Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (98 page)

The reception abroad was something else altogether, which suggests that the old contrast between a pragmatic, open-minded America and obstinate, absolutist Europe and Latin America was getting inverted. Fernando Henrique Cardoso heralded the book as a model of critical progressive thinking in a long review in
Estudos, CEBRAP
and the Argentine
socialist magazine,
La Ciudad Futura
. The Mexican
Nexos
also featured, and celebrated, the defrocking of right-wing futilists.
Die Zeit
carried an extensive review by Otto Kallscheuer on October 2, 1992, noting the importance of open arguments for democratic life. But it was especially in France that Hirschman was greeted as a celebrity. Hirschman found himself besieged with overtures. The Commissariat général du Plan (fittingly, founded by Jean Monnet in 1946) asked Hirschman to speak about reactionaries and the prospects for reform. In preparation,
Alternatives Economiques
’s June 1992 issue had a cover “La grand peur des classes moyennes” with a photo below of a Los Angeles shopping mall in flames during the riots that erupted after Los Angeles police officers were acquitted for the merciless beating of Rodney King; inside was the editor Denis Clerc’s profile of Albert Hirschman and an extensive Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld interview of him. So it was that a panel of French notables welcomed Hirschman at the commissariat and listened to his talk, “Progressive Rhetoric and the Reformer.”
⁵²
Reviews in
Le Monde
(by Daniel Andler, a philosopher and Lia Rein’s son, as it turns out),
Le Nouvel Observateur
, and
L’Express
raved about the book and featured its author as a true
homme de lettres
.

From a European perspective, here was a European living in the United States who could finally explain all the American neo-con froth to them. There was, however, one European who took issue with the book, the eminent Sorbonne sociologist, Raymond Boudon. Pierre Nora had asked him to review
Rhetoric
for the influential, high-end magazine
Le Débat
. Unlike the American conservative reaction, which laced its criticism with deference, Boudon was downright hostile, a task facilitated by wanton misreading. Near the end of the long review Boudon charged Hirschman with knowing nothing of “the new science of rhetoric”—implying either dependence on an old style or an unscientific one. The heat seemed to reflect less an ideological dispute than a personal one, either envy (that Hirschman was getting so much attention) or resentment (that Hirschman had not made the proper genuflections; Boudon had, for instance, written about “perverse effects” and unintended consequences). Nora, to be fair and perhaps seeing the problem, asked Albert if
he would like the right to reply. Hirschman’s prose in
Rhetoric of Reaction
had been at times sardonic, other times playfully hard-hitting. When it came to Boudon, he poured his annoyance at his critics into an uncharacteristically acidic comment. “The objections of Raymond Boudon to my recent book,” he told readers, “are so numerous and so widely scattered that I feel like the proverbial mosquito in a nudist colony: I don’t know where to start.”
⁵³

Of course, he did. Hirschman proceeded to smack his critic hard. It is possible that his riposte was fired by frustration that the popularity of
Rhetoric of Reaction
(which was so personally gratifying) had so little impact on the mood, especially in Washington (which was not). Perhaps he consoled himself that intransigents, once in position, especially positions of influence, were hardly inclined to listen to critics like Hirschman. It was not the first time he found himself at odds with an alliance of ideas and policy makers with whom he profoundly disagreed.
Rhetoric of Reaction
was an outcry; in earlier days Hirschman might have considered exit. But a century was taking its toll. He was getting too old to escape to the field or to retreat to history. Increasingly, he had to watch as others took up the challenge. As he drew the book to a close, an unusually somber tone took over; Hirschman was openly, if ambiguously, prophetic. “There remains a long and difficult road to be traveled,” he concluded, “from the traditional internecine, intransigent discourse to a more ‘democracy-friendly’ kind of dialogue” (p. 170). In an age in which political life was being overrun by arguments conjugated to kill their opponents, it was not so easy to wish good fortune upon those disposed to doubt or to embrace the readiness to be wrong. But even this gloom could not stick. Among other things, Hirschman worried about the figure of the prophet. His diary around the same time records this:

Prophecy
—always a disaster

prophet = Cassandra

or: prophet = action-arousing gloomy version?

Ex: Malthus

Hirschman did not want to go down as a latter-day Malthus, known perhaps unfairly as the apostle of the dismal science. The point was not to predict demise. Hirschman was by then far too seasoned in his struggles against declension to give into it now. The point was to imagine a different way to argue.

O
n April 7, 1995, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Phillip Griffiths, issued invitations to Hirschman’s friends and colleagues to celebrate his eightieth birthday. There would be, as befit an eminent scholar, panels and discussion. Amartya Sen would lead a seminar on development and poverty. Ruth Cardoso, Michael McPherson, Paul Romer, Thomas Robinson, Emma Rothschild, José Serra, and James Wolfensohn planned comments. Seventy-eight people flew in from around the world. Some who could not, such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Wolf Lepenies, sent letters. Later that evening, over rack of lamb, gratin Dauphinois, and haricots verts, there were toasts. Finally, Albert was given the last words. “After marvelous, kind, witty messages, what remains for
me
to say?” he asked his friends. He smiled. “I am reminded” he added, “of a story about a fellow who listens to various praises and then admonishes his friends: ‘Don’t forget about my modesty!’ It would be in the spirit of ‘self-subversion’ if I now undertook to refute the various claims that have been made here—but that would be tiresome. The basic fact is that I must admit to being pretty old.”
¹

