Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (52 page)

Fortuna struck more than once. By the middle of the academic year 1956–57, it was clear that Albert would not be able to complete his envisioned book. In March, Albert approached Norman S. Buchanan, who had taught at Berkeley when Albert arrived there as a refugee and in 1956 had become the director of the Social Science Division of the Rockefeller Foundation. Buchanan, whose work at the foundation was more and more involved with development issues in the Third World, saw an opportunity. He arranged to fund another year for Hirschman at Yale. Hirschman shared his glee with his sister. “I will be able to continue with this and other kinds of wisdom: about two weeks ago I was informed that the Rockefeller Foundation (I cannot burden Ford any longer) is going to finance my research … at the same time I am going to work as a consultant, in particular in connection with the foundation’s plan to support and create social science research projects and institutes in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.” He was also already aware of problems with his fit in the American academy. “Although the uncertainty concerning my future employment will continue to persist, I do not mind much, since I am still not sure I would really enjoy university life in the long run—although I am now tending toward it more than a few years ago. Still, I don’t think I am suited as a professor—not confident or loquacious enough.”
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So, a one-year fellowship evolved into two years.

In return, Albert agreed to do some consulting work for the Rockefeller, which sent him to Brazil in August 1957 to participate in the International Economics Association meeting in Rio de Janeiro. Henry Wallich joined him. The trip to Rio turned into a formative fortnight because there was another purpose to the trip: the foundation had wanted Albert to spend a month looking into some of their funded projects and the prospects for social science research in Brazil and Colombia. This gave Hirschman an opportunity to get to know Latin American scholars in a way he never had while living in Bogotá and working on the margins of academic research circles. His analytical travelogue of impressions presaged a lifelong involvement with North American foundations behind development projects and social science research in Latin America.
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The Rio conference was an eye-opener. Hirschman got his first real exposure to Latin American, especially Brazilian, social scientists, such as Celso Furtado (who was relatively silent, but “was really the éminence grise”), Roberto Campos, the “intellectually snobbish” Alexandre Kafka, and the more elder, “aristocratic,” and orthodox Eugenio Gudin, who presided over the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, the event’s cosponsor. Kafka’s paper at the conference was particularly illuminating for it offered a theoretical critique of economic development from a Latin American perspective, one that flew in the face of northern orthodoxies: it pointed not to vicious cycles of poverty and shortages of capital, but rather to fundamental structural shifts and tensions associated with the changes in capitalism within the region. Latin America was hardly poor and inert, the region’s economists insisted. Kafka pointed to the ways in which shocks created growth opportunities, which in turn spawned social inequalities and inflation; growth promoted structural disequilibrium, rather than resolving it. “Imbalance,” argued the Brazilian economist, “seems to be an interesting part of the explanation of the successful economic development of important Latin American countries.” It was change itself that was the challenge, not the lack of change. Here were eloquent, technically proficient economists who had no trouble seeing the problems of American social science. Rosenstein-Rodan made his case for the “big push” and
generalized planning only to run into flak from Furtado, Kafka, and other Latin Americans present. Hirschman took this all in with amazement. This was, Hirschman quickly realized, “a remarkable convergence.”
⁸

In the wake of the conference, he worked his way through the university and think-tank circles of Brazil. These discussions only confirmed his impressions from the conference. After a long meeting at the Brazilian Institute of Economics with Kafka and others, he concluded that “this is obviously a remarkably competent group of people—almost uncomfortably so, for it is bound to be envied and denigrated by the far more ubiquitous incompetents.” Of course, it was a divided scene—largely between a figure like Celso Furtado, left-leaning, nationalistic, and the more conservative Roberto Campos on the other side. Hirschman was impressed by both, though he acknowledged that the latter tended to cluster some of the smarter younger economists. The School of Sociology at the University of São Paulo came in for similar praise. After almost three “fantastic” weeks in Brazil, Hirschman returned to Yale and feverishly rewrote the early, now lost, drafts of his manuscript. Of course, this was a risky move. With one year left on the clock of his fellowship, extensive revisions threatened to prolong the writing beyond his support. But the inspiration from Brazil could not be denied.
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His impressions, a source of some loneliness and doubt when they were formed in Colombia, were now confirmed by what he encountered with these charismatic and original Latin American colleagues. They also ushered in a romance with Latin American, and especially Brazilian, social scientists, who seemed less disciplinarily constrained and more eclectic—without being any less serious about their economics.

