Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (97 page)

It was alarming. Perhaps emboldened by the senator, Hirschman felt compelled to intervene. His concern about argumentation was nothing new. But it had taken a new turn. The summer of 1985 saw him reading
Considérations sur la France
by Joseph de Maistre, noting his praise for the French Revolution for devouring itself and leaving France better off for having done so. He circled back to familiar themes, like the Scottish Enlightenment and unintended consequences, Marx and romanticism. And there were the expected injunctions to open new readings, like the doctrine of Divine Providence. He sensed he was returning to the beginning of a cycle that began decades earlier in his pleas for reform. “In a sense,” he noted, “I may be after something like ‘Journeys Towards Reaction (or Disaster)’in counterpart to my
Journeys toward Progress
.” Now, to fully understand the challenge of reform, he was finally coming face-to-face with its dialectical counterpoint. To understand why reform was so fraught, he needed “better understanding [of ] why reform movements arouse resistance and passionate antagonism, why they run into decreasing returns, why there are subject to (totalitarian, etc.) dérapage.” By the next summer, his ideas were crystallizing around the keyword “reaction.” He was once again reading Edmund Burke.
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By 1988, it was time to write.

His composition began as an essay about ideologues Hirschman labeled “reactionary,” those who argued that efforts at reform had the
perverse
effect of sabotaging it. Worse, reforms could move societies onto the opposite track. Some even argued that it was inevitable. Talk about
unintended effects! Reform threatened to make things worse—what Hirschman called the Jeopardy Thesis, his first coinage in writing. It focused on Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre as the originators of the current American reactionary discourse and ended with Charles Murray, the libertarian pundit whose book,
Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
enjoyed near-biblical status for those eager to dismantle the welfare state for the putative good of its beneficiaries. The idea, exemplified by Murray’s polemics, was that reforms guided by state policy risked undermining all progress made before the policies were implemented. They put progress in jeopardy. Hirschman plotted his ideas about this tradition of argumentation. Some old friends shared their thoughts. Offe pointed out that conservatives who believed in the bad outcomes from good intensions in politics also believed in good outcomes from bad intentions from economics: “They cherish and condemn intention-outcome discrepancies at the same time,” Offe clarified. Hirschman marked this line. Skinner pointed, as one might expect, to some English precedents: “The one perfect instance of a writer who says in so many words that the drive to greater civil liberty will inevitably lead to what you call ‘the perverse effect’ is Hobbes in
Leviathan
.” Look at the chapter “On the Office of the Sovereign” in Book 2, urged Hirschman; there you will see Hobbes’ account of the
inevitable
consequence of attempted reform. And what about Fortuna, who rewards the brave for tempting her to defeat them by summoning the perverse effect? Is this not what the wheel of Fortune alludes to? The ambitious can be rewarded for their daring.
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He put the final touches to his essay and sent it to James Fallows. In May 1989, the
Atlantic Monthly
published the long essay called “Reactionary Rhetoric,” which charged the self-described “neo-conservatives” of being unwilling to argue
directly
with those who advocated reform. Instead, what they wielded were word games, a theme from
The Passions and the Interests
to chart the arguments for capitalism in its ascent. Two centuries later, with Latin American economies tearing down old restrictions and Communist verities trembling behind their walls, capitalism
was
triumphant. And yet, its apostles were deafer than ever to the voices of those who wanted it to be a little less savage.
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For those making transitions to market life, the essay struck a nerve. The Polish Academy of Sciences invited Hirschman to address colleagues in Warsaw to explain the Jeopardy Thesis. János Kornai and István Rév in Budapest were also eager to have him unpack the critique for Hungarians, but the rector of the crumbling Karl Marx University of Economics, eager to swap his ideological stripes for a different kind of empire, put his foot down at the idea of an honorary degree. “If you were Milton Friedman then there would be nothing to prevent your decoration,” lamented an embarrassed Rév. Instead, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences would host him. Rév also wanted Hirschman to confer with opposition intellectuals, like János Kís of the Free Democrats.
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A volley of letters from friends and colleagues urged more. McPherson applauded the essay and especially the unmasking of Murray, adding “the only real complaint about your piece is that it isn’t long enough.”
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He would get his way. To date, Hirschman’s books had been outcroppings from ideas drawn from his supply of petites idées. This, his last book,
The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy
(1991), was different. It was induced by demand to expand his critique of arguments about the self-defeatism of reform. That is, as we shall see, the core of its ambition.