How to bring closure to a study about someone approaching his final years, especially when—as we shall see—each year brought him closer to death by chipping away at his life? As Hermione Lee has noted, this is often a life history’s peril, where the effort to tie up the dangling threads
reduces the odyssey to an essence it may never have had. We have been fascinated by exemplary deaths, or rather by deaths made exemplary, like Virginia Woolf’s or Nelson’s, replete with famous and mythologized dying words. We seek in the moment of death a meaning of a life.
²

We are fortunate in at least one respect: Hirschman was aware of the dilemma. He wrote about it, often in pursuit of death’s ironical features. “The longer one lives,” he mused in his diary, probably in the late 1960s, “the clearer it becomes that life is short.” A few years later, he asked himself: “To conquer death—how? To die smiling. Practice smiling during orgasm. Smile and laughter as the essential prologue and epilogue to having sex. Making a woman laugh = make her open up, first her mouth—the rest follows. But why is laughter also the epilogue? Do we laugh about each other or about the fact that we were precisely so
tierisch ernst
(full of animal-like seriousness) just now?” It seems likely that Ursula’s illness provoked thoughts of mortality; his notebook is filled with such ruminations. Around the time of the death of his brother-in-law in May 1986, Albert almost foresaw his own biographer’s problem:

Obituary-writers love someone like Altiero with a higher & unitary mission that defines his life’s meaning for them. But why should we make the life of obituary-writers easy?

The convention of using a death to sum up a life, to lend conclusive—and concluding—significance to a subject’s work, is so tempting that it has become a literary parody. Ending is hard to avoid; death is impossible to, which is one reason why biographers have relied on the latter to resolve the former. But even this Hirschman knew. After all, death shadowed him from youth. The spirits of the deceased—his father, Mark Rein, Eugenio Colorni, the unmentioned relatives killed in gas chambers, the fellow volunteers in Spain—accompanied him in the way he viewed the world and in the way he wrote. What he could not know about his own ending was how to place and date it—until it was upon him. For Hirschman it took place, perhaps fittingly, in the Alps, where he had gone for the restorative powers of the mountains. It was the summer after his eightieth birthday. From 1972 onward, Albert and Sarah would visit Katia and Alain as often as possible, spending several weeks each summer at Puy St. Vincent in the Alps. A centerpiece of these vacations was a metronomic commitment to walking in the mountains. With each passing summer, Albert looked forward to reliving this childhood passion, all the more so as his French grandchildren joined him on outings.

Climbing near Puy St. Vincent in the Alps, 1982.

Albert enforced what others regarded only half-mockingly as “the German rules”: up at 6:00 a.m. sharp, an early breakfast, hit the trails by 7:00, steady walking for 50 minutes followed by 10 minute breaks. When the entourage reached the peak then the family rested and ate. It was not always easy to drill this into the occasional American tag-along, who often preferred to eat the whole way and take breaks whenever the going got tough. For Albert, it was not just the commitment to the routine and its standards, and no doubt the fond memories; he was truly inspired by the majesty of the peaks.

The visual inspirations and physical vigor were important for the days he was not walking. Part of the routine was to walk hard one day and take the next off for writing. When Albert and Sarah went to visit the Hoffmanns in their Swiss getaway near Bern, Stanley and Inge were slightly miffed that they saw so little of their guests, who were out the door at 7:30 sharp, and only after a day in the mountains would show up for dinner. At least then they could break out the wine and talk. But then the next day, Albert would hole himself up at a desk and spend hours writing on his yellow pads. This was not the shared vacation that the Hoffmanns had been looking forward to. But Stanley could not help but be impressed, though not surprised, by the work ethic.
³

The summers thereby became reunions for Sarah and Albert with their daughters and their families. With his grandchildren as muses and surrounded by the mountain airs of his youth, he created a habitat for summer writing. This was where many of his final books were drafted. The writing of
Rhetoric of Reaction
filled those long, alternate days as he poured over his note-filled pads and read George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
.
⁴

Hirschman was thus a healthy man. Wolf Lepenies arranged a photo shoot of Albert and Sarah with Christa Lachenmaier during a visit to Berlin in 1994. Albert was a little nervous, but conversation with the photographer and Sarah calmed him down. The result was a portrait of serenity with old age.

Albert had occasional troubles, especially with high blood pressure and tachycardia, which hospitalized him in Toronto and Boston. He had troubles with his right eye and later suffered temporarily from zinc shortages, which briefly affected his ability to taste. In early 1988, Sarah noticed something on Albert’s back. Tests revealed a nonmalignant tumor, which was later deemed dangerous sarcoma. Albert was admitted in February to the University of Pennsylvania hospital to have it removed. This was followed by seven weeks of draining radiation therapy five times each week. It was a scare, made worse because Albert fretted that he would not meet his lecturing obligations, especially in Paris in June. “This came as a big shock,” he told Mike McPherson. When it was over, he breathed a sigh. “Right now I feel fine, in fact enjoying what is much like a return from the realm of the damned.”
⁵
In 1991 he was admitted to the hospital in Berlin for an angina pectoris angioplasty and the following year underwent radiation therapy again, this time for prostate cancer.