Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (3 page)

Words were to Hirschman what equations were for other economists. Indeed, by the standards of economics, Hirschman was an exceedingly wordy economist. Many in the profession, without knowing that he was once fairly handy with statistics and enjoyed its possibilities, disavowed him as a colleague for it. As Hirschman became a mature scholar, the charge of practicing a social science that did not lend itself to formal, theory-testing rigors or mathematical modeling was a common one. He felt compelled to explain himself to his friend from his Harvard days, Daniel Bell. “The model builders sometimes criticize me,” Hirschman explained, “for not putting my thoughts into mathematical models. My reply to them is that mathematics has not quite caught up with metaphor or language—both are more inventive!”
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To many, this may seem a self-serving defense. But it is true that Hirschman’s skill with words always eclipsed his dexterity with numbers, and as the economics profession abandoned the former to pursue the latter, Hirschman was out of step.

Why so much about words? For one thing, they were a sanctuary, a refuge for a man with no country. In the summer of 1944, as he waited anxiously and increasingly depressed in North Africa to join the American Army in Europe, he found solace in words. Despair began to overwhelm him as he thought about the number of people who had suffered on account of the war “or worse, the prisoners in concentration camps.” Anguished, he happened upon a verse by Jean Wahl, “Merci mon corps, tu fais bien ton métier de corps.” Writing to his pregnant wife (Sarah) in New York, he exclaimed, “Isn’t this well said? And so simple! Good poetry produces the effect of great inventions. It is so simple but one must think about it.” Characteristically, he concluded with more words inspired by those words: these are “themes to be developed.” Behind him, Albert Hirschman left diaries, letters, and marginalia in books filled with “ideas,” “themes,” and “questions” to mark the trails of his thoughts, verbal routes into his mind’s eye.
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Language, especially its written form, was a dwelling place for mind and soul. That someone with so many languages should think of its practice as a kind of home may seem strange to us. But it was precisely his Odyssean life, so long unsettled that a physical home was almost an arbitrary
one, that enhanced the dominion of words. He was above all a writer, and as Joseph Brodsky once noted, “for a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.”

Words thereby gave solace. But they are also our clues to an intellectual imagination. Words, sentences, prose, and poetry—in effect, literature—were more than embellishments or ornaments to hang on existing social scientific classifications. Hirschman’s work represents an effort to practice social science
as
literature. It is what makes him appear so original in style and content now that the bonds between literature and social science have increasingly been severed. Hirschman, and the cultural milieu of assimilated bourgeois Jews of Berlin, sank a taproot deep into the classics, from Kafka the modernist to the
Odyssey
, long portions of which Hirschman could recite from the time he was a child. It is why Flaubert’s interiority gives insight into psychology, and it is why La Rochefoucauld plumbs the cunning of self-interest. Good literature, to Hirschman, summons the power of small details and anomalies to uncover something new about the whole. As Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a close friend, collaborator, and future president of Brazil once told me, Hirschman was like a Dutch painter, revealing in the small new ways of seeing the whole. An economist to the end, he was forever conjugating genres, styles, and divisions of the human sciences. As the cursus of his life slowly closed with the century, he made of his style a kind of rampart from which to warn us, without giving up on humor, of the perils of overspecialization, of a narrowing of vision, and of the temptation to fall in love with the image of one’s own technical prowess and vocabulary and lose sight of the vitality of moving back and forth between proving and preaching. Appreciating this is crucial for understanding his stance toward evidence and argumentation, why to him rhetoric mattered. He exemplifies at once a disposition that is much broader than the estuary of our social sciences; perhaps for this reason he represents a humanism of social science that may be slowly drying up.

But this would be far too gloomy a reading—and Hirschman would be the first to object to this portrait of his own work. Thank goodness, he would no doubt say, that Fortuna has plenty of tricks up her sleeve.

The affection for writing is what draws our attention to Hirschman; it is his books and articles that have captivated generations of readers and make him unique in the human sciences. But this story is not the story of the works; it is rather the story behind them. By this I do not mean that Hirschman’s books and essays should speak for themselves, though their lucidity often left me paraphrasing what was rendered much better in the original. Upon rereading one of Hirschman’s essays, the great historian of ideas Quentin Skinner felt compelled to confess that he had been pressing it upon his Cambridge graduate students, “but I find on re-reading it that the points I try to make to them about it are in fact in the essay itself. An unconscious application of a form of dishonesty common, I suppose, among teachers, especially of the harried kind.”
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I agree with Skinner. This study does not seek to explain arguments that are told well enough by the original author, but rather, by illuminating the drama, complexity, tension—and downright hard work of the intellectual labor process—to invite readers to have their own reading experience by telling the biographical backstory of a life’s ideas.

But which backstory? These days, biography, especially of the “popular” sort, has become a synonym for private revelation, culled from a stash of secret letters, a hidden diary, or a confession. The presumption seems to be that what is most private is also most revealing, as if the
real
truth about someone is that which is least known, what Louis Menand called “the Rosebud assumption.”
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Leave aside the naïveté of this genre—as if people don’t lie in their letters, distort in their diaries, and concoct in their confessions. Hirschman himself was not above melodramatizing the moment. There is also the matter of what is always inscrutable about a life history. In trying to render a vivid sense of the person’s likeness from letters, personal notes, manuscripts, and archives from several continents, not to mention the conversations with him and others, I became aware of the multiplying gaps, the unprovable stories, the maddening lack of evidence. Some are the gaps that we know of, such as the death of his dear colleague and close friend, Clifford Geertz, before I could arrange formal interviews with him. The absence of Geertz’s testimony will be a lasting fault, and readers should be aware of the absence of his voice here.
There are also gaps of a less accidental kind; Hirschman, though pressed, did not want to revisit his memories of fighting for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. I have often wondered whether his brand of hopefulness and his faith in reform, his possibilism, required covering the tracks of terrible memories. If they did, it is important to know that some details are sometimes more relevant and saddening in their absence because the gap was there for a reason.

