Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (92 page)

The stunned and demoralized staff read The
New Republic
essay with relief and felt encouraged that someone was taking up their cause. Peter Bell thanked Hirschman: “I feel doubly honored to have headed an organization so generously praised by a person for whom I have such high esteem. Your solidarity,” a keyword of the era, “is enormously important to everyone at the Foundation.” But there was no stopping the juggernaut. Fearing his presence would imperil the organization, Bell left for the Carnegie Endowment. Hakim eventually resigned and moved to the Inter-American Dialogue, where he would eventually become its director and make it Washington’s premier center for thinking creatively and openly about US policy toward Latin America.
⁴¹

In the end, this little book, a supplement to an academic journal, garnered almost no attention. The editor, Hirschman’s old friend Paul Streeten, had suggested that a version appear as an article to give the findings
more exposure. He could also include a selection of the graphic images of aheadness. But with little engagement with the burgeoning scholarly concerns with social movements and the so-called informal sector, and with no conceptual pretense unless a reader were to tackle
Getting Ahead Collectively
adjacent to its counterpart,
Shifting Involvements
, it was probably doomed as a scholarly treatise.

There was a way in which
Getting Ahead Collectively
was at odds with Hirschman’s drift from development. He had, after all, pronounced the field’s demise. The book was intended as a counterpoint to the impossibilists and less as a new argument for progress. One might argue that he had made a break. But it would be a messy one. He was increasingly being asked to guide the future of development. So much for epitaphs. Enrique Iglesias, the executive secretary of CEPAL, asked Hirschman to participate in a workshop on the future of development at the United Nations headquarters. As Hirschman put it cheekily, “I did not mean nor did I say that DE [development economics] is deadly sick, only: that DE cannot handle [the] job of slaying the dragon of backwardness
by itself
.” The problem with economists was that they preach about scarce resources but have “no sense of limit of their prowess.” He proceeded to extrapolate a few “lessons” from recent experience and then let the proceedings unfold. Judging from his excited notes, he must have had an impression of a revitalized field.
⁴²

Though Hirschman had distanced himself from development, he could still be summoned for the right occasion. The Rockefeller Foundation brought him and Cliff Geertz to the Bellagio Villa in late summer of 1985 to participate in a workshop to promote social science scholarship in the Third World “on fundamental development issues.” “The luminaries” could not have been entirely cheered by the well-meaning, if conventionally patronizing, format; they were called upon to comment on the younger participants’ work—which left them both exhausted, not least because they were constantly challenged “with a vigor,” noted the foundation reporter, “that I, for one, had not anticipated.” For their part, it must be said, not a few of the participants recorded their gratitude for getting “wisdom of these gurus,” and spending a full week “with such giants of the intellectual community.”
⁴³

Ford also came knocking, which stirred up a sense of unfinished thoughts, including remorse about the final days of the Inter-American Foundation at the height of its achievements and its precipitous demise. Ford arranged for Hirschman to visit the Delhi School of Economics in India. Shekhar Shah wanted Hirschman to convene with the leaders of the Center for Developing Societies, the hub of much Indian thinking about development, and to talk with the foundation’s staff about relevant debates and practices in Latin America. Hirschman agreed, though he added, “I am quite anxious to reserve some time for
listening
.” After checking into Claridge’s Hotel, he participated in a conference on the economic history of India and Indonesia, and then Ford Foundation staff escorted him around the capital to hobnob with its leading social scientists. Hirschman enjoyed the role of sage. But it was a side visit to a self-employed women’s group in the city of Ahmedabad that captivated him more—and churned him up. On the heels of the fracas over the Inter-American Foundation and the hounding of Peter Bell, Hirschman suffered from some pangs of torment. When he got back to Princeton, he typed up some notes dedicated to Peter Hakim. Perhaps he felt he hadn’t done enough to defend the foundation, Hirschman worried. He confessed to a certain
esprit de l’escalier
, the feeling of regret upon descending a staircase of having failed to make a witty remark right after leaving a party. Hirschman wished he had told the IAF stories as a single narrative that arced from one phase to the next, “From Struggle to Development” and “From Development to Struggle.” Seeing the embroiderers and wastepaper-pickers of Ahmedabad reminded him that grassroots development “
is
the unity of development and struggle and also the tension between these two components.” It was complex, not simple, and “I know that no one will appreciate this more than Peter Hakim.”
⁴⁴

