Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (71 page)

It was not just Latin America that gave cause for self-reflection. The economic crisis of the early 1970s was a more general crisis of ideas—and of their institutional brainchildren. Entire paradigms and analytical systems began to crumble.
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Since the election of Richard Nixon, the United
States was in more upheaval than ever. Ditching the Bretton Woods system made the world economy more turbulent. Inflation began its inexorable creep upward, economic growth slowed, and the war in Vietnam escalated. The gloom of the 1970s reversed what seemed in retrospect a festive, hopeful 1960s. In the summer of 1972, Tom Schelling asked Hirschman to write an essay for a special issue of the
Quarterly Journal of Economics
, prompted by Staffan Linder’s book,
The Harried Leisure Class
, a Swedish broadside against the effervescence of consumption, which typified the changing mood. To Linder, affluent societies were caught on a treadmill of their own making. The preference for long courtships, time-consuming cuisine, and monogamous dating was giving way to sex, television, and jeans with ready-made holes. Hirschman questioned Staffan’s dismal view. As with the swings he noted in
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
, he predicted diminishing rewards from “obituary-improving activities” and a return to civic life and old style romance. As with markets, self-corrections might stave off the trap of harriedness. This was a bit abstract; it is hard not to see him struggling to resist disenchantment.
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The reelection later that year of Richard Nixon aggravated the more general malaise. In the early spring, Hirschman joined a “professors’ march” against the Vietnam War, after which he quipped that there were real problems fighting Nixon: “One always suspects that everything he does is some sort of trick—one can’t quite take him at face value.” He joined the ill-fated campaign of the Democratic candidate George Mc-Govern, writing a brief on US policies toward Latin America. If the electoral defeat were not enough, the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam unleashed B-52 Stratofortresses to shower Hanoi for ten merciless days. In response to the downing of some of the bombers, President Nixon ordered the extension and intensification of the carnage. Hirschman watched in horror. “I don’t remember having been so shaken by a political event,” he confessed, “feeling so strongly in my bones the need to do something since the Spanish Civil War broke out.” These are revealing words for a man who walked around with wounds from the Aragonese front.
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While the world was shaking Hirschman’s faiths, he was also increasingly unhappy at Harvard. The passage of time did little to alleviate
his anxieties about teaching. By the end of the academic year 1971–72, he was exhausted and complained to Katia about how “everyday a new dissertation” and “two seminar papers [are] plunked down on my desk.” His stomach still churned before teaching. “He lived for writing, not for teaching,” recalled Stanley Hoffmann.
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To this was added a poisoned atmosphere in the university after the upheavals of 1969. Many of his former colleagues and friends would no longer speak to each other. Tensions ran especially high within the economics department. The faculty could not agree to a single appointment for three years. There were also deep methodological divides opening up. It affected Hirschman personally, though not because he sided with one or the other camp. Rather, it was the very existence of the divide that dispirited him. More and more, he found himself at odds with Shura Gerschenkron over student demands. In the spring of 1972, a group of graduate students asked him to open a departmental track in Marxist and neo-Marxist theory. Ever the ecumenical, he agreed, though in short order he confessed that it “has become a lot of work and nerves (and I don’t know if anything will come of it). The brittle coalition I think I have put together may well crumble.”
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It did; the idea went nowhere. Increasingly, rather than get involved on either side of the various quarrels, Hirschman withdrew into a polite, respectful silence. He would rather preserve friendships than drop his gloves over a dispute he felt had been blown out of proportion. Henry Rosovsky, his former chairman and eventually influential dean, recalled that Albert “grew rather distant from the affairs in the Department.”
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If there were colleagues with whom he regularly shared ideas, it was with junior colleagues. Visiting assistant professors such as Philippe Schmitter found in Hirschman one of the rare senior faculty interested in their work and careers. At the time, Harvard Economics was the home to a handful of well-known younger Marxist economists: Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, and Stephen Marglin. While Hirschman seldom agreed with them, their intelligence and creativity engaged him. In an ambience better known for the stratification between tenured and untenured scholars, Bowles found Hirschman “extremely warm” and unusually solicitous.
When in 1971, the gregarious Herb Gintis gave an opaque talk to the faculty, many of the senior economists “freaked out.” Galbraith, on the other hand, was delighted to “have someone to my left!” Hirschman was less extroverted; he saved his encouraging thoughts for a more discreet conversation later. When Hirschman returned from Mexico, it was with Sam Bowles that he sorted out some of his early formulations about economic inequality’s effects on social behavior. In February 1972, “Sam” (Bowles) and “Tom” (probably Schelling) joined Hirschman for lunch at the Faculty Club. In the course of their discussion, Hirschman turned his receipt into a graph of the “lexicographic ordering” of peoples’ preferences between the pleasure they get from others’ rewards versus their own. After the lunch, Hirschman went back to his office and scribbled his notes down on his yellow pad, giving himself a diagrammatic image to synthesize his ruminations for what would become one of his most influential papers, on the tolerance for inequality.
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Lexicographic ordering.

