Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (64 page)

If this came from the Right, it was the Latin American Left that was especially partial to the “unthinking structuralist reflex.” Potential “non-fundamental” forces were dismissed as trivial or boring, even if addressing them increased and broadened the paths forward. A sign of this was the way that progressive intellectuals had swung from believing that industrialization was the miracle solution to underdevelopment, to the malefactor. The dream of car plants and steel mills teeming with modern workers went from being a source of enchantment to disenchantment. The setbacks and problems of the 1960s changed the tune; now the factory became
the symbol of all that was off course, hopeless. Social scientists were beginning to conclude that industrialists were as feudal and patrimonial as the old landed classes they were once meant to dislodge; they were just one more member of the ageless, venal oligarchy.

This style of thinking struck Hirschman as doommongering. The only way out of the impasse, for the Right, was a forced capitalist demarche, such as Brazil under its generals. For the left, the same structuralist bent pointed to revolution as the only remedy. There was something déjà vu about this. As Hirschman wandered through the region, he scratched out some notes that would lead to an essay reviving the case for industrialization by giving it a different spin, an epic of its own—one that might salvage the cause for a road somewhere between the extremes. The essay, “The Political Economy of Import-Substituting Industrialization in Latin America,” would become a classic in Latin American economic history. Far from being “wrong,” the industrial adventure carried certain properties that obtain in countries launching “late-late” industry—in contrast to the portrait of the “late” cases of Japan, Russia, and Germany depicted by Shura Gerschenkron. Far too much was expected from the start; it was practically foregone that industry was condemned to disappoint. Late-latecomers built up light-consumer-goods manufacturing, in contrast to the muscular producer goods of the latecomers. Industrialization was therefore smoother, less disruptive—and yielded less instruction or a “convulsive élan” that dominated the Japanese and German eagerness to catch up to the leaders. But to give up now and throw in the towel, argued Hirschman, was naïve and self-defeating. One option, Hirschman suggested prophetically, was to start exporting manufactures, an insight he had probed long before the Asian miracle became a “model.”
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The nub of Hirschman’s analysis was to show that not all histories had to conform to a single normative account that identified industry with an industrial
revolution
in order to work out. In fact, the sooner Latin Americans could free themselves from finger-wagging histories of their failure as compared to first-world “success” stories, the better. They could free themselves of expecting industry to change the social order when instead all it did was pump out manufactures. The first ideas were unveiled to an
audience of social scientists in Santiago to become a touchstone of an alternative economic history of the region, a history less driven by an obsession with what went wrong. The younger generation of social scientists like Cardoso took note; he would partner with another sociologist, Enzo Faletto, to author one of the classics of social sciences in the region called
Dependency and Development in Latin America
, which bore a perceptible Hirschmanian imprint of trying to reveal the multiple trajectories of the history of capitalism.
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Thinking about a different narrative of the history of development—how to sing the epic of what was accomplished—sharpened the focus on the idea that what was going on in peoples’ minds was important in shaping possibilities. At the time, social scientists tended to dwell on the external limits to what people could do—their place in social structures and the institutions that governed them. No work exemplified this more than Barrington Moore’s
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
, published in 1966. Moore and Hirschman were colleagues and had a cordial relationship, but Moore’s book left Hirschman shaking his head. The quest for deep, antecedent determinants of large, encompassing outcomes, like dictatorship or democracy or capitalism, stripped history of politics and the possibilities for thinking about alternative, surprising tracks. When Dan Rustow was putting together a special issue of
Daedalus
, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he asked Albert to say something new about leadership. Hirschman agreed and used the occasion to cycle back to his concern that leaders in Latin America fettered themselves with their own perceptions. Prompted by a well-known anthology of essays edited by the Chilean sociologist Claudio Véliz called
The Obstacles to Change in Latin America
, Hirschman gently chided his Latin American colleagues for leaving themselves—as intellectuals—out of the inventory of fetters. They were as much obstacles as any deep structure. One evening he went to a dinner party in Santiago. Wishing to catch up with Véliz, who’d recently returned to Chile, Hirschman asked his hosts for Véliz’s phone number. The host didn’t have it and dismissed the telephone book as a list of numbers for people who had died or left the country. Everyone laughed and enjoyed the meal. The
next morning, in his hotel, Hirschman spied the phone directory in his room. Curious, he looked up Véliz, dialed the number, and quickly found the voice of his friend at the other end of the line. The tale was an example of the ways in which Latin American intellectuals had a habit of overperceiving the ways in which things remained the same and tended to wave off changes as unoriginal or copied from someone else (preferring to fetishize the “original” version of the breakthrough). Indeed, in some cases intellectuals could not even see that innovations occurred in their own backyards because they presumed that these sorts of things only happened in “advanced” countries.

