Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (75 page)

Throughout his field notes on conversations, Hirschman sprinkled in his petites idées (only some of which appeared later in print) characteristics of his preference to observe, aphorize, and double-check his hunches with follow-up questions. Brazil, especially, captured the paradoxes he found so fascinating. “Rapid economic growth legitimizes or is believed to legitimize. The tunnel effect had actually worn off in 1974 perhaps because there was no progress achieved along political lines. As a result there arose a lack of belief in the reality of expansion. (Remember how Roberto Cavalcanti was booed at the Brasilia Congress for saying real wages had increased during the last year or so: people just could not believe it.).” On the other hand, he noted a few pages—and interviews—later, the government had a self-destructive habit of believing its own growth-promoting myths. “High growth rate makes for white noise that drowns out other noises coming from other problems of society. This isolates the policy makers.” This led him to a reprise: “Amendment to the tunnel effect,” he noted:

In the period of rapid growth it is possible for the policy makers to
believe
that everything is in good shape; propaganda and the real worries about the maintenance of the growth rate are then drowning out information about the non-conformity of the ‘ungrateful’ masses (shades of Churchill after the war). Also the concentration on economic discussions may mislead the government into thinking that the principal problem is economic when what people really want is something quite different. In this manner the government becomes victim of its own manipulation of freedom of expression.
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Over and over, he intoned to himself: “Make connections!” Between politics and economics, beliefs and behavior.

The booing of the aspiring politico Cavalcanti referred to an occasion in Brasilia that exemplified the kinds of openings that Hirschman was searching for in the dictatorship. Though the country was in the grip of autocrats, he sensed that there was a prospect for change. In fact, he did not have to look too hard. Strikes were spreading; the government wavered between letting go or repressing. Cardoso himself was sticking his neck out. Hirschman flew to the Brazilian capital to join him at the meetings of the Society for the Progress of Science in time to witness his friend delivery a fiery speech denouncing the government. When Cardoso returned to his seat, Hirschman leaned over to say in grinning admiration, “I never imagined you as a
pamfletario
!” Rumors started to fly that dissidents were about to be rounded up, which filled the meeting with paranoia. Every time a door opened, everyone jerked their heads to see if storm troopers were barging into the hall. “This might be the strangest conference I have ever attended,” Hirschman told Cardoso. That night they dined with Severo Gomes, the minister for Commerce and Industry, a moderate within the dictatorship. As long as Gomes was at the table, no one would get arrested. Cardoso noticed Hirschman poke away at his dessert to forestall the end of the meal—and the possible storm troopers. In the end, the meetings were uneventful. The next day, Ruth and Fernando Henrique Cardoso took Sarah and Albert on a long voyage into the Brazilian backlands to visit the old city of Goiás, the home of Cardoso’s ancestors. In the governor’s palace, a portrait of his great-grandfather still hung. They toured the Baroque city and then bounced along the washboard roads to Fernando Henrique’s cousin’s rustic ranch near Jaraguá. When they finally reached their destination, Albert was astonished to find a recent edition of the
New York Review of Books
lying on a rickety old table, and they all sat down in the shade to spend an afternoon eating steak and discussing French literature. Such was the diversity of Brazil, and the reminder to Hirschman of his affection for Latin America.
⁴⁴
After one trip to visit Cardoso in São Paulo and O’Donnell in Buenos Aires, he confessed that “I rather enjoy the position of being
the intellectual and personal friend of the people in these centers.… In addition to the intellectual endeavor there is involved here a cause one has in common and that makes for a great deal of warmth and friendship.”
⁴⁵

