Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (81 page)

There were some who acknowledged the two Hirschmans—the development economist and the intellectual historian. But they were rare. One was Bruce Cummings, an assistant professor at the University of Washington working on Korean authoritarianism and Chinese foreign policy, who had read Hirschman’s draft essay for the SSRC project and now drew the immediate connections to
The Passions and the Interests
. He appreciated “the difficulty of generalizing from the economic to the political, or establishing the connections between the two,” and he could not help but notice the echoes of Perón in Mao “regarding the elasticity of things economic.” What Mao called “walking on two legs” (with heavy industry and agricultural assaults pounding at the same time) had created
a legacy of rigid thinking that “now appears like Sir James Steuart’s statesmen, so ‘bound up by the laws of his political economy.’ ” The analysis led, for Cummings, to a clear-eyed view of the responsibility of intellectuals, “another passage I particularly liked.” There is the Left, which advances its “revulsion with capitalism” to the point “that they make themselves irrelevant” or a threat, “so that nothing short of a revolution will satisfy them,” which “comprises a recipe for repression.” Then there’s the Right, like Samuel Huntington, who at least “are quicker to accept that responsibility.” “We all need the heightened awareness you call for.”
⁴⁸

Awareness
was, as it turns out, one of Hirschman’s key words, and while Cummings used the term to denote the illumination on the external world, it also had an internal significance as well. As Hirschman was deep into the writing of
The Passions and the Interests
, Katia was going through a troubled patch in Paris. Albert consoled her with a quote from Goethe: “Childhood is a paradise from which we cannot be expelled.” This, of course, was the problem—because aging and changing were inevitable, so “we’re in for a shock” and thus forced to ask ourselves, “Is this still me?” The point about growing up, leaving innocence to join grown-up rough and tumble, is that we are not prepared “for the roughness of the games that are being played by the adults of this world.” For Albert, this was more than a developmental challenge; he knew this firsthand, for “the biggest shock” was to discover “that
I
can play just as rough as the next fellow.” He recalled the moment of “this savage discovery” when he had been released from the French army in the summer of 1940 and was fleeing to the unoccupied zone. It gnawed at him that the bicycle that wheeled him to freedom in Marseilles was one he had stolen. And it clearly continued to bother him; “This was something I did which I had never thought I’d be capable of.” To Katia what he wanted to say was that we never get over this elementary duality—our sensitivity to the world and the feelings generated by living in it and the “sacro-egoism” (a term he borrowed from pre-1914 Italian foreign policy—of all places!) that’s often required for survival. Moreover, there’s never any perfect balance—sometimes the pendulum goes one way, sometimes the other. Perhaps the
best preparation “is the awareness, in the back of one’s mind, that the time for the other mode of existence will surely come again.”
⁴⁹

The intention of
The Passions and the Interests
was also this—a reminder of other ways of thinking about our “mode of existence.” To think about this awareness could not help but point to our vocabulary and our arguments. It was on this point that Hirschman ended his book: “I conclude that both critics and defenders of capitalism could improve upon the arguments through knowledge of the episode in intellectual history that has been recounted here. This is probably all one can ask of history, and of the history of ideas in particular: not to resolve the issues, but to raise the level of the debate” (p. 135).

This was overly modest. There was in fact more going on than the level of debate. The challenge was not striving for an order that freed some “true” human nature or spirit, the rule of interests or rein of passions, but appreciating their conjoining and fluctuating propensities and the ways that people wrestled with them. Man, therefore, was a stage on which these competing and ineluctably combined drives carried out an epic struggle—one that, in his ever-optimistic turn, yielded to a modern character who could be acquisitive
and
virtuous, self-interested and other-regarding. There was no reason to sever the republican collective good from the liberal private purpose. But this is exactly what modern social theory was doing, worried Hirschman. As he reflected on later thinkers who imagined “that the economy must be deferred to,” capitalist societies contrived social arrangements that substituted “the interests for the passions as the guiding principle of human action for the many [which] can have the side effect of killing the civic spirit and of thereby opening the door to tyranny” (p. 125). One side was driving out others. It was Tocqueville, Hirschman reminded, who had some prophetic words for the advocates of a favorable business climate and the benefits of the maxim of
enrichissez-vous!
and who ask merely for law and order. He did not mention Pinochet, but in writing these words as he was travelling back and forth to South America, it is hard to believe he did not have the Chilean commander in mind when he quoted Tocqueville:

A nation that demands from its government nothing but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the bottom of its heart; it is the slave of its well-being, and the man who is to chain it can arrive on the scene. (p. 124)

Tocqueville had in mind those who yearned for public stability so that private pursuits could be liberated. Perhaps some fundamentals of the sociological imagination had not changed after all. But there is more: it was easier to see the tensions of capitalism in moments of birth or transition, whose uncertainties helped reveal internal juxtapositions at the core of political arguments. The years and centuries to come would obscure the strains and pressures under layers of triumph. Revisiting one’s Machiavelli and one’s Tocqueville provided a means to recover a memory of a different way to argue about capitalism and thereby to consider anew its possible futures.

I
f Albert Hirschman were a novelist, the human body might have figured prominently in his writings. Bodies fascinated him, not least his own. His eye for small details—human feelings expressed by a flinch or a discreetly placed hand—is a hallmark of the literary imagination he brought to bear on his social science, but it is only rarely visible through the lacquer of economic analysis and political theory. There was also a fundamental comfort with and confidence in his bodily self, a disposition that was not just coincident with the grace of his prose.

We know the human body was important to Hirschman because of the attention he gave to the gesture. The Gerty Simon portrait of his father, reproduced in the first chapter of this book, was a reminder of a paternal afterlife. But it was not the melancholy of Carl’s eyes that stoked Hirschman’s memory, but their counterpoint—the strong yet nimble hands of the surgeon. Did these hands rest on the shoulder of a son while reading together? Were they reminders of a father’s chess moves? We cannot know for sure; the precise meaning of the memory of these body parts must be included in the store of absences and gaps of a life history. The significance of hands is also clear in Hirschman’s favorite passage from
Madame Bovary
, the scene in which Emma’s husband, Charles, leans over the dying body of his wife, clasping her hands as she shudders to her end. Emma has chosen to kill herself rather than confront the sordid reality of
her affairs and debts. Charles weeps, but the last thing Emma hears is the blind beggar in the street below. Hands are touching, but they do not feel. It was, to Hirschman, a picture image of realism, an echo of the register he tried to bring to his own less narrative style of social science, where the reader might capture the meaning of the whole through a riveting portrait of the small, seemingly insignificant, and almost imperceptible pattern—if not drawn to it by the writer’s pen.

Of all human body parts, it was the heart that most concerned Hirschman. Throughout his life, the imagery of the heart divided or pressed to service a one-sided
homo economicus
was what Hirschman wanted to rescue from the social scientist’s obsession with rational man. Hamlet’s soliloquy on the heart (“Give me that Man / That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart / As I do thee.”) reminds us that the heart had to be conjugated in the singular; “heart of hearts” is an unfortunate bastardization. It is being enslaved to passion, not passion per se, that’s the problem for a man of reason like Horatio, to whom Hamlet is speaking. Since we have only one heart, it had to be a home for passion and reason, and Hamlet’s inability to reconcile this necessary tension helps explain his paralysis. From Hirschman’s long days’ conversations with Eugenio Colorni, whence they pronounced a shared commitment to prove Hamlet wrong, one might see the heart playing a starring role in his work. Consider the frontispiece of
The Passions and the Interests
: here we have a hand wielding a pair of iron tongs that have clasped a beating and bleeding heart; the pincers have begun to squeeze. The image is from 1617 and its caption, “Repress the Passions!” is a lurid reminder that the heart was the heart of the matter for social science. So too was one of Hirschman’s favorite aphorisms collected for his daughter Lisa in June 1967 on the occasion of her graduation from Barnard College, a decade before
The Passions and the Interests
was published: from Vauvenargues he wrote that “Les grandes idées viennent du Coeur.”
¹