By shifting the debate about dependency from the familiar problems—with feudal elites, capital flight, and reliance on exports—to the mind, he was breaking new ground. In the 1960s, with the gathering consensus on the Left that change could only be effected through a violent, cathartic explosion, Hirschman was trying to sound a different key—already a shift from his celebration of the “reformmongers” to highlight a “revolution by stealth.” More gradual, unspectacular, and not easy to see if one looks obsessively for the original, change was threatened with being throttled by intellectuals looking for—and increasingly advocating—the “loud” style. The perception of hindrances could thereby become its most pernicious obstacle: “The obstacles to the
perception
of change thus turn into an important obstacle to
change itself
,” he observed.
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Latin Americans were not the only prisoners of paradigms and perceptions. There was little that was furtive about the thinking that governed social scientists and policy makers north of the border. One who was increasingly alarmed was Sandy Stevenson, now the deputy director of the Economics Department at the World Bank. He was increasingly concerned about the development decade’s increasing noise about foreign “aid” as panacea or poison. Sandy wanted fresh thinking. Evidently unfazed by the disappointments of
Development Projects Observed
, he appealed to Albert. Albert in turn went to a young colleague at Harvard, Richard Bird, whom he had known when Richard was a graduate student at Columbia and who had recently returned from field work in Colombia. They were both interested in how economic transfers affected growth.
Sandy offered the opportunity to address the ways in which Americans thought about their charity to the Third World.
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Aid was so fraught with generosity and resentment on all sides that it could not help but cause friction. Hirschman and Bird made a strong case for project lending over program support; program funding was bound to create friction between donor and recipient because it all too often implied that donors’ “own judgment is superior to that of the recipient” and overrides local knowledge in areas where projects are more likely to have beneficial impacts. Pay attention to the grammar of aid relationships—and the inequities built into them—between givers and takers. When Albert and Richard were done with an initial draft, it went to Sandy in late autumn 1967. The World Bankers, some of them still twitching from the last Hirschman installment, were not exactly pleased by the suggestion that they might be no less blinded by their way of thinking than their Latin American counterparts. In fact, they were incensed. Sandy wrote to Albert just before New Year’s, including several long memoranda from his staff. “As you will see,” he warned, “they are somewhat explosive.… But I think they are interesting and I hope you will find them useful.”
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Hirschman found them neither useful nor interesting—except as an index of social scientists’ resistance to thinking of themselves as part of the problem. If he was dismayed, he never let on. By the time World Bankers were typing up their reactions, Hirschman was moving on to other frontiers.

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing up it, it would have been permitted.

