Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (94 page)

In the blizzard of prizes that come with fame, several themes stand out. The first is Hirschman’s use of the pulpit to think, speak, and write retrospectively. In the fall of 1987, he flew to Turin to receive a doctorate and recounted his “familial, personal, intellectual, and sentimental ties” he had with Italy. He warned his audience that he was averse to autobiography because “I tend to think of it as the ultimate admission to having run out of ideas” (which became something of a cliché). By now, he was repeating a refrain, which suggested that writing some kind of memoir might have been a temptation he had to suppress. So, he gave himself exception to prove his more general rule: such an endeavor could illuminate if “the autobiographical exercise serves the purpose of
recovering
an idea.” In this case, it was the memory of Eugenio Colorni and the desire to prove Hamlet wrong. As Latin Americans struggled to rebuild civilian rule, he drew the arc backward to an earlier struggle and found in Colorni’s example of combining participation in public affairs with intellectual openness an “ideal microfoundation of a democratic politics.”
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Retrospection, when not self-indulgent, was conversation in pursuit of
a method. The final festschrift was a gathering at MIT, which prompted Hirschman to author a chronicle of his own tendency to raise doubts about his own concepts. Many of his readers often concluded that he was less interested in theory than in locating anomalies to rules, even his own. What they failed to see was that self-reflection and skepticism were aimed at adapting earlier insights to new complexities, insisting that theorizing had to account for its own historical limits. He called this practice self-subversion. Conversation was a constant; it is what he was doing with his petites idées and files of quotes and aphorisms. What changed as Hirschman became a profiled figure was that the conversations were less with the ancients and more with himself. Still, the ancients did not take a back seat: his final major book,
The Rhetoric of Reaction
(1991) was an argument with reactionaries.
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The second theme was the rather obvious globalization of his voice. And with globalization came a return to his European roots. With the return to Europe came the encounter with his own personal memories to reclaim forgotten legacies. The European return began in France. The translation of
The Passions and the Interests
into French brought him to the attention of a whole new public that knew little or nothing of his continental formation. To French readers, the book had clearly located
their
Enlightenment in broader European currents; this may have been obvious to non-French readers, but to the French, especially those less familiar with the narrower field of intellectual history, breaking out of the Pantheon was an eye-opener. It was this that François Furet, the celebrated historian of the French Revolution and director of the prestigious École des hautes études en sciences sociales, had in mind when he invited Hirschman to deliver the Marc Bloch Lecture in the spring of 1982. It was a kind of French coming out. Before heading to the Grand Salon de la Sorbonne, Hirschman lunched with Furet, Pierre Nora, Lucette Valensi, Jacques Julliard, and Fernando Henrique and Ruth Cardoso. Paris’s intelligentsia came out en masse for the performance at the Sorbonne’s Grand Amphitheatre. After Furet’s introduction, Hirschman stepped to the podium and read his paper with Philippe de Champaigne’s grand portrait of a stately Richelieu hanging nearby. It was as if he were born for the occasion. Hirschman began by reprising his Parisian days and proceeded to braid intellectual traditions—the French Enlightenment faith in man’s perfectibility, the Scots’ insight into the role of unintended consequences, and the birth of a German critique of capitalism in the early nineteenth century. He was tracing the lineages of his own amalgamation. When he got to quotes of the classics, he would don a Basque beret. Midway through the lecture, he grinned and flipped the blackboard to draw graphs with chalk.

Delivering the Marc Bloch Lectures at the Sorbonne, 1982.

Pleased with this little trick, he argued that these conflicting “theses” about society developed largely without awareness and communication between them, leaving us with rival but disengaged views of the market. “Intimately related intellectual formations,” he noted, “unfolded at great length, without ever taking cognizance of each other. Such ignoring of close kin is no doubt the price paid by ideology for the self-confidence it likes to parade.” Hirschman offered a
tableau idéologique
of the rivals. In conversing with them, he drew them to the table to communicate with the other. This “democratic” approach to economic thought deprived any single argument of certainty nurtured by isolation. In staging this conversation among rival views of the market, however, Hirschman had to concede that over the course of the twentieth century the prospect of such a dialogue was getting more difficult. In fact, it could only be resurrected through his kind of historical reenactment. Ever the optimist, he suggested that this version of history should be seen as a precedent for present.
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At the Sorbonne, his locution had lost some of its fluency. The words were clear but laced with an unidentifiable accent whose origins were lost in a lifetime of migration and translation. One who was captivated was Annie Cot, the French historian of economic thought. Lia Rein’s son, Martin Andler, arranged for them to meet, and soon Hirschman found himself on Cot’s dissertation committee. Many years later, her seminar at the Sorbonne for PhD students working on the history of economic thought became baptized informally as the Séminaire Albert Hirschman.

Cliff Geertz found Hirschman’s hunger for honorifics irritating and grumbled to friends that Albert was debasing himself (though it should
be said that Geertz harvested his fair share, too). To some extent, he was right—it was going to Hirschman’s head, but in Hirschman’s own, humorously self-detaching way. His diary contains the following entry:

When I was first in school I was told this is a bad omen for success in “life”—now that I am getting all kinds of honors while still alive I worry this is a bad omen for my fame after death.