Hirschman was drawn to the body most of all in the form of a beautiful woman. The ladies of Marseilles were only too happy to forget their despair as the Nazis took over Europe in 1940 and dally with a mysterious
young man who could speak many languages. Beamish’s grinning and cunning optimism was magnetic in the sleazy bars along the quayside, which came in handy when running money-laundering and document-forging operations. Some of the American (female) volunteers who worked on the rescue scheme marveled at Beamish’s skills in seduction. Even Varian Fry would shake his head at the pleasures of his assistant. Hirschman loved to flirt but was discriminating in his choice. The affection for the company of a woman—not to bed but rather to banter, as if the presence of feminine beauty were enough for the senses—was a habit that enabled him to endure cocktail parties and hors d’oeuvres he otherwise preferred to skip. Not a few women remarked to me in interviews that Hirschman was quick to search out the loveliest woman in a crowd and had no difficulty finding a suitable topic for conversation—a painting, a recent book, her project. If there was to be small talk, let it be embellished with aesthetic pleasures.

Without a doubt, his passion for the company of a picturesque woman was one of the many ingredients that bonded him to Sarah. There was so much they shared—books, music, art, politics, and travel—that this dimension of their mutual attraction is easy to skip, not least because among literati the corporal experience is too often treated with some unease. But it is hard to deny that Sarah was a breathtaking woman and she must have struck Hirschman from the moment they met; in that instance, his seductive instincts went into high gear. The posed photos of her as a young woman have a rare combination of glamour and radiance. Nor did age seem to take its toll. The midlife portraits by the great Colombian photographer, Hernán Díaz, do not fail to capture Sarah’s striking elegance. So too do Christa Lachenmaier’s images (see the portrait in the last chapter of this book), taken in Berlin half a lifetime later. Indeed, the photos of the couple give us a sense of astonishing beauty, as if mutually attracted by each other’s good looks. It may well be—though yet again we are in the domain of the biographical unknown—that this underlying magnetism helps explain why a preternaturally flirtatious man who was not above thinking about the centrality of desire in world history was not a womanizer; many people have asked me about Hirschman’s infidelity,
as if expecting it; because he was so obviously not the uxorious husband, a cloud of suspicion has hung over him. But nowhere in the archives or testimony is there a trace of a paramour. Albert’s heart of heart does not appear to have been divided or squeezed: it reserved its passion for Sarah.

And what did he think of his own body? His ailments and troubles were a constant subject in his letters, and there is a slight whiff of the hypochondriac in some of the complaints; he took delight, for instance, in sharing tales of blisters from marching in wool socks during French army training in 1939, and embellished the stories with details of how he lanced them with a spare needle. There were bouts of hay fever as a child and bad pneumonia in Berkeley. But otherwise, it is safe to say that Hirschman was more than a fit man. “Exercise” is too American a term to describe Hirschman’s habits of regular long walks, often in Sarah’s company, attention to his diet, and vacations that included some form of physical activity. After moving to the IAS, climbing the Alps became a summer’s pastime. While not muscular (certainly by the chiseled standards of our air-brushing days), he was strong, well proportioned, and not without a manliness—a manliness of which he was most certainly aware. For as much as he loved to flirt, he was also ready for the right masculine pose. Here again, we are left to wonder about the story behind the pose—what was Hirschman thinking as he propped himself upside down for the camera to capture him in a headstand, or flexing his arms and chest in a semi-jesting (only semi!) bodybuilding stance? Sarah recalled the pride he took at being athletic in his youth. Good grades were a source of self-esteem, but it was his abilities on the rowing team, bicycle trips, mountain climbing, and eventually capacity to endure long marches in soldier training that brought out immodesty. Raised to comport himself properly at old-world parties, he was also a poised dancer; the institute would host annual dinner and dance soirées, and when Albert and Sarah stepped onto the floor, others would cede the center to the ball’s most graceful couple.