As he immersed himself, the news arrived that his mother, now 77 years old, had died in Rome in December 1956. It was a sign of how strained their relationship had been over the years that Hirschman was not so troubled by her illness. Indeed, his work had cut into his correspondence with Ursula—which elicited a sharp comment from his sister after Mutti’s death. “Many thanks for your letter with the description of Mutti’s last days,” he wrote contritely. “It was good to know that she was not alone and that she only suffered for a short time. How was it for our
and your Eva? Was the relationship to your children in the end better?” Evidently, Mutti had the same ability to alienate her grandchildren as she did her son. But Albert had some patching up to do with his sister. “Please don’t be angry with me because I haven’t written. I cannot get myself to degrade our relationship to the level of writing post and Christmas cards.”
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Albert’s embarking on a new career at midlife lifted the charmed halo that hung over the Hirschman family. Sarah found North Haven a hub of boredom, not unlike the suburban life she had endured in Washington. It would have spelled hardship had the girls not been enrolled in schools. Sarah could explore new horizons. She took courses at Yale, especially in anthropology. Sidney Mintz, whose pioneering work on Puerto Rico was itself shaping ideas of development from a different disciplinary standpoint, opened up the world of anthropology to Sarah, and thus to Albert. Mintz became a close friend, and he and Albert had affinities in their reservations about the orthodoxies of modernization theory. Another close friend was the professor of French literature, Victor Brombert. With time, Sarah’s hesitations about leaving Bogotá began to fade.

It was Katia and Lisa who struggled most in the adjustment. Albert’s work would pull him more and more away from home in a way that the Bogotá routine never did; there is no memory of making up poems or weekend adventure. This coincided with the girls’ adolescence and their tribulations going to high school in suburban, 1950s America. The girls had had friends in Bogotá and preferred the more relaxed, tightly knit atmosphere of their Colegio, which was a close walk from the house. Now they faced junior high school and high school and the influences of peer pressure on two, culturally displaced girls. Katia, in particular, found the adjustment from the comforts of Bogotá trying. In her first autumn, the North Haven High School put on a dance. Anxious to fit in, she donned her fanciest dress, white socks, and patent leather shoes. The scene was mortifying. The gym was huge, the music loud, and all the girls wore silk stockings, the precursor to panty hose. No boy asked her to dance; Katia glued herself to a chair to wait for her parents to rescue her. Still, the girls tried hard to adjust. One day they returned from school with lipstick on.
And the stockings! To Sarah, they looked dressed for Halloween. “What happened to you?” she exclaimed in horror. There was one consolation: a television in the basement of the rented house, and Albert and Sarah let the girls watch half an hour per day. While they missed their friends and life in Bogotá, they soaked up Zorro, Lassie, and the Lone Ranger. Perhaps it could not be helped, but looking back, Katia and Lisa associated the move to the United States with a loss of family adventure; Albert’s journey into an academic career was not one they could join.

