Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  For those making transitions to market life, the essay struck a nerve. The Polish Academy of Sciences invited Hirschman to address colleagues in Warsaw to explain the Jeopardy Thesis. János Kornai and István Rév in Budapest were also eager to have him unpack the critique for Hungarians, but the rector of the crumbling Karl Marx University of Economics, eager to swap his ideological stripes for a different kind of empire, put his foot down at the idea of an honorary degree. “If you were Milton Friedman then there would be nothing to prevent your decoration,” lamented an embarrassed Rév. Instead, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences would host him. Rév also wanted Hirschman to confer with opposition intellectuals, like János Kís of the Free Democrats.44

  A volley of letters from friends and colleagues urged more. McPherson applauded the essay and especially the unmasking of Murray, adding “the only real complaint about your piece is that it isn’t long enough.”45 He would get his way. To date, Hirschman’s books had been outcroppings from ideas drawn from his supply of petites idées. This, his last book, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (1991), was different. It was induced by demand to expand his critique of arguments about the self-defeatism of reform. That is, as we shall see, the core of its ambition.

  There was something else at work in Rhetoric that did not get much play among Anglophones applauding the work. While much of the book was responding immediately to neo-conservative triumphalism in the United States and Britain, and this became the focus of readers’ attentions, the events in Germany and Latin America cued him to a broader problem that transcended questions of welfare: the role of discourse in democracy. There were not just arguments on the line; there were republican values of civic life. All dogmas and “basic” logics (the inevitable crisis of capitalism, the unavoidable need for outside interventions of development planners, the intractable crisis of late industrializers, and now the ineluctable pointlessness of reform—the inventory of iron-clad certainties of the century was growing longer) had been favorite targets for decades. By definition they limited what people might consider as alternatives—and anything that limited the scope for learning from experience closed off options. But there was more at stake. Arguments that immunized themselves from the possibility of being wrong and from accommodating uncertainty were closed discourses that thwarted listening to others—and this sapped democracy of its vibrancy. The major and minor keys of the book were therefore united in a concern to address “the systematic lack of communication between groups of citizens, such as liberals and conservatives, progressives and reactionaries.”

  The resulting separateness of these large groups from one another seems more worrisome to me that the isolation of anomic individuals in ‘mass society’ of which sociologists have made so much.46

  Loosening the encased certainties and the “servitudes” that flow from them would, he believed, help restore communication. Chest-thumping neo-cons worried him; so did the arguments coming from the progressive side. It is important to bear this in mind because “Reaction” was read as, understandably, a position exclusively of the Right. In fact, Hirschman had in mind all positions that react to the idea of reform by discounting its logical impossibility. This is why, to the chagrin of many on the Left, Hirschman chose to write a chapter—chapter 6—about progressive intransigencies. This allowed him to stand above extremes to defend the space of reform as also a disposition about forms of arguing. Intransigents of all stripes only serviced a dialogue of the deaf and thus ensured that the failure of reform was sealed from the start. The ability of a society to sustain open conversations among rivals that admitted the possibility of being wrong was a gauge of its democratic life and its ability to promote nonprojected futures for its citizens. Indeed, when Hirschman completed it, he asked Harvard University Press if he could change the title from The Rhetoric of Reaction to The Rhetoric of Intransigence. There was objection all around. Americans wouldn’t understand the word and were like to mispronounce it, so Hirschman went back to the original. But the simultaneous foreign language translations—where the question of democratic discourse was more burning—did embrace the title change. The German, Italian, Brazilian, Mexican editions substituted “Intransigence.” The French preference for historical narratives led to Deux siècles de rhétorique réactionnaire.47

  The book, in imperceptibly powerful ways, grew in scope as readers turned the pages. Characteristically, he went back in time to the foundational arguments of the modern era. “I have a new project,” he told his sister, “an “article” (or a book) on the structure of reactionary thought, inspired by the Reagan regime. But I will go back until the reaction to the French Revolution. For the first time in many years I am reading a lot of German, for instance Novalis, Schlegel, but also Schiller—did you know that the Song of the Bell is a completely anti-revolutionary poem (see the last part)—it is very pleasant to discover that my German and the feeling for the language is still there, completely intact.”48 This excavation of a tradition sired by counter-revolutionary talk gave birth to his coinage: “the perversity thesis,” a foundational argument born of reactions to the French Revolution, according to which all efforts at purposeful change aggravates the condition one wants to remedy. “Everything backfires”; Le Bon argued that universal suffrage would destroy national and international order by raining the irrationality of the masses on the state, first by ramping up demands and thus augmenting public spending, and then bloating governments faced with mounting mandates, only to turn over the once-precious democracy to a class of bureaucrats. It was a formulation that presaged contemporary “public choice” theorists. One cannot help but read a lifetime’s battles being poured into this “new project,” including warnings that trumped-up promises of deliverance cannot help but set the stage for trumped-up declarations of absolute failure, a syndrome Hirschman cautioned a quarter of a century earlier. What had changed over the decades is that failurists no longer needed to wait for exaggerated hopes to deliver their blow. It was enough for someone ever to have bothered to think that minimum wages or safety nets might cure ills to inspire the lip-curling scorn of those who blessed themselves for having mastered the elementary sophistication of a simple paradox and turned it into a cure-all for all public policy considerations.