It has been said that the hoard of honorifics was compensation for not having won
the
prize—the Nobel Prize in economics. Hirschman once quipped that he figured an honorary doctorate from Harvard was the consolation for runners up. Still: why no Nobel Prize? No question came up more often in the course of a decade’s research on this book. As
Le Monde
declared in September 1997: “Hirschman, let’s say it outright, should have long ago received the Nobel Prize in economic sciences.”
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Certainly, Hirschman was nominating others for the prize—including heroic organizations like the Inter-American Foundation. One reviewer noted of
Essays in Trespassing
that Hirschman was in the same league as the other founders of development economics—Arthur Lewis, Gunnar Myrdal, and Raúl Prebisch—with original thinking and many admirers. But unlike them he had no disciples. “There is nothing which could be described as a Hirschman school of development economics,” noted the reviewer, and his lack of “method” explained the limits of his influence. Although Hirschman looked at the many ways in which phenomena are connected, “the connections he highlights are rarely direct or straightforward. His approach is circuitous; the most important linkages are often indirect; intellectual progress frequently requires lengthy detours and forays into seemingly unrelated areas.” The reviewer drew attention to Hirschman’s cherished cover of
Journeys toward Progress
, Paul Klee’s painting,
Highways and Byways
, as an apt image for the content of his thinking.
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This critique in the
Times Literary Supplement
stuck in Hirschman’s craw. When he began a talk at CEBRAP in March of 1982, he despaired that his readers only saw disjointed, indirect connections.
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Another reviewer, Alex Inkeles in the
Journal of Economic Literature
, noted that Hirschman was at his best when he connected economic relations
to social and political systems; but when it came to “conventional economic analysis,” a reader was left wanting. Of course, Hirschman could only reply that he never aimed to fit convention.
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By the late 1980s the rumors of Hirschman’s nomination for the Nobel were flying fast and furious. The guessing game was becoming an autumn ritual. In 1989, Peter Passell drafted a list for the
New York Times
based on phone calls with anonymous economists. Many confirmed that there was an element of crap-shooting going on. Passell named some of the obvious contenders, like Gary Becker (who would get it in 1992), Robert Lucas (1995), Joseph Stiglitz (2001), and Ronald Coase (1991). His list was impressively accurate in retrospect. To add some drama, he added a “dark horse category.” This is the “most fun” part of the whole game, he thought, as there were awardees who “would be sure to arouse controversy.” At the top of this category he put Hirschman, “who has ventured deep into sociology, anthropology and philosophy to explain economic phenomena.” There were others, too: Robert Fogel, Mancur Olson, Robert Mundell, and Martin Weitzman. Two of these would go on to win the prize, suggesting that dark horses could still cross the line first.
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To some of his fans, among them laureates, it was a mystery why he did not get the Nobel Prize. Tom Schelling argues that the arc of his lifework yielded more originality of economic thinking, and this achievement, rather than any single “theorem” or “solution,” is what recommends him.
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A common account is that Hirschman was not mathematical. Amartya Sen, Albert’s nephew and a laureate, noted that in the early days most economists added math to their analytical kit bags and were recognized more for their conceptual breakthroughs; nowadays, when more and more economists start as mathematicians, this once “rare skill which Albert lacked” became increasingly notable. To Sen, this was regrettable; he considers Hirschman an uncommonly profound economic thinker. Beside, Hayek, Myrdal, and more recently Hirschman’s old friend Schelling were not especially math-inclined; the lack of math was not, in itself, the spoiler.
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The question for many is, what did he contribute
to
the discipline? This, after all, is the metric for the award. The fact was, Hirschman’s increasing
breadth and originality coincided with his decreasing interest in speaking only to his discipline. His departure from Harvard Economics for the IAS in a sense represented a departure from the discipline and its fundaments. His calls to resist the grain of disciplinary specialization, to move beyond a discipline’s own terms to explain social phenomena, meant that specialized practitioners were unlikely to see these injunctions as paths to further their pursuits. For this reason, Hirschman’s work could not influence economic thought as it was then being envisioned—increasingly as a discipline resting on claims that had to be sharp enough to be empirically tested, followed up, developed, and refined. Economists, as Eric Maskin once told me, found it easier to operate within existing models, dissolving ambiguities and anomalies in pursuit of taut precision. Too many of Hirschman’s insights did not add up to the kind of claims that could be tested in ways that yielded professional returns; by their standards, they were simply too wooly and elusive. The main exception was, paradoxically, the book that most veered him away from the discipline,
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
, which
is
generally recognized as a work riddled with formulae waiting to be quarried. It may well be that the recent turn to examine behavioral foundations will lead some economists back to this forerunner.
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If this was his drift, why not acknowledge his contribution to development economics?
Strategy
, after all, was recognized as possibly the single most important book in the field. The trouble was, the field was not exactly held in high regard by the discipline. The fact that a prize had been allocated to William Arthur Lewis and Theodore Schultz in 1979 was all the recognition the subfield was going to get. According to Paul Krugman, the path it was on was leading to “an intellectual dead end.” Hirschman, one should recall, was inclined to agree, though not for the same reasons. Although he never ceased to think
about
development, he worried that any proposition that the Third World required its own subfield was bound to lock economists into colonial outlooks. This concern lurked at the heart of his irritation with the big planners and “balanced growth” advocates of the 1950s and 1960s, who felt that Third World peoples need an external jolt. Rosenstein-Rodan’s crack about Allende bringing
the coup upon himself only confirmed Hirschman’s doubts.
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When “endogenous” theories of growth erupted on to the discipline’s stage, the field flared up again, this time with technical virtuosity. But some of the circularity seemed all too familiar. In the fall of 1991, colleagues at Berkeley convened an international symposium, “Endogenous Growth,” and invited Hirschman as a keynote eminence; by then, he was one of the few lucid founders left. Judging from his notes on the occasion, there was not a bit of déjà vu as a younger generation debated whether growth implied industrialization (“No!” exclaimed the seventy-six-year-old to himself) and whether “market failures” and “externalities” explained the trouble. When one economist proclaimed that “I don’t have a model for that,” Hirschman scribbled, “missing the point.”
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