Mercifully, biographical uncertainty is something that can now be admitted. It points to something that Hermione Lee has thoughtfully discussed: how a biography amalgamates what is known and what is not known, the present and the absent,—and how it includes the welter of alternatives, accidents, might-have-beens, in a word, the
possibilities
of a life, only some of which can be reconstructed.
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It is perhaps fitting that Hirschman himself would accent life’s possibilities, not just in the way he lived but also for History, and that any social theory worth its weight had to reckon with it. At the core of his possibilism was the idea that people had a right to what he called a “non-projected future.” From a biographer’s point of view, one might say the same of the past, especially one that traces a subject’s uncanny ability to get out of a jam and find reasons for hope and space for reform even when they seem most implausible. It was not an accident that one of Hirschman’s favored words was
débrouillard
, from the Old French root,
brouiller
(to mix up), which alludes to artful ways to wiggle out of a convoluted, intractable, or bad situation.

Words met ideas and ideas found their expression in a quest. One might see Hirschman as a latter-day Don Quixote, striving in his books and essays to produce possibilities that can only be dimly seen. Cervantes was, in fact, a favorite of Hirschman’s and a source of some of his selected quotes. The very idea of Quixote’s
Librillo de memoria
, his book of memories, inspired the kind of note taking and observation that provide grist for the narrative of this book. It was only after several years of research that Hirschman’s wife, muse, and, in decisive moments, his life intellectual partner shared with me Hirschman’s little brown diaries, in which he jotted some of his most personal notes. Understandably, it had taken time to build confidence in her husband’s biographer. These as well as other
sources help paint a portrait of an errant knight, a figure often noted for being disconnected from reality. But this is only one mode of reading the character, a mode that became commonplace during the English Civil War, which has warped how we think of dreamers. In Hirschman we find a dreamer—Fry would complain about his invaluable coconspirator that he was too often
dans la lune
—who was most certainly connected to his worlds, connected and committed to the extent that he was willing to lay his life on the line for his cause.

The quest is evident across the writings that would span seven decades. But there is no single idea or topic at work; Hirschman’s attention moved along with History. The subjects vary from the economic causes of imperialism and war, the subject of his near-forgotten first book,
National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade
(1945), to his searing indictment of modern habits of political discourse in
The Rhetoric of Reaction
(1991). One can read any single Hirschman oeuvre as a window onto a moment, and together they make up a kind of intellectual glossary of a century. Certainly, many of his works now rank among classics of the social sciences—one thinks of
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
(1970) or
The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph
(1977). To see them as testimonies and products of moments in time and place, to give these books their own history, is one aspiration of this book.

And yet, there are some common traits in this glossary. One trait was style. It can be read at first blush as literary. Hirschman would become one of the greatest
authors
in the social sciences, a division of intellectual life admittedly short on writerly credentials. Many have delighted in his vivid metaphors, memorable images, and poetic turns. But the great prose was in the service of a disposition that urged wariness about big claims, grand theories, and encompassing plans and the certainties that were required to scaffold them—required because social scientists increasingly sought quarry in models, theories, and laws that were meant to be true across time, and thus outside History. Hirschman was a skeptic who preferred anomalies, surprises, and the power of unintended effects, forces that were sometimes easier to see in literature. Whatever prevailed as the
orthodoxy—fixing the dollar gap in Europe with austerity, faith in planning in the 1950s, exuberance about foreign aid in the 1960s, Latin American defeatism, and the triumph of free-market ideologies in the 1980s—Hirschman positioned himself as a contrarian. This was because he always feared that orthodoxy and certainty excluded the creative possibilities of doubt, of learning from surprises.

As such, his narrative style summoned readers to question whether History really had to unfold a given way. Schooled as an adolescent in Marxism in one of its hotbeds, Berlin, he came to reject anything that smacked of teleology or historical laws. His early battles with Communist orthodoxy would have a lifelong effect. Sometimes the way out of a jam could come from being more modest, accepting one’s limitations, and pursuing strategies that lay before one’s nose, if only one could shed the temptation to presume that bigger is better or grander is greater. Other times, it was precisely exaggeration and ambition that was required. Being open to many possibilities meant accepting uncertainty and embracing the fact that one could learn from experience in the world by forfeiting presumptions that one could not know it all. Some of the options included the most counterintuitive. As he would note in
Strategy of Economic Development
(1958), it is where one faces the most resistance that one should press one’s pursuits. For this reason, some of his critics have noted that Hirschman had more fondness for understanding complexity in the social sciences than searching for strong predictions. They are right, and they are right to point to his affection for the powerful image over the perfect equation. But there are reasons for this preference that this biography aims to illuminate.

If style was one of the traits, it was connected to the content of his thinking. And the content was deeply rooted in a sense of being in the world. Hirschman’s century was one of bad situations, and he found himself repeatedly—indeed, placed himself—at their junctions. Often painted as a hundred years of revolution, war, and genocide, the twentieth century ended with the general consensus that humanity did not dignify itself but rather displayed an ability to perform vast horrors. It is for this reason that Eric Hobsbawm once depicted the long history of the short century as an “age of extremes.” The extremes had their intellectuals.
Many intellectuals. And many of these intellectuals worked in the service of the extremes. Just as we are accustomed to see the twentieth century as the age of extremes, we have tended to be more interested in its extremist apostles, from the revolutionaries to the reactionaries.