  But how exactly did perversity unfurl its malice? The next two centuries saw the perversity thesis spawn two more: the Jeopardy Thesis and “the futility thesis.” Jeopardy, as he pointed out in the Atlantic Monthly, insists that the costs of reform were punitive and imperiled all previous, fragile, breakthroughs. Futility argues that all efforts at change are pointless; plus ça change plus cést la même chose shrugged some in the wake of revolutions—French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban. Milton Friedman assured readers of Time magazine that minimum wage laws wind up driving workers out of jobs while Gordon Tullock’s Welfare for the Well-to-Do had the added virtue of boasting a title that “left nothing to the imagination.” At least Milton and Rose Friedman bothered to suggest there might be an option in their Free to Choose. There was an analogy in the futility thesis to primitive or “vulgar” Marxists—and faint echoes of the debates in Germany in 1932–33 can be heard—who argued that the state served capitalists and scorned as hypocrisy any notion that a policy might help the working class or the general interest. The Far Left had feared that a successful policy might blunt the appeal of revolutionary certainty. A half century later it was the Far Right that mocked reformers for their naïveté or idiocy for messing with a system that should, untouched, be self-equilibrating. Meddling with the market would invariably serve better the haves than the have-nots.

  History turned the tables on Hirschman. Having spent so much of the 1950s and 1960s trying to get social scientists to see that unintended consequences of collective actions could yield positive side effects, trying to get them to climb down from their master plans and elaborate flow charts to see what was actually transpiring on the ground, these same side effects had been given a new, pernicious, spin. R
eactionaries had claimed the power of unintended consequences for themselves and turned them into a dogma against change. Now Hirschman had to warn against overclaiming the power of side effects, especially those that overwhelmed the puny positive results. The posture, in the hands of the extremes, became positions of intransigence.

  The Rhetoric of Reaction rolled off the presses amid a war in which overwhelming forces drove Iraqi armies from occupied Kuwait. In their wake, the American government celebrated in a fit of bravado. Everyone was talking about an article by an American pundit, Frances Fukuyama, about the end of history and the eclipse of its ideological forces. With this in the air, Hirschman’s combative élan rang out of tune. Many were delighted that someone had captured what was so frustrating about the nondialogue with conservatives. The novelist Jamaica Kincaid was one of them. She read the book about the time she got her first fax machine and gave it a trial run with a short note to Hirschman. His introduction “took my breath away,” she wrote. “I imagine having you for a reader.”49

  But others were not so impressed. When Hirschman returned from Berlin, he found a stack of mixed-to-hostile reviews. Some, such as those from Critical Review and the Public Interest were no surprise, although they were genuinely acknowledging of Hirschman’s learned lucidity and cannot be accused of not taking the book seriously. Indeed, if Hirschman aimed to motivate a dialogue with the Right to promote more open-mindedness, his effort worked, at least in these two influential magazines. Not so with the British journalist Peter Jenkins, who was unflattering in the New York Times, finding the book steeped in an age riven by traditional political ideologies: “The old labels don’t stick anymore,” he announced with unblinking confidence. Rather immodestly, he thought Hirschman brushed reactionaries away too “lightly.” After all, the French Revolution led to the Terror, and look what Marxism did, as if this had bypassed Hirschman. “The last decade of the 20th century is not a moment to mock those who have mocked such great transformational projects.”50 Thin-skinned when it came to reviews, Hirschman complained to Silvers at the New York Review of Books that “I cannot help feeling that some sort of concerted assault is shaping up.” This was self-pity speaking. The New Republic and the American Prospect treated the book with serious enthusiasm. Still, he angled for a favorable review from Silvers, who told Hirschman he’d sent the book to two different reviewers “but was disappointed in each case.” Taken aback, he turned defensive; the lectures and ripostes that ensued were self-protective, surprising given the point he was trying to make. A polemical book such as this one was bound to elicit strong reactions.51

