as well as personal, marker. There were some that were sheer personal pleasures, such as the Brazilian elections of 1994, which swept his long-time collaborator, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, to the presidency, and José Serra, his “assistant” at the IAS to Cardoso’s cabinet. Hirschman had watched Cardoso rise from senator to minister of foreign affairs and then finance minister and could not help but take pride as Cardoso and his advisors finally laid to rest the inflationary scourge. Cardoso’s redemptive rhetoric—este pais vai dar certo, this time this country will do things right, it will succeed—moistened Hirschman’s eyes. When he announced that “Brazil is no longer an underdeveloped country. It is an unjust country,” it was as if Hirschman’s long war against those warning of vicious cycles, binding constraints, and ineluctable traps had finally ended. Fernando Henrique asked Albert to sit with him during the inauguration on January 1 in Brasilia. Before the ceremony, Fernando Henrique had an informal lunch with his wife Ruth, Sarah, Albert, Alejandro Foxley (who was by then Chile’s finance minister), and his thesis advisor from Paris, Alain Touraine. Old friends and colleagues chatted before the formalities. When they were done, someone handed a camera to a waiter, they put down their napkins and posed, the reflections of the Brazilian capital on the panes of glass being them.38

  The “end of ideology” in Latin America highlighted something that had not seemed to change: the inability for the United States and Latin America to get on the same frequency. This was a conversation whose stubborn impossibility Hirschman had long lamented. In the early 1960s, Hirschman had compared US-style pragmatic reformism with Latin American quests for “fundamental” solutions and found the hemisphere “out of phase.” Twenty years later, it was out of phase again. Now, the places were reversed. The Latin Americans had learned “from the spectacular miscarriage of economic policies inspired by ideology” and embraced a new experimental spirit, while in the United States whatever learning took place was thrown from the window in an effort to embrace fundamentalisms (of all sorts) and a dramatic brand of ideology. Latin Americans were open, flexible, moderate, and self-critical. American policy makers under President Reagan and the multilateral agencies they influenced were anything but. It infuriated Hirschman. He explained the problem of this desencuentro to readers of the New York Review of Books. “North Americans, so proud not long ago of their pragmatism, have taken a distinctly ideological turn while Latin Americans have become skeptical of their former sets of certainties and ‘solutions,’ ” he explained. Now, with a jab at Reagan’s fearmongers and the money doctors from the IMF, Latin Americans “are naturally exasperated by the neophytes from the North who are intent on teaching them yet another set.” Returning from Cardoso’s inauguration, he asked himself, “Could it be that the torch—of democratic freedom and social justice—has been passed from the North to the South?”39

  Against these European and Latin American backdrops, Hirschman weighed in on the state of civic discourse in the United States. The triumph of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher announced an all-out war on welfare, regulation, and the role of government in citizens’ lives. By 1988, in the middle of a vicious electoral campaign, the Republican candidate, Vice President George H. W. Bush, hurled charges at his hapless opponent, Michael Dukakis, for being an l-i-b-e-r-a-l. A “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” Bush snarled, as if it were an acronym for the Communist Party. The right-wing campaign brought the vernacular of politics to new lows. Fritz Stern, the Columbia historian, spearheaded a campaign to defend “liberal principles and traditions,” which were being threatened by the “current political rhetoric,” and enlisted Hirschman’s commitment for a large ad in the New York Times. In the end, Daniel Bell, George Soros, Ken Arrow, John Hope Franklin, Donna Shalala, Felix Rohatyn, William Styron, and others signed up. A few weeks after the depressing election, Hirschman worked with Stern to assemble the outraged at the Board Room Club on Park Avenue, hosted by the progressive philanthropist, Daniel Rose. That winter, upset by the degradation of American civic discourse, Hirschman labored to sort out what was so pernicious about the opposition’s talk. New York’s senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote Hirschman a long and personal response to the ad’s text. “Dear Al,” said Moynihan, “I write, uninvited to be sure, but not without a sense of family, to encourage instead your hopes.” He tried to explain that the conservatives were not quite as powerful as they seemed and that the vicious turn was not quite as new as the petitioners claimed. The senator urged the economist to hold true to his own faith in the unintended blessings of opposition: perhaps the rise of conservatism could be good for liberals “as a stimulus of powerful ideas opposing them.” Not without evidence, he felt that liberals basked in moral superiority and did little to rethink their principles and policies. “So far,” he concluded, “all I have in the newspapers are accounts of conferences at which the losers of an eminently winnable Presidential election get together to blame the American people.” So it was that Hirschman was not just alarmed by the rising tide of dogmatists from the Right, but the retreat to hermetic self-satisfaction on the Left—such a contrast to what he had witnessed in Europe and Latin America.40

