Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (19 page)

The indomitable force of Carlo Rosselli brought together an alliance of liberals, socialists, republicans, Mazzinian nationalists, to imagine a postfascist order and to conspire to topple Mussolini. Bombings, audacious flights over Italian cities to shower leaflets, schemes to assassinate Il Duce, smuggling illegal newspapers like
Giustizia e Libertà
—there was no end to the clandestine praxis of liberty—and so long as the coalition was oriented to action, there was less cause for theoretical, internecine feuds. A stark contrast to German leftist handwringing would be harder to find. This was the movement that Colorni joined in 1930, in Milan, and he subsequently worked closely with the circle in Turin, led by Leone Ginzburg, though his engagements were often cut short by his travels to Germany to study. When the Turin group—as well as other domestic cells—was rounded up in March 1935, Eugenio Colorni searched out other affiliations; he joined the Centro Interno Socialista (CIS) in Milan, directed by the doctor Rodolfo Morandi, just as Socialists and Communists were engaged in heated discussions over a broad coalition that would culminate in the Popular Front. In 1936, Colorni became the head of the CIS, which sponsored the Paris-based publication
Grido del Popolo
. He would eventually meet up with Rosselli at the Ninth International Congress of Philosophy in Paris and get intimately involved in the discussions over the ties between the Italian Socialist Party and Justice and Liberty.
³⁹

The spirit of action was intimately bound up with a way of thinking. Italian exiles were not averse to Theory, or
un’ idea forza
, to justify, to explain, and to motivate antifascist praxis. Indeed, at the outset, the influence on Hirschmann was very much intellectual. According to Ursula, Colorni was set on helping “cure” the Hirschmanns, as if they were patients. For Ursula, Eugenio’s gentle but tireless persuasions were like
Renzo Guia’s, a relentless breakdown of her Marxist sophistry, by the end of which she’d relinquished her faith in dialectical materialism. Unfortunately, this political cure did little for the romance between Ursula and Eugenio, and before long, their marriage ran into difficulties.
⁴⁰
Ursula’s brother worried that she did not fully appreciate her own husband’s gifts. Indeed, many years later, Albert had to clarify Eugenio’s turn of mind to his sister. Her memoirs had described him as a
maitre à penser
. Albert thought this reflected a misunderstanding. “Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault are ‘maitres à penser.’ Eugenio was actually the opposite: a constant critic, questioner, stimulator. That he was
homme d’action
and
penseur critique
at the same time was maybe his special trait.… Maybe you should change the title here to ‘
Pensatore critico e uomo d’azione
’ or simply ‘
pensamiento critic e azione
.’ ” She did not.
⁴¹

What her brother considered a “special trait” was too much for Ursula, who tended to lean on the
azione
side of the scales. But it captivated OA. Colorni’s restless, ecumenical style and concern to let the observations of everyday life shape one’s outlook would leave an indelible, permanent, and probably the most decisive mark. This also made Colorni a slightly undisciplined thinker. Often, his curiosities got the better of him. When he was infatuated with psychoanalysis, he devoured Freud. He would then skip almost instantly to Einstein and theoretical physics. Publishing the work on Leibnitz kept drifting into the future as new ideas crowded in. But his omnivorous curiosities threw open doors for Hirschmann. Free of the theoretical formalities of Germanic Marxism, Colorni eschewed the obscure and often circular language of its abstraction. His outlook grew from an early encounter at his
liceo
with the giant figure of Italian liberalism, Benedetto Croce; what fascinated Colorni was the aesthetic dimension of liberty,
libertà
, and the richness of positivism, the belief that actual experience and observation were the bases for authentic knowledge. Take a look around you, he told Otto Albert. Notice the world and let ideas be summoned from it. He exposed taboos. He espoused a kind of voluntarism, free of the inexorable course of History. People did not have to conform to the necessary sequence of social development, to wait for the “objective conditions” to ripen before taking action.
This is what Guia meant when he laughed at Ursula’s constrictive language. To Otto Albert, the conversations with Eugenio drew his attention “to what we call the small ideas, small pieces of knowledge. They do not stand in connection with any ideologies or worldviews, they do not claim to provide total knowledge of the world, they probably undermine the claims of all previous ideologies.” These
petites idées
really stuck for Hirschman, who for the rest of his life would jot down observations on scraps of paper or notebooks hoping they might evolve from insights into ideas. “They are like aphorisms,” he explained, “very astonishing remarks, perhaps of a paradoxical nature, but which are perhaps true because of it.” Since these little ideas lay all around like leaves, the skill was in figuring out how to “gather them up” and make them into “a great idea.” It was not for an abstract system to define the significance of daily experiences and choices, but, rather, the other way around.
⁴²

