Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (90 page)

Moved and emboldened, Hirschman finished his long trip in São Paulo where he settled into an office at CEBRAP. He pored over his notes, reviewed documents, and wrote, furiously. Peter Hakim, by now itching with curiosity, inquired about the state of Hirschman’s work. Hirschman offered to send him a copy of the full draft—though warning him that it was all written longhand. Hakim accepted the offer, only to find the script completely illegible. (When I explained how I conducted my own research for this biography, his first reaction was, “But how can you read his writing?”) Hirschman consoled him by saying that he would ask his secretary at the institute (who was, by then, literate in his script) to type it up and offered to present his findings to the foundation staff.

The occasion for the presentation of the report set the rumor mill going among the staff. Intrigued that an eminent scholar and his magnetic wife would be interested in poking in their files and looking at their projects, they were eager to hear the results. Some had been reading Hirschman’s previous work trying to anticipate his conclusions. Rapt, they gathered in the small auditorium of the foundation’s headquarters with Sarah and Judith Tendler present and listened to the stories about the effects of some modest projects they had incubated and supported for so many years. “For us,” recalled Sheldon Annis, “this was a big deal; the great man was coming.” When Albert stepped up to the front of the small meeting hall, he explained that one of the problems with economists “is that they economize on love.” People were astonished. This was hardly what they expected. “It floored us,” said Annis. When the flutter subsided, Hirschman observed that one source of the staff’s frustration was the feeling that they had to gauge the success of projects in terms that were easily quantified, which had often led them to overlook other variables, like love, civic purpose, and what in Hirschman’s childhood would have been called
Bildung
, improvement and self-cultivation for their own sake, development to harmonize the mind and heart, self and society. Sometimes people engage in economic activities for noneconomic reasons or summon noneconomic deeds for economic reasons. The point is: an evaluation had to be open to measures and motives that did not always conform to the prescribed model of costs and benefits. That an economist of Hirschman’s stature could give reasons for thinking about development in such expansive ways liberated hard-working staff from the sense that so much of their work was failing because “data” to prove rising productivity were so elusive. Few were more assured than Peter Bell who, unbeknown to those present, was worrying about the organization’s future. The debriefing was “an exciting occasion for us all,” he remembered.
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What Hakim and his colleagues at the foundation learned was that they really were in the development business, even if it was not always easy to see. Indeed, even in failure there could be redemption—redemption through learning, and this is one of the themes he drove home from his narrative. Someone was explaining how it all worked—“Here
it is,” Hirschman seemed to be saying, “This is what you are doing.” Determined to break the failure complex and show that reforms could work, even those emanating from the most downtrodden under the most inauspicious of political circumstances, Hirschman painted a very different portrait. To Hakim, it was luminous. All the reports that pointed to the shortfalls of each project—shortfalls compared to the grantees’ lofty aspirations—had missed the larger point. It had been a point driven home in
Development Projects Observed
(look at side effects!) and again in
Shifting Involvements
(let disappointments produce alternatives!). Consider the following passage from
Shifting Involvements
, which found evidence aplenty among the shantytowns and fishing villages of Latin America:

We may simply be unable to conceive of the strictly limited advances, replete with compromises and concessions to opposing forces, that are the frequent outcomes of actions undertaken under the impulse of some magnificent vision. Given this propensity of the modern imagination to conjure up radical change, and its inability to visualize intermediate outcomes and halfway houses, the results of public action typically fall short of expectations. (p. 95)

Improvable, not perfectible. Hirschman’s complicated, mixed, flawed, imperfect, mistake-prone citizen was on display, in fact more than on display,
working
. All around was evidence of human capacity to imagine social change—perhaps motivated by a magnificent vision but yielding to basic improvements. What was important was not to lose sight of the achievements, even if they were modest. Hirschman kept noting how dairy farmers and housing co-ops put people to work, lending a plebeian twist to
streben
. Projects may “fail” to yield their expectations, but it did not mean they failed to move development along. Hirschman offered them a simple principle—“social energy”—to help illuminate how modest grants could help people create, direct, and expand communities’ and associations’ efforts to change the world around them. But the change was more evident in the ways that grants forced people to learn how to solve their problems; even if they did not finally solve the problem they
set out to lick, they had acquired skills, created movements, and marshaled social energy that they could apply to other problems. This too was an old theme—learning—dating back to
Strategy
. But Hirschman had never lost his acumen for its role in social change. A little, unremarkable experience with his granddaughter led to the following entry in his diary:

I show Lara (4 years old) how to prepare newspaper for making fire—she learns x from now on will do it
exactly
the same way. Perhaps it is not good to learn too many “useful” things too early in life, for then one will never question the moment one learnt. For innovation to be possible
late
learning may be essential.