  
FRANZ KAFKA

T
he late 1960s wrenched major American cities and university campuses with unrest; in Mexico City, Prague, and Paris, they became battlefields that shook regimes. Coups d’états and civil war spread across what were once upliftingly called “new nations.” The promises of the development decade seemed increasingly empty. How could one defend reform in this context? This was a difficult question, faced not only with an establishment looking for manageable answers, but also with radical sources of dissent coming back to life with an energy unseen since the 1930s. In late 1969, after a trip to Latin America, Hirschman penned a short essay, “How to Divest in Latin America, and Why,” a manifesto calling for American tolerance for nationalism and reform abroad. He gave a draft to a younger colleague, Sam Bowles. Bowles’s response echoed the tone of a new generation: Hirschman’s essay was a manifesto to make capitalism palatable. Divestment simply left the terrain of development to national bourgeoisies so that they “can exercise their class interests.” Left-wingers found Hirschman’s reformism too tepid to solve the world’s mounting problems. But he liked Bowles, a lot, so, he paused to clarify his argument: “I don’t think the ‘constructive’ tone is as counterrevolutionary as you think.” Was the choice just between revolution or foreign domination? Surely this was too limited, especially given the difficulties facing Latin American rebels—trigger-happy despots, scared investors,
and Green Berets? “What I am doing, perhaps, is to try to increase the number of options, by pointing out the requirements … of a strategy that does not have revolution as an absolute prerequisite. I have all along argued against those who lay down such prerequisites for economic development, be they W. W. Rostow or [the Marxist] Paul Baran.” There had to be more ways of “moving forward.” Without them, people would be paralyzed and caught in an uneven clash of extremes. He ended the letter with a fable about a community of Jews who’d gathered to lament their lot. After much complaining, one of them finally stood up and concluded: “God will help!” A moment of silence passed before another carped, “But how does God help until such time as God will help?”
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In fact, “How to Divest” was an epistle in article form written to New York’s governor Nelson Rockefeller. Nursing presidential aspirations and wanting to display his foreign policy credentials, Rockefeller had invited the Harvard economist to join him on a tour of Latin America. Hirschman politely said no and gave his reasons in “How to Divest,” a proposal to help improve things until God came along, an economist’s way of doing more than kvetch in the safer precincts of the faculty club.

Indeed, Harvard seemed at first to be an unlikely setting for a heated clash. Life in Cambridge was lively and social. The Hirschmans were immediately swept up in the Harvard way, living in a modest, wood-clad house on Holden St., a few blocks from Littauer Hall, the columned home of the economics department. The Galbraiths lived nearby, and the Hirschmans were frequent guests at their festive, sophisticated soirées full of the “beautiful people.” Across the street were the Gerschenkrons. Albert and Shura were respectful and courteous, and occasionally Shura would seek out Sarah at home to pore over Tolstoy; the two conversed in Russian. But the ties tended to be formal, and with time, increasingly strained. For the first time, Hirschman had a personal study at home, but he had little time to use it. “The establishment here is the only thing that is really exaggerated,” he confessed to Ursula. The university was busy with seminars, discussion groups, and conferences. There seemed to be a committee for everything. When a new institute for politics was being created in memory of John F. Kennedy, the bash was all glitz. Jackie
Kennedy made a glamorous appearance. Afterward, the guests moved to the Galbraiths’ for champagne and dancing. Hirschman wanted to slink home to his study; Sarah did her best to keep him engaged. “How one is then still supposed to be able to write something, that I haven’t quite understood yet,” he grumbled. One upside of socializing with the well-heeled was that he dusted off his childhood tennis game. Perhaps it was a discrete source of revenge, for he soon found himself beating most of his colleagues on the court.
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But he did not grumble much. If he did, it was mainly on account of the teaching and diplomatic duties of a senior academic figure. Some occasions, like Octavio Paz’s frequent visits to Harvard, were redeemable; Hirschman and Paz became friends. But mostly, the public scene was tiresome, and he was only partly successful at inventive excuses to avoid it. Harvard gave him friendships, some rekindled, and some new, especially Stanley and Inge Hoffmann. It was almost a natural convergence. Though Albert and Stanley spoke in English, they shared French backgrounds and their discomfort with the disciplinary narrowness of departmental life. Inge and Sarah also became very close. The couples got together frequently for dinners and movies.
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