  It was alarming. Perhaps emboldened by the senator, Hirschman felt compelled to intervene. His concern about argumentation was nothing new. But it had taken
a new turn. The summer of 1985 saw him reading Considérations sur la France by Joseph de Maistre, noting his praise for the French Revolution for devouring itself and leaving France better off for having done so. He circled back to familiar themes, like the Scottish Enlightenment and unintended consequences, Marx and romanticism. And there were the expected injunctions to open new readings, like the doctrine of Divine Providence. He sensed he was returning to the beginning of a cycle that began decades earlier in his pleas for reform. “In a sense,” he noted, “I may be after something like ‘Journeys Towards Reaction (or Disaster)’in counterpart to my Journeys toward Progress.” Now, to fully understand the challenge of reform, he was finally coming face-to-face with its dialectical counterpoint. To understand why reform was so fraught, he needed “better understanding [of ] why reform movements arouse resistance and passionate antagonism, why they run into decreasing returns, why there are subject to (totalitarian, etc.) dérapage.” By the next summer, his ideas were crystallizing around the keyword “reaction.” He was once again reading Edmund Burke.41

  By 1988, it was time to write.

  His composition began as an essay about ideologues Hirschman labeled “reactionary,” those who argued that efforts at reform had the perverse effect of sabotaging it. Worse, reforms could move societies onto the opposite track. Some even argued that it was inevitable. Talk about unintended effects! Reform threatened to make things worse—what Hirschman called the Jeopardy Thesis, his first coinage in writing. It focused on Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre as the originators of the current American reactionary discourse and ended with Charles Murray, the libertarian pundit whose book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 enjoyed near-biblical status for those eager to dismantle the welfare state for the putative good of its beneficiaries. The idea, exemplified by Murray’s polemics, was that reforms guided by state policy risked undermining all progress made before the policies were implemented. They put progress in jeopardy. Hirschman plotted his ideas about this tradition of argumentation. Some old friends shared their thoughts. Offe pointed out that conservatives who believed in the bad outcomes from good intensions in politics also believed in good outcomes from bad intentions from economics: “They cherish and condemn intention-outcome discrepancies at the same time,” Offe clarified. Hirschman marked this line. Skinner pointed, as one might expect, to some English precedents: “The one perfect instance of a writer who says in so many words that the drive to greater civil liberty will inevitably lead to what you call ‘the perverse effect’ is Hobbes in Leviathan.” Look at the chapter “On the Office of the Sovereign” in Book 2, urged Hirschman; there you will see Hobbes’ account of the inevitable consequence of attempted reform. And what about Fortuna, who rewards the brave for tempting her to defeat them by summoning the perverse effect? Is this not what the wheel of Fortune alludes to? The ambitious can be rewarded for their daring.42 He put the final touches to his essay and sent it to James Fallows. In May 1989, the Atlantic Monthly published the long essay called “Reactionary Rhetoric,” which charged the self-described “neo-conservatives” of being unwilling to argue directly with those who advocated reform. Instead, what they wielded were word games, a theme from The Passions and the Interests to chart the arguments for capitalism in its ascent. Two centuries later, with Latin American economies tearing down old restrictions and Communist verities trembling behind their walls, capitalism was triumphant. And yet, its apostles were deafer than ever to the voices of those who wanted it to be a little less savage.43