Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (100 page)

Albert Hirschman as Beamish in Marseilles, 1997.

In the meantime, tragedy struck. Lisa, by now a successful psychologist and path-breaking researcher on incest and the abuse of women in San Diego, was diagnosed with brain cancer in July 1998. She died, after extensive radiation therapy, less than a year later.

This was a death whose blows, for once, he could no longer ward off.

In the dimming of his cognitive abilities, he reached into forgotten recesses of his own life to prior losses. Lisa’s dying summoned memories of his father’s death at fifty-three of cancer, with children of similar ages as Lisa’s Nick (seventeen, Albert’s age when Carl died) and Alex (twenty-one). Over the summer of 1998, he wrote several letters to Lisa. One was about his father’s commitment to brain tumor surgery. As Lisa underwent treatment and her father was powerless to intervene, he consulted some leading American surgeons, not about her cancer but about his father’s surgical legacy. It motivated him to try to correct a record he felt his sister had warped. Ursula’s memoir, which Albert had felt helpless to alter, passes over Carl’s accomplishments and focused instead on his “career disappointments.” “I myself do remember,” Albert told Lisa, “that his accomplishments as a brain surgeon were important to him to the end.”
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Another letter dealt with Carl’s hiding of Kuczynski in his clinic, once again Albert feeling a need to vindicate “the anti-Nazi activism my father engaged in just before his death!” As Lisa was dying (or maybe a little afterward) Albert wrote to Alex and Nick, reminding them of his own loss and his efforts to remember the redeemed, living memory of his father. The physical difficulties Hirschman was struggling with became entwined with long-gestating personal ones. When Lisa finally died after a valiant struggle, it would have been impossible to disentangle the sources of her father’s grief. If he had been stoical at Carl’s graveside, he was in shock beside Lisa’s. He said nothing. A stricken Sarah and Katia tried to reach out and console a paralyzed, frozen husband and father. His only words anyone could recall were to Peter: “This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” he managed to whisper.
¹⁶

After that, Hirschman’s deterioration was steady. When I interviewed him for this project during 2000–2001, after an hour’s conversation in his office at the institute, he would labor to stay awake. Often, I would ask
him if he wanted to continue. Part of him yearned to, but another could not. I would either drive him home after escorting him by the arm down the institute hallway, or take the pen from his hand and leave him sleeping in his desk chair.

Unable to write anymore or to read very much—one of his final books was Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s memoirs, which he held with pride and admiration—he took to painting. Losing his command over words, he tried his hand at images. When his first grandson, Grégoire was about to get married in France, Katia suggested that her father paint something for the newlyweds. Off he went to the library for inspiration and came back with a book on Chagall. Did he recall that Chagall was among those saved in Marseilles? It is hard to imagine he did not, but we cannot know for sure. Either way, the image he chose suggests he was thinking less of heroic deeds than of one’s passion. In this case, he fastened on the passion one feels for one’s wife and of dreams a lifetime would bring together. He chose Chagall’s captivating image of himself and his beloved Bella in their hometown of Vitebsk. Painted in 1915, Chagall’s
The Birthday
coincided with his own, in Berlin. A romantic couple floats as if on a cloud, in the artist’s dreamscape, kissing.
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E
nough years have passed for Hirschman’s life to enter the domain of memory, for his work and ideas to have lives of their own. Perhaps anticipating this—he was well aware that an occupational habit of intellectuals is to dream of everlasting life through one’s ideas—he took great interest in reading about the uses (and sometimes the abuses) to which people put his concepts, especially if they were artful. He took special pleasure, for instance, when his friend, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, adapted the exit, voice, and loyalty trilogy to explore how Cuban refugees cast their fates on makeshift rafts and overloaded motorboats to flee their island and revolution. Hirschman enjoyed that one less out of vanity than of appreciation for how a concept services understanding well beyond its original purpose. For others, Hirschman’s was a legacy that gave courage along with inspiration. Approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of
Strategy of Economic Development
in 2006, Jeffrey Sachs delivered a lecture in honor of Albert Hirschman in Mexico City. He confessed to his audience that as a crusader for the world’s poorest, reading
Rhetoric of Reaction
—over and over—spared him feeling “alone in the world” as a reformer surrounded by naysayers. The next year, the Social Science Research Council in New York honored the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik as the first recipient of the Albert O. Hirschman Prize. Given in recognition of social scientists laboring in the Hirschman tradition
of spanning disciplines, borders, theories, and audiences, the SSRC president, Craig Calhoun, imagined the award to honor a style of social science that had no better exemplar than Hirschman. These gestures, small and large, are signs that we no longer need him present to keep him alive. He lives on in other, and many, ways.

Albert Hirschman’s odyssey of the twentieth century can be read—to borrow one of his own metaphors—as the epic of a mariner sailing ever into the wind. What he stood for, fought for, and wrote for was a proposition that humans are improvable creatures. Armed with an admixture of daring humility, they could act while being uncertain and embrace alternatives without losing sight of reality. But for much of Hirschman’s century, this was heresy. There were those—from the Right and Left—who insisted that anything short of revolution either perpetuated misery or was an unromantic bore; and there were the legions of pessimists who warned that change was dangerously disordering and ran the risk of making things worse, unless entrusted to managerial savants with their multipurpose models. Faced with these headwinds, Hirschman tacked back and forth.