Getting Ahead Collectively
arose from the ground up of a South America emerging from many years of dictatorship. One important feature of the book was to showcase active citizenry solving problems and improving lives when governments turned their backs on them. It tendered a message of hope about everyday people even as Hirschman was playing an active role in the rebuilding of social science research in the dictator-plagued
continent, participating in the Ford review of Brazil’s CEBRAP, working with Elizabeth Jelin at CEDES in Buenos Aires, and keeping tabs on Alejandro Foxley in Santiago. Indeed as Patricio Meller, one of Foxley’s colleagues, recalled, Hirschman’s frequent visits were a counterpoint to the flow of Chicago Boys through Pinochet’s ministries. He was special “because we could always count on his help.” Though they felt isolated and persecuted—their phones were bugged by the police—the conversations could be open and frank in the seminar rooms, where they talked about alternatives, survival, and fear. Hirschman was reassuring; this would pass. He seldom gave details of his own—but the feeling in the room was that there was deep historical experience behind his words. When Hirschman presented his “Morality and the Social Sciences” paper to a tightly packed room at CIEPLAN, his listeners could recognize, despite the mumbling and pauses that increasingly inflected his public speaking, the ways in which their commitment to human rights need not be severed from their concern with growth. Meller asked if he could publish a translated version of the essay in their magazine.
⁴⁵

If it could shine light in the darkness, why not? Hirschman’s tension may have seemed a little abstract to readers in American academia. But in areas beyond, where the social scientist was less sheltered—and more engaged—the duality of being in the world while analyzing it was an ineluctable condition. The worldliness stored up in a life that stretched across continents and struggles poured forth in words to Hirschman’s youngers. Naming the tension was the first step to acknowledging its existence. By identifying its existence, perhaps the social scientist might not feel so compelled to resolve, transcend, or overcome it without losing something precious and important. The social scientist’s dilemma could not be cast off like outgrown clothes. Better to admit it than to take refuge in false certainties.

Laughable is the way you have to put yourself in harness for this world.

  
FRANZ KAFKA

T
he academic year 1984–85 was Hirschman’s last as an “active” member of the Institute for Advanced Study. He was turning seventy in April and was due to retire from his formal commitments. “Rights without duties: the perfect academic life, surely,” joked Quentin Skinner in congratulations, without adding that in Princeton’s little republic the ratio was hardly tilted toward the denominator. Retirement coincided with international fame. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a social scientist enjoying more respect in so many corners of the world than Hirschman. Government ministers, presidents of foundations, civic leaders, and scholars from Buenos Aires to Budapest turned to him as a sage. And yet, Hirschman did not embrace the role of advice-dispensing celebrity. If anything, he spurned sermons of certainty more than ever. He scorned those who would peddle their convictions—and none more than the closest thing to a nemesis, Milton Friedman, the Chicago economist who
did
don the mantle of celebrity with breathtaking assurance to become the public guru of neo-conservative ascent. As an antidote, what Hirschman urged was less certainty, more tolerance, and better, forward-propelling arguments. As the Cold War reached its climax, the quality of public conversations and debate at the self-proclaimed center of the democratic world worried him deeply.
¹

Retirement was not without benefits. Hirschman kept his office, his presence in the hallways and seminar rooms at the institute, and a generous
travel and research fund. More and more people came for guidance. Students, such as Anthony Marx, a doctoral candidate at Princeton, plucked up the courage to ask Hirschman to guide an independent reading course. Marx, who read whatever Hirschman material he could lay hands on, thought he’d reached heaven when Hirschman agreed. “He was the closest thing to an academic God,” he recalled. The students did most of the talking; Hirschman would smile at the occasional hubris of youth. Many years later, when Marx was president of Amherst College, one of his fondest moments was hosting Hirschman and the Amherst-alumnus and Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, as honorary degree recipients. At the end of the ceremony, Hirschman and Stiglitz boarded a golf cart. Marx’s son climbed onto the back; Marx watched proudly as Stiglitz whisked away his God and his son. The Argentine sociologist, Elizabeth Jelin, was asked to evaluate some neighborhood projects in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, a task fraught with ethical problems. How to evaluate critically without reinforcing someone else’s agenda (in this case the military authorities hunting for a pretext to shut projects like these down)? Hirschman had no answer, but he did convince her that she was up to the task. “Albert,” she recollected, “opened my eyes and made me feel capable.”
²