Hirschman’s was not an ideological affinity; he simply liked colleagues with fresh ideas. In 1969, Michael Rothschild was hired as a junior faculty member as a specialist in the theory of economic uncertainty; he came equipped with a powerful mathematical inclination. Hirschman sought him out. He wanted to know more about uncertainty and shared some of his own ideas with his younger colleague—who found Hirschman “completely wrong” but equally open-minded. Other senior colleagues might have bristled at Rothschild’s pointed comments, but not Hirschman, who asked an “utterly charmed” Rothschild to collaborate with him on an essay. Over lunch at the Faculty Club, Rothschild plotted a simple mathematical formulation (“the least mathematical piece I have ever written,” he would later confess). Impressed, Hirschman urged him to rewrite the draft so they could publish it together. Meanwhile, he asked a research assistant to help him hunt down a quote from St. Thomas Aquinas and gushed to Katia that “the whole theory is being put into equations by a young mathematical economist!”
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The mixture of faith and formulae was not to be. In the midst of all this, Hirschman checked into Massachusetts General Hospital for a heart procedure—so when Rothschild was done, he paid the patient a visit with the revisions under his arm. Hirschman flipped through the pages from his hospital bed, his face going from delight to shock. “This essay is all evidence!” he exclaimed. Rothschild was taken aback. The literary essayist and the precise quantitative analyst came face-to-face with their differences. But to Hirschman the personal relationship mattered too much for a falling out—and the article was eventually published under Hirschman’s name with a mathematical appendix by Rothschild. Later, Rothschild came to recognize the problem: Hirschman ran into problems contributing to a field that had long-since made its ballast out of elaborate formulae and definitions.
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The mood in the department deteriorated substantially over the decision to deny tenure to Sam Bowles in December 1972. The faculty cleaved. Graduate students accused the senior faculty of ideological bias. Hirschman, a Bowles-backer, was away on leave that year, which meant he was absent for the dispute. But it only contributed to his lack of interest
in departmental and disciplinary politics. In the wake of the Bowles vote, he tried to defer his return to Harvard—which generated “all kinds of problems.” The chair mollified him with a lighter teaching load, which led Hirschman to remark wryly that “it’s good to have some exit possibilities, that makes voice more powerful [sic].” Still, little could assuage him: within the first week of classes he had the feeling that “I’ll never be able to get back to my manuscript—there are just too many other pressures and obligations.”
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One day, he returned from his office and told Sarah that there was “a place where he dreamed of being.” It was the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Unlike Stanford’s center, it had permanent research faculty who were spared teaching obligations to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of great ideas. Hirschman fantasized being an intellectual without having to be an academic, a model more familiar to his Continental origins than of the United States and its rapidly expanding university midriff. It turned out that his former chairman, Carl Kaysen, had become the institute’s director. In November 1971, Hirschman wrote to Kaysen to inquire about a visiting fellowship for the following year. He had several projects going and was intrigued to hear that the respected anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, had recently moved there—“my work on the tropics would probably benefit from his presence.” One project was a continuation of his interest in the economic, social, and political effects of technology in the Third World. “I have done a considerable amount of dabbling in this field, which I like to call Micro-marxism,” he wrote. At the time, he was reading Fernando Ortíz’s
Cuban Counterpoint
and Geertz’s
Agricultural Involution
, both of which counterposed cultures organized around agrarian techniques. The project opened up a more conjectural topic, “a curiosity about attitudes and other changes that are entrained by technology although such changes were not visualized and much less intended, when the technology was adopted.” Never one to let a useful crisis go by without examining the foundations of ideas that were now in crisis, Hirschman was switching tacks. He had happened upon some writings of Montesquieu and Sir James Steuart about the rise of industry and commerce that piqued his interest. “Both felt,” he told Kaysen, “that the
pursuit of material gain would keep men from indulging their passions for power, conquest, and domination.” The current obsession with the Invisible Hand “justification of individual profit-seeking” had “driven out these earlier richer, though profoundly flawed, ideas.”
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As with many fledgling ideas, these were still muddled. A sojourn in the wooded comforts of the Institute for Advanced Study, first as a visitor in 1972–73, and then permanently in the fall of 1974, would afford time to explore his multiplying tracks. It also would give him a base from which he could engage in broad conversations with Latin American colleagues, conversations that would shape the history of the social sciences in the region.

The lecture in Mexico was the first sign that his bias for hope was coming in for some self-interrogating. Meeting “half-way,” holding down the middle ground, was not as easy as it once was—or seemed to have been. Certainly, what we see is Hirschman’s urge to address positions—political as well as intellectual—as they drifted apart. Nowhere was this clearer than on the debate over what caused the gap between haves and have-nots, which was becoming a hot-button issue as development seemed to falter and hopes for social inclusion faded. The list of development disasters was growing; he’d seen some of them, like Pakistan and Nigeria, close up. Inequality had always been on Hirschman’s mind; his Marxist background attuned him to class disparities. Conversations with Gintis and especially Bowles may have rubbed some radicalism off on their senior colleague. Certainly, Hirschman was forced to confront a rising left-wing critique of reformism in Latin America. By the early 1970s, his concern with inequality was shifting from a problem to solve
with
development to becoming a problem churned up
by
development—with politically explosive consequences. No book synthesized the disenchantment more than Samuel P. Huntington’s
Political Order in Changing Societies
(1968), which assaulted the rosy prognostications of modernization theory that free markets, promoting growth, and expanding democracy were mutually reinforcing. Instead, argued Huntington, rapid development in the tropics made political systems more ungovernable. Hirschman did not agree with Huntington; he had been skeptical of earlier facile theories
in which “all good things go together.” But there was no reason to throw in the towel and assume the opposite. The development decade now appeared as just one more stage in a much larger saga of the history of capitalism—a “transitory” moment or an “exuberant phase.” As he noted, with tongue in cheek, at a Harvard lecture in the fall of 1973, we are faced “unfortunately not with an income distribution explosion, but income distribution literature explosion. Those who would change the social order,” he concluded, “oscillate between the illusion of complete powerlessness and the illusion of absolute power.” On his lecture script, the final four words were circled. A line connected them to one more: “Chile.” What one made of the debate over inequality was clearly tied to the political fate of reform in Santiago.
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