For many of his readers, it was often easier to see what he resisted, what he was writing or fighting against. It was not so easy to see his course. For this reason, many concluded, there was no Hirschman theory, no model. At best, he had a style, and he had style—of that there was never a doubt. Even the skeptics swooned over the prose, the illuminating metaphors, the memorable aphorisms. But a theory, a model that explains the world or one of its parts? At least in the contemporary coordinates of the human sciences, Hirschman’s oeuvre seemed to fall short. In the fall of 1992, a group of MIT faculty, led by Bishwapriya Sanyal and Donald A. Schön, started a year-long Hirschman seminar using his work to reflect on the experience of economic development. It would include his former student, Judith Tendler, and friends such as Emma Rothschild, as well as sociologists such as Michael Piore and Charles Sabel and the economists Paul Krugman and Robert Picciotto. Hirschman even made an appearance and would share extensive notes on the drafts of essays that eventually appeared as
Rethinking the Development Experience: Essays Provoked
by the World of Albert O. Hirschman
(1994). How does a man’s work move intellectual fields forward? the volume asks. It was not a simple question, and the answers, offered in personal testimony, were hardly uniform. After one of the seminars, the group went out to a Cambodian restaurant for dinner. Krugman doubted aloud whether Hirschman had been so influential on economic theory—sparking a riposte from Amartya Sen. A serious but friendly, if inconclusive, row ensued. How
has
Hirschman shaped theories in social science? Much depends, of course, on one’s definitions, and the dispute, by necessity, goes on.

Hirschman was not the first to wonder whether intellectuals were overdoing it, or at least missing some possibilities in the
rage de vouloir conclure
, as Gustave Flaubert bemoaned the affection for elegant models that explain little. A child of 1933 and that year’s wreckage, Hirschman winced at grandiose proclamations and elaborate certainties like a reflex. But it would be a mistake to confuse this with lack of ambition; his was a quest that would not easily conform to the increasingly professional boundaries and norms of the academy. What he wanted was not so much a theory with predictive powers, but a way to think about societies and economies, beginning with the premise that living in the world means we cannot step out of time to divine universal laws of human motion severed from the day-to-day banalities and mysteries of existence. The intellectual is as much a creature of the world as his or her subject—and so too are his or her concepts, which are limited and liberated by the context from which they emerge. It is for this reason that experience of real life, appreciating one’s place in history, was such a wellspring for Hirschman, as it was for his inspiration, Montaigne, whose last essay was “On Experience.” Life, as Montaigne reminds us, is “a purpose unto itself.” The excursions into real life—as struggler against European fascisms, soldier in the US Army, deep insider of the Marshall Plan, advisor to investors in Colombia, and consultant to global foundations and bankers—were never digressions for Hirschman; they were built into the purpose of observing the world to derive greater insight, and from insights invent concepts that could in turn be tested, molded, refashioned, and even discarded by the course of time.
These were the pendular swings from a contemplative life to a life of action and back again—pendular because they were codependent.

Underneath it all, Hirschman had a sense that human actions and choices were the engine of social possibilities and that any history of possible futures—is this not the script for grand theory?—starts its life as an observation of the human by another human. All categories that flowed therefrom had to be flexible and adaptive, open to the cunning of unintended consequences and side effects that were often more momentous than the original purpose. Such was the personal and moral stuff of which his vision was made, bold enough for him to dream of a unified social science. There is no shortage of ambition here. One only has to consider the concepts and keywords that he juxtaposed: the individual and the collective, private and public, markets and politics, wealth and virtue, equilibrium and disequilibrium, choice and constraint, simplicity and complexity. Fertile oppositions were not just for fun—though if there were possibilities for wordplay, Hirschman did not resist. They were meant to show how each side required the other. In this sense, the art of sailing into the wind was all about gaining speed from an oppositional force and turning it to one’s advantage.

If biography is the art of the singular to illuminate a pattern, Hirschman’s odyssey can be read as a journey with no particular end, the life of an idealist with no utopia because he believed that the voyage of life itself yielded enough lessons to change who we are and what we aspire to be; to require and stay on course toward an abstract destination threatened to deprive the journey of its richest possibilities. Odysseus’ quest was a homecoming to Ithaca; by contrast, Hirschman’s course had no destination. Once uprooted from family, home, and tradition, he became a man of our world set upon a global voyage, cherishing his origins without yearning for a return. Of course, there was a terrible, incalculable loss, and Hirschman would guard the trauma close. Yet, from the violence committed to kin and friends could come release and hope for a more humane future.

Age and ailment, however, soon withdrew Hirschman from the world, forcing him to gaze in silence from a wheelchair into the backyard
where trees give life after their apparent winter death. It was in the winter of 2011 that Sarah, who comforted and accompanied an increasingly spectral husband through his decline, was diagnosed with cancer. By then, the disease had spread. For all her determination to be there until his end, the cancer would not be stopped. One January night, Katia, who had flown in from France, climbed into the hospital bed and embraced her dying mother. She sang quietly as Sarah slipped away from an afflicted body. The next morning, Katia returned to the house on Newlin Road to tell her father that Sarah was dead. Albert’s head jerked up and for a moment his body shook before settling back into his remove. Alain flew from France, Peter Gourevitch and the grandchildren all arrived in time for Sarah’s burial, and they made plans to move Albert to an assisted living facility outside Princeton.

It is from Albert’s room at the Greenwood House that I have just returned. Almost a century after his birth, Albert’s is now a life after a life. He does not communicate, and one cannot know for sure what he sees or hears. But he can feel, of that I am sure. He clasps my hand, unrecognizing but with surprising strength, and brings it to his forehead for me to caress, his eyes closed, and I tell him, “Thank you, Albert.”