Even language became a thorny issue. At home, in Washington and in Bogotá, French was the family tongue. Tensions first surfaced in Washington, when the girls, uncomfortable with the schism between private and public ways, would return from school and ask their parents “not to speak French now.” This common-enough plight of immigrant families soon found a variety of compromises. By the time they moved to North Haven, French was the language for driving in the car, and since there was a lot of driving, rust did not develop on the girls’ vocal chords. Breakfasts, where, in spite of all the moving about, the Hirschmans always shared a proper meal, were also French time. But as the girls moved through adolescence, English edged out French. Sarah and Albert did not finally abandon French as the nuptial tongue until they moved to New York. One day, Albert returned from his office at Columbia University, having had to lecture in English, to confess “you know, I really feel that it would be good for me to speak English at home.” Teaching had been so traumatic that he needed to find ways to alleviate the anxiety. The linguistic conversion began at once. To Sarah, shifting their relationship to English “was the most difficult thing I ever did in my life.”
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Still, life in the United States was not without opportunities of its own—like schooling. And it was always clear, and accepted, what the underlying purpose of the relocation was: to allow Albert to reset his career through writing. He did not squander his side of the deal; the family’s support and Yale’s opportunity were gift horses whose mouths he was not about to inspect. Brimming with ideas and determined to compose something that garnered more attention than his first effort to join the republic of letters, he plunged into writing without hesitation. But the
project was not, at the outset, a book. He began with a few articles, one on economic policy and another on investment decisions, which he submitted to the
American Economic Review
and
Economic Development and Cultural Change
. “I am under great moral pressure to be ‘creative,’ ” he told Ursula, explaining that he was furiously coming to terms with theories of economic development. “I am even about to create my own and am thinking about writing a book.”
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In stages he moved toward the idea of a full book; by the spring it had some undergirding principles. One was that it be short on details and more deductive and conceptual in nature, based on Colombian lessons but without making them explicit. This did not mean that he diminished the significance of empirical fieldwork. It may have been that Hirschman worried that a single “case study” would pigeonhole the book. What is an “insight,” Hirschman wondered? Here, the influence of Schelling, his most influential manuscript reader, was subtle but important. Schelling, without knowing how prominent he would be, pushed Hirschman from the start to translate the lessons from his Colombian immersion into more general insights, to connect the observations of small, local changes to inform the broad view. Hirschman told his sister, after one of his chats with Schelling, that he found his friend “one of the most intelligent people that I know (almost scary)—he turned away from economics and is now more interested in questions of foreign policy and peace strategy.” What helped was a distinction between human
strategies
, a key word for both thinkers, and not
theories
, as motors of social processes. Moreover, they shared an affinity in dealing with the relationship between case studies and general insights. Neither bothered too much that a single case of multiple strategies would constrain conceptual innovation; Hirschman noted that Karl Marx wrote
Capital
based on observations of industrialization in one country without having to add “—A Case Study of England.”
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There were also immovable practicalities to consider. Even if he had wanted to compose a classical case study, there were certain rules of evidence to follow. In the rush, he’d arrived in New Haven without organized data and had no time to collect any systematically. Beside, if
he wanted a career maker, it would be better to be as universal as possible, and he wasted little time striking out in that direction. Freed up in this way, by April 1957, he had three sections written. When he got back from Rio, his drafts went through a major overhaul. Off the library shelves came the works of Latin American heterodox thinking, ranging from the Peruvian Marxist of the 1920s, José Carlos Mariátegui, to Raúl Prebisch, the influential Argentine economist whose 1949 “Manifesto” for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America was so definitive for—if hotly debated by—Latin American social scientists. Hirschman was finally tangling with alternative, more radical thinking about development within Latin America, though his more developed thoughts on this structuralist tradition would come out later. For now, they emboldened him to see the balanced growth doctrine as one increasingly troubled standpoint—and one that made a lot of value-laden assumptions about the societies it claimed to want to remedy. As he put it to Buchanan, he “was catching up with the rapidly expanding literature on economic development.”
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The work was more than an impressionistic brainchild of experience. Its uniqueness lay in its combination, of which experience in the field was a part. The making of
The Strategy of Economic Development
, which appeared in the fall of 1958, reveals a tangle of influences woven of many strands. Economic development may have been a rapidly expanding field, but it was also, at least to Hirschman, narrow and rehearsed the same theoretical and uncomplicated mantras he found so tiresome. Behind the veneer of understanding and smiling tolerance lurked impatience. But Hirschman knew how and when to move to more interesting quarries. Aside from his own observations, he drew from a range of fields beyond economics to inform his economics.