There was something else at work in
Rhetoric
that did not get much play among Anglophones applauding the work. While much of the book was responding immediately to neo-conservative triumphalism in the United States and Britain, and this became the focus of readers’ attentions, the events in Germany and Latin America cued him to a broader problem that transcended questions of welfare: the role of discourse in democracy. There were not just arguments on the line; there were republican values of civic life. All dogmas and “basic” logics (the inevitable crisis of capitalism, the unavoidable need for outside interventions of development planners, the intractable crisis of late industrializers, and now the ineluctable pointlessness of reform—the inventory of iron-clad certainties of the century was growing longer) had been favorite targets for decades. By definition they limited what people might consider as alternatives—and anything that limited the scope for learning from experience closed off options. But there was more at stake. Arguments that immunized themselves
from the possibility of being wrong and from accommodating uncertainty were closed discourses that thwarted listening to others—and this sapped democracy of its vibrancy. The major and minor keys of the book were therefore united in a concern to address “the systematic lack of communication between groups of citizens, such as liberals and conservatives, progressives and reactionaries.”

The resulting separateness of these large groups from one another seems more worrisome to me that the isolation of anomic individuals in ‘mass society’ of which sociologists have made so much.
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Loosening the encased certainties and the “servitudes” that flow from them would, he believed, help restore communication. Chest-thumping neo-cons worried him; so did the arguments coming from the progressive side. It is important to bear this in mind because “Reaction” was read as, understandably, a position exclusively of the Right. In fact, Hirschman had in mind all positions that
react
to the idea of reform by discounting its logical impossibility. This is why, to the chagrin of many on the Left, Hirschman chose to write a chapter—
chapter 6
—about progressive intransigencies. This allowed him to stand above extremes to defend the space of reform as also a disposition about
forms of arguing
. Intransigents of all stripes only serviced a dialogue of the deaf and thus ensured that the failure of reform was sealed from the start. The ability of a society to sustain open conversations among rivals that admitted the possibility of being wrong was a gauge of its democratic life and its ability to promote nonprojected futures for its citizens. Indeed, when Hirschman completed it, he asked Harvard University Press if he could change the title from
The Rhetoric of Reaction
to
The Rhetoric of Intransigence
. There was objection all around. Americans wouldn’t understand the word and were like to mispronounce it, so Hirschman went back to the original. But the simultaneous foreign language translations—where the question of democratic discourse was more burning—did embrace the title change. The German, Italian, Brazilian, Mexican editions substituted “Intransigence.” The French preference for historical narratives led to
Deux siècles de rhétorique réactionnaire
.
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The book, in imperceptibly powerful ways, grew in scope as readers turned the pages. Characteristically, he went back in time to the foundational arguments of the modern era. “I have a new project,” he told his sister, “an “article” (or a book) on the structure of reactionary thought, inspired by the Reagan regime. But I will go back until the reaction to the French Revolution. For the first time in many years I am reading a lot of German, for instance Novalis, Schlegel, but also Schiller—did you know that the Song of the Bell is a completely anti-revolutionary poem (see the last part)—it is very pleasant to discover that my German and the feeling for the language is still there, completely intact.”
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This excavation of a tradition sired by counter-revolutionary talk gave birth to his coinage: “the perversity thesis,” a foundational argument born of reactions to the French Revolution, according to which all efforts at purposeful change aggravates the condition one wants to remedy. “Everything backfires”; Le Bon argued that universal suffrage would destroy national and international order by raining the irrationality of the masses on the state, first by ramping up demands and thus augmenting public spending, and then bloating governments faced with mounting mandates, only to turn over the once-precious democracy to a class of bureaucrats. It was a formulation that presaged contemporary “public choice” theorists. One cannot help but read a lifetime’s battles being poured into this “new project,” including warnings that trumped-up promises of deliverance cannot help but set the stage for trumped-up declarations of absolute failure, a syndrome Hirschman cautioned a quarter of a century earlier. What had changed over the decades is that failurists no longer needed to wait for exaggerated hopes to deliver their blow. It was enough for someone ever to have bothered to think that minimum wages or safety nets might cure ills to inspire the lip-curling scorn of those who blessed themselves for having mastered the elementary sophistication of a simple paradox and turned it into a cure-all for all public policy considerations.