Like petites idées themselves, the turn away from abstract theory to observational practice took time to germinate. It did not immediately reintegrate fragments of what was once a fairly coherent intellectual style anchored in a particular place, Berlin, into a new one associated with another place. Yet, with time this alchemy of an exploratory intellectual sensibility and voluntarist political dispositions would be one that Hirschman could cultivate and refine over the rest of his life—in many ways
because
it was so itinerant; it was an intellectual temperament that complemented a restless spirit. The petites idées was “a really key thing throughout Albert’s life,” according to his wife, Sarah, “that he told me almost on the first day I met him, when we talked about Eugenio.” This was six years and several wars later, in early 1941—but it was as if he was still sitting beside his brother-in-law the previous day. In that first conversation with his future wife, Albert “taught me not to think in big theories or big things, but to treasure small ideas.” Thereafter, the affection for petites idées was also a bond, transmitted from Eugenio Colorni, between Albert and Sarah. “In our life we have had these things that you say to each other, like all couples, and for us it was our petites idées: ‘Wow, this is wonderful. It’s small, but it’s wonderful.’ And his letters have a lot of petites idées. He will see a picture, a painting, and he would get a petite
idée. He would see something going on in the street; he would get a petite idée.” Small things could provide big insights without being reduced to them. The Big Idea, which Hirschman associated with the “claim to complete cognition of the world,” claimed “to explain multi-causal social processes from a single principle.” The alternative was “the attempt to come to an understanding of reality in portions, admitting that the angle may be subjective.”
⁴³

Biographers—indeed their subjects—often latch onto a formative moment, a turning point, an éclat after which the subject has changed and whose future consists of its direct effect. This can be a trauma, a book, an external event. The tendency can easily oversimplify a story. Hirschmann’s encounters with Colorni were a formative moment. But to identify them as such should not imply that this was the moment that made the man; it would take him much longer to transcend conventional academic boundaries, to assemble a distinctive style from an exposure to different intellectual currents which, thanks to exile, Hirschmann was stockpiling along with his petites idées stashed in notebooks and scraps of papers.

Some exiles hung onto their Marxism for security; Colorni reinforced Hirschmann’s sense that it was a false source. But what Colorni did not do was try to convert his brother-in-law to some new system. On the contrary, what Colorni conveyed was a sense that certitude need not be a precondition for constructive action or purposeful thinking. Eugenio, six years older than Otto Albert, had an intellectual style that took nothing for granted—with only one exception, his doubts. It was “the only sure thing.” Doubt is not the same thing as uncertainty, though it sometimes passes for it. Uncertainty means that you think you may be wrong; doubt means you are not sure you know. The first makes you less confident; the latter does not. Colorni believed that doubt was creative because it allowed for alternative ways to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable circles and self-feeding despondency. Doubt, in fact, could motivate: freedom from ideological constraints opened up political strategies, and accepting the limits of what one could know liberated agents from their dependence on the
belief that one had to know everything before acting, that conviction was a precondition for action. Few things were more frustrating to Colorni, already a veteran of Italian opposition infighting, and to Hirschmann, who had lost his tolerance for doctrinal posturing, than theoretical arguments that masked apathy. One day, sitting with the Italian journalist Franco Ferraresi, an older Hirschman explained his debt to Colorni and his circle: “Those people did not consider their participation in a highly dangerous political activity as the price they had to pay for the freedom of thought, but rather saw it as a simple, natural, spontaneous and almost joyous response.” It was freedom of thought that mobilized dangerous political activity. Hirschman looked at the reporter and said: “I have always found this an admirable way to conceive of political action, and to unite public and personal life.”
⁴⁴