The commitment to late learning produced by social energy presented a master narrative the organization needed for itself and a way to think creatively about its mission. Hakim was delighted. “This was all just so exciting to hear,” he recalled.
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When he finished writing up his notes, Hirschman realized that he had not just presented to the organization a story for itself, he was composing something that belonged to the arc of his own lifework. He returned to some of ideas that had been waylaid by his obsession to answer Mancur Olson. What drew his attention to the stories was how they reminded him of his own past. When he presented his preliminary findings to colleagues at the institute in early 1984, he noted that the venture had required that he have an open mind—“but not a
blank
one.” What filled his mind were his own older thoughts. He found himself picking up forgotten strands he had abandoned many years earlier—and it was undoubtedly a self-assuring exercise. “I continue to collect inverted, ‘wrong-way round’ or ‘cart-before-the-horse’ development sequences for a simple reason: the finding that such sequences exist ‘in nature’ expand the range of development possibilities.” Free from having to wait for necessary prerequisites meant that people needn’t feel paralyzed by mass poverty. In the face of a grinding debt crisis, there was still scope for improvement. What was true of social processes applied to himself as well; even a mature scholar of global repute could rediscover himself and the range of his own possibilities.
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In the meantime, he faced the challenge of how to pull together the small details of his disparate projects. They ranged from efforts to give property rights to homes in shantytowns to cooperative schools. As usual, Hirschman did not wade into his evidence with big—or even small—hypotheses to test. It was a strategy that would perplex even the informal methodologist. But with an eye to the balance of competing personal and collective engagements, Hirschman let a pattern appear. What many of the projects shared was an initial thrust to better the private fortunes of families, and doing so led to public activities. One favorite example involved efforts to help
tricicleros
—deliverymen who wheeled around the capital of the Dominican Republic with three-wheeled bicycles with large racks on the front—get out of the trap of chronic defaults on their loans. Local businessmen and nongovernmental organizations contrived a plan to promote groups of seven tricicleros so that they would be jointly responsible for making payments on loans to buy their vehicles. The effect was a surge in ownership. But more than that, this initiative to protect creditors against default by individual borrowers had significant, and unanticipated, social and political effects as the small
grupos
turned into “
grupos solidarios
.” As the
triciclero
organizer beamed, “I can mobilize 500 tricycles to converge on any spot in the city and paralyze everything.” And the range of issues that concerned the deliverymen varied from traffic laws to taxes and police enforcement. So, a risk-spreading organization mutated into a “pressure group.” This kind of story fascinated Hirschman, and he filled his notebook with calculations about the cost of the vehicles, the insurance scheme, and how much could be saved with accounting precision to end with more than a successful business—a collective movement.
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At the end of one of his narratives, he told readers: “Here then is another sequence where the traditional concern with ‘bettering one’s condition’ in the private sense leads over, almost effortlessly and without any clear sense of a break, into public advocacy and participation in public affairs,” an insight that returned to Adam Smith. In what would be a small book bereft of detours through theories and concepts of collective action, the only figure to appear was the Scottish moral philosopher. Smith’s
observation that collective actions were either ignored or “castigated as conspiracies” swept the ground for Hirschman, who sought to examine a spectrum of actions, from the wholly private to the outspokenly public with many intermediate and mixed combinations in between, that came under Adam Smith’s rubric: “They are all conceived and intended by the participants as means to the end of bettering their condition.”
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At the outset, Hirschman considered naming his project “Making it in Groups.” He liked the ring. But for a wordplay-man, he did not see the salacious double entendre. But some did. Friends—Mike McPherson, Judith Tendler, and Peter Hakim (who may have wondered how the wordplay might go down in Congress)—dissuaded him from this particular heading. McPherson and Hirschman brainstormed and came up with “Getting Ahead Collectively.”
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It was an unusual piece. The prose was incredibly simple, some might say childlike. This was on purpose. Hirschman wanted the analysis, such as it was, to be accessible, to narrow the gap between the analyst and the analyzed; this was part of the “moral” personality of the book. Hirschman specifically appealed to the publisher (Pergamon Press) for a larger type to make it easier to read. This became something of an issue when the manuscript was sent for review, an exercise unlikely to bring out the best in Hirschman after the scorching he took for
Shifting Involvements
. Sure enough, one of the readers, the Quaker economist otherwise sympathetic to the whole enterprise, Jack Powelson, had the impression that Hirschman was trying to revisit ideas from
Strategy
in light of grassroots findings bereft of theoretical ambition or engagement. It was not unreasonable. But it rubbed Hirschman the wrong way. “The ms. does not want to be, nor does it anywhere pretend to be,” he retorted, “a comprehensive evaluation of the experience of grassroots development. It is the report of an eyewitness with a longstanding interest in development issues, but cast deliberately in a non-academic mold, with a minimum of footnotes, references, etc.” Striking a defensive pose, he announced that “I believe a scholar should be entitled to write and publish an impressionistic, speculative book provided the book has something suggestive and stimulating to say.”
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It also contrasted with
Development Projects Observed
, which was organized around analytical claims. In
Getting Ahead Collectively
, he sung the epic by storytelling. Hirschman wrote it “not as a scholarly treatise” but rather as a “reasoned travelogue.” But this was a travelogue fixated on the particulars of people speaking to him with some uplifting antidotes to his own recent disappointment. Indeed, he marveled that even in the face of failure and setbacks, people did not swing to private pursuits as
Shifting Involvements
would have predicted. In many cases Albert and Sarah observed, each spasm of organizing was “a stepping stone” to the next, and that the step was upward not down. “The present Latin American generation is not waiting for their grandchildren: they seem perfectly able to resume a ‘fight’ … several times in the same lifetime.” He found this a perfect buttress for his indictment of
fracasomanía
, for lack of success could, ironically, help motivate a desire for even more success. And one had to be on the lookout for invisible and intangible benefits such as the dispelling of isolation and mutual trust. As one micro-impresario in the Dominican Republic told him as he scribbled, before “we used to see just each other, but we never knew each other.” Now, not only were they personally making it, they had a “change of mentality (
cambio de mentalidad
).”
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The decision to tell stories may have reflected the nature of the evidence; though Sarah andAlbert had scoured the paperwork for the projects, it was oral testimony that informed the study. Some were performed. Colombian women in La Calera sang about a young woman who had recently married a man who became a lout. “I serve you lentejas & you do not like them—so just leave them.” One group of men from San Bernardo acted a play on the dirt floor of a hut to tell the tale of their fathers’ dispossession of their land to a rapacious investor.
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