  The reception abroad was something else altogether, which suggests that the old contrast between a pragmatic, open-minded America and obstinate, absolutist Europe and Latin America was getting inverted. Fernando Henrique Cardoso heralded the book as a model of critical progressive thinking in a long review in Estudos, CEBRAP and the Argentine socialist magazine, La Ciudad Futura. The Mexican Nexos also featured, and celebrated, the defrocking of right-wing futilists. Die Zeit carried an extensive review by Otto Kallscheuer on October 2, 1992, noting the importance of open arguments for democratic life. But it was especially in France that Hirschman was greeted as a celebrity. Hirschman found himself besieged with overtures. The Commissariat général du Plan (fittingly, founded by Jean Monnet in 1946) asked Hirschman to speak about reactionaries and the prospects for reform. In preparation, Alternatives Economiques’s June 1992 issue had a cover “La grand peur des classes moyennes” with a photo below of a Los Angeles shopping mall in flames during the riots that erupted after Los Angeles police officers were acquitted for the merciless beating of Rodney King; inside was the editor Denis Clerc’s profile of Albert Hirschman and an extensive Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld interview of him. So it was that a panel of French notables welcomed Hirschman at the commissariat and listened to his talk, “Progressive Rhetoric and the Reformer.”52 Reviews in Le Monde (by Daniel Andler, a philosopher and Lia Rein’s son, as it turns out), Le Nouvel Observateur, and L’Express raved about the book and featured its author as a true homme de lettres.

  From a European perspective, here was a European living in the United States who could finally explain all the American neo-con froth to them. There was, however, one European who took issue with the book, the eminent Sorbonne sociologist, Raymond Boudon. Pierre Nora had asked him to review Rhetoric for the influential, high-end magazine Le Débat. Unlike the American conservative reaction, which laced its criticism with deference, Boudon was downright hostile, a task facilitated by wanton misreading. Near the end of the long review Boudon charged Hirschman with knowing nothing of “the new science of rhetoric”—implying either dependence on an old style or an unscientific one. The heat seemed to reflect less an ideological dispute than a personal one, either envy (that Hirschman was getting so much attention) or resentment (that Hirschman had not made the proper genuflections; Boudon had, for instance, written about “perverse effects” and unintended consequences). Nora, to be fair and perhaps seeing the problem, asked Albert if he would like the right to reply. Hirschman’s prose in Rhetoric of Reaction had been at times sardonic, other times playfully hard-hitting. When it came to Boudon, he poured his annoyance at his critics into an uncharacteristically acidic comment. “The objections of Raymond Boudon to my recent book,” he told readers, “are so numerous and so widely scattered that I feel like the proverbial mosquito in a nudist colony: I don’t know where to start.”53

  Of course, he did. Hirschman proceeded to smack his critic hard. It is possible that his riposte was fired by frustration that the popularity of Rhetoric of Reaction (which was so personally gratifying) had so little impact on the mood, especially in Washington (which was not). Perhaps he consoled himself that intransigents, once in position, especially positions of influence, were hardly inclined to listen to critics like Hirschman. It was not the first time he found himself at odds with an alliance of ideas and policy makers with whom he profoundly disagreed. Rhetoric of Reaction was an outcry; in earlier days Hirschman might have considered exit. But a century was taking its toll. He was getting too old to escape to the field or to retreat to history. Increasingly, he had to watch as others took up the challenge. As he drew the book to a close, an unusually somber tone took over; Hirschman was openly, if ambiguously, prophetic. “There remains a long and difficult road to be traveled,” he concluded, “from the traditional internecine, intransigent discourse to a more ‘democracy-friendly’ kind of dialogue” (p. 170). In an age in which political life was being overrun by arguments conjugated to kill their opponents, it was not so easy to wish good fortune upon those disposed to doubt or to embrace the readiness to be wrong. But even this gloom could not stick. Among other things, Hirschman worried about the figure of the prophet. His diary around the same time records this:

  Prophecy—always a disaster

  prophet = Cassandra

  or: prophet = action-arousing gloomy version?

  Ex: Malthus

  Hirschman did not want to go down as a latter-day Malthus, known perhaps unfairly as the apostle of the dismal science. The point was not to predict demise. Hirschman was by then far too seasoned in his struggles against declension to give into it now. The point was to imagine a different way to argue.

  CONCLUSION

  Marc Chagall’s Kiss

  On April 7, 1995, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Phillip Griffiths, issued invitations to Hirschman’s friends and colleagues to celebrate his eightieth birthday. There would be, as befit an eminent scholar, panels and discussion. Amartya Sen would lead a seminar on development and poverty. Ruth Cardoso, Michael McPherson, Paul Romer, Thomas Robinson, Emma Rothschild, José Serra, and James Wolfensohn planned comments. Seventy-eight people flew in from around the world. Some who could not, such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Wolf Lepenies, sent letters. Later that evening, over rack of lamb, gratin Dauphinois, and haricots verts, there were toasts. Finally, Albert was given the last words. “A
fter marvelous, kind, witty messages, what remains for me to say?” he asked his friends. He smiled. “I am reminded” he added, “of a story about a fellow who listens to various praises and then admonishes his friends: ‘Don’t forget about my modesty!’ It would be in the spirit of ‘self-subversion’ if I now undertook to refute the various claims that have been made here—but that would be tiresome. The basic fact is that I must admit to being pretty old.”1