Between them, Eugenio and Otto Albert shared a little saying: that they should “prove Hamlet wrong.” If the Shakespearean figure was the archetype of immobilizing doubt, Colorni’s ideas were intent on demonstrating that doubt could propel deeds.
⁴⁵

Colorni’s influence was particular, but he was also part of a broader, Italian, current. By the time Colorni engaged Hirschmann in long conversations, he represented a generation that was trying to stand on the shoulders of two powerful Italian intellectual currents, one liberal through Benedetto Croce and Piero Gobetti (whose
Liberal Revolution
pointed the way to bridge individualism with social concerns into a political theory of action), and the other an inheritor of Marxist philosophy, Antonio Gramsci. These two great trajectories, according to Carlo Rosselli needed to be recombined. This was the message behind his manuscript,
Socialismo liberale
, which he published first in French in Paris in 1930 (the Italian edition did not appear until after the war). As the title itself denoted, Rosselli advocated a way of thinking that combined the liberal tradition’s emphasis on the importance of free will with the Marxist tradition’s stress on social justice into one brand, fused in a commitment to democracy. Renounce the quest for certainty, abandon astrological searches for the inevitable laws of History, and get past the sterile abstractions of past debates. This was all inscribed in a fundamental skepticism about historical
laws, and the need to admit that one can act, learn by acting, reevaluate, correct one’s opinions, act once more—in the service of liberty and justice for their own sake.
⁴⁶

It would take years for this amalgamation of ideas and influences to form the new chemical balance of Hirschmann’s thinking. For the moment, while he was moved and inspired by his conversations with Eugenio and drifted into
giellisti
, Rossellian socialist-liberal circles, with Renzo, he was also nearing the end of his studies at HEC. By the spring of 1935, as Ursula was reaching out to Eugenio, Otto Albert began to make plans for the next uprooting; in early April, he wrote to Mutti asking for her to send him original certifications from the Collège Français and notarized documents confirming her own nationality and status. He was applying for a fellowship to go to the London School of Economics (LSE). HEC had been a disappointment. This made Hirschmann all the more determined to make the next step the right one. If Paris had not satisfied his curiosity to learn economics, Hirschmann hoped that London would. The letter of support from the Entr’aide Universitaire Internationale must have helped clinch the opportunity to open new intellectual vistas; he was accepted to the LSE and given one year’s scholarship. In early summer, he finished his final exams at HEC, reading
Brothers Karamazov
to the last, and escaped to Forte dei Marmi for a vacation with Ursula and Eugenio. Then he was back in Paris, packing his bags, getting ready for London.

From the true antagonist boundless courage flows from you.

  
FRANZ KAFKA

O
ver the course of the next three years, Hirschmann shuffled between four countries, enlisted to fight in a civil war, joined an underground resistance, and got a doctoral degree. The languages changed—from French to English to Spanish to Italian and back to French—but his commitment to fight fascism remained the same, no matter the language or land. Uprooted from country yet loyal to cause, Hirschmann found a way to make this an intellectually fertile period, especially after the disappointments of HEC. It was in these years that Hirschmann got his first exposure to real economics at the London School of Economics, which he had long been seeking. His relationship with Eugenio Colorni and the influence of his style of thinking came into full bloom in Trieste. Between the books of London and Trieste was a searing political and military experience in the Spanish Civil War.
¹

These were pendular years. Hirschmann swung between countries and languages, as well as from esoteric reading to self-sacrificing struggle, from
homme de lettres
to man of action, suggesting an erratic, reactive, or unpremeditated quality to his moves. No doubt, in the volatile years from 1935 to 1938, the highly fluid settings in each country clearly affected his choices; there was a great deal of restlessness to his decisions, as his former girlfriend, Inge Franck, had noted presciently, and the volatility of European popular fronts and their right-wing foes account for part
of Hirschmann’s swings as he moved around the continent searching for new coordinates.