Retirement posed the question of his institutional legacy. He and Geertz, joined by Michael Walzer in 1980, had made the IAS a haven for interpretive social science. Determined to ensure that economics still be part of the conversation among social scientists—at a time when the discipline’s earlier ties to its disciplinary cousins were breaking down—the issue for Hirschman was, what kind of economics? With retirement pending, he recommended that the School of Social Science launch a thematic year to discuss “Toward a Broader Economics” in order to liberate “The Rational Economic Man” from the straightjacket to which many economists, but not only they, consigned him. This was to inaugurate a three-year cycle on interpretive social science to open up new directions in social research—and keep the economists engaged. The determination to “forge connections” and “foster conversations” dominated the planning material. In an era that saw the triumph of rational expectations, monetarism, and an economics increasingly tethered to its self-selected concepts, creating
an alternative—no matter how appealing to some—was a bit like tilting at windmills. Then again, Hirschman was a pragmatist with a quixotic twist, striving for outcomes that could only be dimly seen.

The question of how economics was going to fit in the School of Social Science was not just an institutional, or even an intellectual matter. It was also personal. Behind the scenes, Geertz, Walzer, and Hirschman had forged something unique in modern intellectual life. Over dinner at Albert’s retirement party at the institute, Cliff got up to make a speech—“not at all easy,” he confessed. Geertz tried to convey to those present that what made Social Science special was not just that each of the trio was wholly involved, but that they were involved in all of the school all of the time. Unlike the increasingly conglomerate university, the members of the school delegated nothing. “We are a company of intellectual friends, the sort of thing that is reputed to have existed in Greece, but is rather hard to find in contemporary academia. For myself,” he continued, “I have never had a closer or more admired intellectual friend, or one who has had more impact, both personally and in scholarly terms, upon me than Albert. The Greeks again would have called such a relationship ‘love;’ but we, now, so far have we come, are precluded from doing that.”
³

Ten years after his retirement, Hirschman was still advocating the creation of a political economy chair at the institute—for an economist with interests in developing societies and
varieties
of capitalism and in dialogue with other social sciences, ethics, and philosophy. Everyone silently understood that this was a tall order. Implied here was a portrait of, if not himself, his understanding of the discipline, one that the discipline did not recognize as its own. Just as his vision was impressively broad, it was singularly implausible. There could be no more Albert O. Hirschman; he was the product of a place, Mitteleuropa, and an intellectual moment that no longer existed. It must be said, however, that Hirschman was not alone in groping for an alternative. The president of the MacArthur Foundation, Adele Simmons, flew to Princeton to confer with Hirschman because she had been “concerned for some time about how economic theory is often used as a barrier to social and economic change.”
⁴

It would not be up to those outside the discipline to shape its course. The leaders of the IAS did not forsake the commitment to economics, even if they recognized that the conversations that Geertz and Hirschman sustained across the disciplinary borders were not easy to reproduce. The institute assembled a committee to raise funds for an Albert O. Hirschman Chair in Economics to commit the institute permanently to the discipline, for a successor to Hirschman, and to guarantee at least three visiting memberships per year. Several European banks and American notables opened their wallets for the spear-carrier of the campaign, James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank and chairman of the institute’s board of trustees. An impressive 141 friends and colleagues followed suit. The school eventually nominated the brilliant game theorist, Eric Maskin, best known for his work on mechanism design; he moved to Princeton in 2000—and won the Nobel Prize in economics seven years later. The appointment secured the place of economics in social science, though it was also a statement that it would be a different breed of the discipline than Hirschman’s. There was also a move afoot, led by the young Spanish economist, Javier Santiso, to create an Albert Hirschman Chair in Latin American Political Economy at Sciences Po in Paris; this idea went nowhere.