In the cacophony of griping there lurked alternatives. With the slumping economies and human rights atrocities, it was easier to see cause for despair. This bolstered Hirschman’s studious efforts to keep his hopes up. When Gert Rosenthal, the director of the Economic Commission for Latin America, sent Hirschman the proofs of a Spanish translation of one of his articles, Hirschman replied with a fable about the need to exaggerate one’s hopes in order to motivate oneself to pressure for change. It is a necessary myth for progressives, Hirschman explained, like the allure of a mirage to motivate a caravan forward through the desert even though it may eventually only find “a tiny waterhole.” For without the mirage, “the exhausted caravan would inevitably have perished in the sandstorm bereft of hope.” While the results may pale beside the hopes, at least the caravan arrived.
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Hirschman returned to Princeton at the end of the summer determined to challenge the sacred cows of ideologists. And none was more sacred than the assumption that it was the nature of capitalism in Latin America that market life required despots. For the Left, the pressures to “deepen” heavy industry by securing the investment climate had called for jackboots to tame unruly citizens. To the Right, the argument was not dissimilar: populists and radicals had the region spinning out of control, and if modern life was to be salvaged, it required some cleansing of public life. It was precisely this agreement—and the circularity of the arguments that buoyed it—that inspired Hirschman’s dissent. There was an ethical purpose to his stance: “The more thoroughly and multifariously we can account for the establishment of authoritarian regimes in Latin America, the sooner we will be done with them,” he affirmed.
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A fresh view could point to a multitude of, but not limitless, possibilities and yield stories free of the normative weight that dominated development studies—the “tendency to look for heroes and villains.”
⁴⁸

There was no more villainous character in Latin America in the mid-1970s than the confederation of economic elites and generals. This fixation
was one that Hirschman was determined to break up. One of his implicit aims was to find ways in which economic elites might be salvaged from narratives that depicted them as hopelessly reactionary and bereft of scruples. A strain of his writings from the 1950s had extolled the hidden virtues of the entrepreneur, the doer. The importance of leadership and a heroic coalition of creative
réalisateurs
and intellectuals was one of his underlying themes, and “the polarization and lack of communication between these two types symbolizes, and at the same time renders more arduous, the transition from stagnation to dynamic development.” These were his words in
Strategy
. Almost two decades later, as the curtain fell on civilian regimes, one cannot help but sense that Hirschman had the fate of the Weimar Republic in mind, in which business elites had abandoned their pluralist and democratic principles because they felt they had no choice. He admitted that it was hard not to despair. Once upon a time, Enlightened thinkers optimistically affiliated market life with individual liberties, conjuring—as de Tocqueville put it—“a necessary relation between … freedom and industry.” Now, the affiliation flipped to identify “torture and industry.” Both the Left and Right could agree on this—rescuing Latin American capitalism
required
despots to stabilize the investment climate and subdue unruly workers, to break the grip of “exhaustion with inflation.” Hirschman wanted to break the iron logic. There was altogether too much reflex to run to extremes. The clarion calls in the 1960s had come from the Left, demanding revolution. Now they came more menacingly from the Right. An orthodoxy had settled in Santiago, one aiming to correct the course altogether with drastic market recipes advocated by faculty from Chicago and their former Chilean graduate students nestled into the highest echelons of various economic ministries to usher in nothing less than “a new economic order,” starting with a battery of “shock treatments.”
⁴⁹

It was the effects of these that Hirschman witnessed during his recent trip and bemoaned. He bemoaned them in part because he was not convinced that they were necessary. The Chicago Boys argued that the old model was irredeemable because of its intractable disequilibria and that it should be replaced with “liberal economic organization.” For Hirschman,
who’d long since backed off advocating imbalances, the problem was not the model but the difficulty of “
shifting of gears
” between policies, difficulties that were then attributed to the model. At issue was the lack of flexibility in thinking among policy makers as well as social scientists. Authoritarianism thrived in climates in which existed—and again, Weimar was an object lesson—“the generalized consciousness that the country is facing serious economic problems … without being able to solve them.” The Chicago Boys exaggerated the impossibility of fixing the existing system because they wanted something wholly different.
⁵⁰