But how exactly did perversity unfurl its malice? The next two centuries saw the perversity thesis spawn two more: the Jeopardy Thesis and “the futility thesis.” Jeopardy, as he pointed out in the
Atlantic Monthly
, insists that the costs of reform were punitive and imperiled all previous,
fragile, breakthroughs. Futility argues that all efforts at change are pointless;
plus ça change plus cést la même chose
shrugged some in the wake of revolutions—French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban. Milton Friedman assured readers of
Time
magazine that minimum wage laws wind up driving workers out of jobs while Gordon Tullock’s
Welfare for the Well-to-Do
had the added virtue of boasting a title that “left nothing to the imagination.” At least Milton and Rose Friedman bothered to suggest there might be an option in their
Free to Choose
. There was an analogy in the futility thesis to primitive or “vulgar” Marxists—and faint echoes of the debates in Germany in 1932–33 can be heard—who argued that the state served capitalists and scorned as hypocrisy any notion that a policy might help the working class or the general interest. The Far Left had feared that a successful policy might blunt the appeal of revolutionary certainty. A half century later it was the Far Right that mocked reformers for their naïveté or idiocy for messing with a system that should, untouched, be self-equilibrating. Meddling with the market would invariably serve better the haves than the have-nots.

History turned the tables on Hirschman. Having spent so much of the 1950s and 1960s trying to get social scientists to see that unintended consequences of collective actions could yield positive side effects, trying to get them to climb down from their master plans and elaborate flow charts to see what was actually transpiring on the ground, these same side effects had been given a new, pernicious, spin. Reactionaries had claimed the power of unintended consequences for themselves and turned them into a dogma
against
change. Now Hirschman had to warn against overclaiming the power of side effects, especially those that overwhelmed the puny positive results. The posture, in the hands of the extremes, became positions of intransigence.

The Rhetoric of Reaction
rolled off the presses amid a war in which overwhelming forces drove Iraqi armies from occupied Kuwait. In their wake, the American government celebrated in a fit of bravado. Everyone was talking about an article by an American pundit, Frances Fukuyama, about the end of history and the eclipse of its ideological forces. With this in the air, Hirschman’s combative élan rang out of tune. Many were
delighted that someone had captured what was so frustrating about the nondialogue with conservatives. The novelist Jamaica Kincaid was one of them. She read the book about the time she got her first fax machine and gave it a trial run with a short note to Hirschman. His introduction “took my breath away,” she wrote. “I imagine having you for a reader.”
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But others were not so impressed. When Hirschman returned from Berlin, he found a stack of mixed-to-hostile reviews. Some, such as those from
Critical Review
and the
Public Interest
were no surprise, although they were genuinely acknowledging of Hirschman’s learned lucidity and cannot be accused of not taking the book seriously. Indeed, if Hirschman aimed to motivate a dialogue with the Right to promote more open-mindedness, his effort worked, at least in these two influential magazines. Not so with the British journalist Peter Jenkins, who was unflattering in the
New York Times
, finding the book steeped in an age riven by traditional political ideologies: “The old labels don’t stick anymore,” he announced with unblinking confidence. Rather immodestly, he thought Hirschman brushed reactionaries away too “lightly.” After all, the French Revolution led to the Terror, and look what Marxism did, as if this had bypassed Hirschman. “The last decade of the 20th century is not a moment to mock those who have mocked such great transformational projects.”
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Thin-skinned when it came to reviews, Hirschman complained to Silvers at the
New York Review of Books
that “I cannot help feeling that some sort of concerted assault is shaping up.” This was self-pity speaking. The
New Republic
and the
American Prospect
treated the book with serious enthusiasm. Still, he angled for a favorable review from Silvers, who told Hirschman he’d sent the book to two different reviewers “but was disappointed in each case.” Taken aback, he turned defensive; the lectures and ripostes that ensued were self-protective, surprising given the point he was trying to make. A polemical book such as this one was bound to elicit strong reactions.
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