What bothered Hirschman most was the refusal to take responsibility for the traps that social scientists laid. As he was planning his trip to Latin America, McGeorge Bundy, the president of the Ford Foundation and former dean of the faculty at Harvard, contacted Carl Kaysen, expressing his interest in convening a meeting with “Messrs. Hirschman and Geertz and their colleagues on the question of the Ford Foundation priorities in the area which we have chosen to call ‘the hungry, crowded, competitive world.’ ” The very topic of the gathering expressed the prevailing mood. Hirschman was determined to challenge it by, as he told “Mac” Bundy, showing “that I am less of a mindless optimist than people (and sometimes my closest colleagues and friends) tend to think.”
⁵¹
On January 27, 1976, an interlocutor from Ford sat down with Hirschman, Geertz, and Cardoso. The conversation began with a dark tone, and Hirschman immediately resisted with a reminder to put social scientific analysis into a broader historical context. The naïve 1950s believed that “all good things go together”: increase GDP and get democracy; free people and they will invest. “It was a simplistic model,” he recalled. “But now we have come in a sense to the inverse idea, that all bad things go together.” Growth is bunk. Human rights are violated. But this “dismal diagnosis” is “probably just as wrong as the earlier one, and I’m also a little bit suspicious of where it leads us.” Geertz, who knew Hirschman as well as anyone, and one of the friends who poked fun at the resilient hopefulness that bordered on quixotic, chimed in: “Albert always wants to look on the bright side.” “You always say,” he added, “truth lies not at the extremes but in the middle.”
⁵²

The divide between hope and hopelessness, between optimism and pessimism, was a false one, Hirschman believed. It was not a matter of whether the overall story was bleak or uplifting, but rather of how it was told, for the epic passage of social change was riddled with chance and choice, and understanding this required humility and a concession to the limits of Reason. From his Hegelian taproots he found the current “correlation” between economics and “the development of torture” as “puzzling” as it was “appalling.” He wanted to get at social scientists’ mindsets, why they persist “in thinking of having only one thing happen, and everything else will coalesce around it, and we’ll come out all right.” Why do “we only have one ‘new key’ at a time?”
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Invariably, the question of complexity could not avoid the touchy question of ethics, especially when it came to economics. Hirschman wished that his colleagues felt freer to accept their own limits and uncertainties, but not because their claims were irrelevant. On the contrary. The relevance of economists was limited because “they feel more at home with economic magnitudes” and preferred to settle solely upon them. Hirschman never lost sight of a heroic place for the economist. His trouble was, he found it “intolerable” that a bubble of economists (“a little group of American-trained local economists who think they are still in graduate school”) make policy for Pinochet while another bubble of “neo-Marxists” go on about exploitation. Neither orthodoxy was capable of “breaking out” of its hermetic certainties. The irony was, as far as Hirschman was concerned, that feeling at ease with one’s limits would allow social scientists to learn about the economy itself. “It turns out it’s not all just one black box; there are all kinds of new things churning in there.” Even in Chile, “things have not been completely shut down,” and he pointed to the important research being conducted there among his beleaguered friends at CIEPLAN. It struck some as starry-eyed, but Hirschman added: “If only there were someone who could bring these people together, it might be possible to create some type of dialogue.”
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One can think of Hirschman talking of himself here, casting himself in the role of broker for such a dialogue. He invoked his “small study group on Latin America” and the way it was exploring, in the darkness
of a despotic age, “interesting passages” through a labyrinth to find light. His conclusions could not help but be hesitant. Weeks later, he prepared to pack his bags and return to Latin America. But his mind’s eye was also looking elsewhere, back in time in search of deeper clues to explain how the social scientist learned to think in terms of one new key at a time.

The Good is in a certain sense comfortless.

  
FRANZ KAFKA

H
irschman’s life can be recounted as a biography of a reader, recounting stages in the development of a subject’s library, from childhood influences to the dog-eared volumes that shaped an intellectual imagination to the books he parried with his own. Such a narrative would arc across familiar categories of an intellectual biography, from formation to contribution, from absorption to creation.