Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (99 page)

Albert and Sarah in Berlin, 1994.
Credit: Christa Lachenmaier/Laif/Redux.

The occasional frights did not slow him down, but he did indulge himself a little bit. After delivering the Patocka Memorial Lecture at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in June 1996, Hirschman decided to splurge with part of the proceedings. He found an elegant hotel in the Alpine town of Pontresina and invited Katia and Alain to join him and Sarah. This was going to be a more relaxed vacation: on July 11, they made plans to take a cable car to the peak and walk down, an unheard of extravagance! Perhaps he should have stuck to his old drill, for on the descent Albert tripped and struck his head against a rock, severely gashing his face. It took three hours for Alain to get Albert to the bottom of the path, by which time he was covered in blood; the whole while he kept asking Alain if
he
was alright. A doctor cleaned him up and swathed his face in bandages. But it was clear that the damage was more than skin-deep. Albert’s speech was slurred, more hesitant. Then his gait changed; it was hard to keep his balance. He quickly returned to the United States, where doctors diagnosed a cerebral hematoma, by which time Albert was having more difficulties speaking.

He knew he was losing his grip. Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard economist who had struck up a late but active correspondence with Hirschman about the relations between economic growth and democratization, had sent Hirschman a draft essay and list of queries. Under normal circumstances, this would have elicited a lengthy response. Instead, he told Friedman that he found “it impossible for me to address myself to the kind of questions you are posing.” Wolf Lepenies had been planning a global colloquium on Albert’s work at the Kolleg in Berlin. By the middle of August, the effects were clear enough to someone who did not want to refuse a return to Berlin. “I am depressed,” he told Wolf, “and have some serious doubts about our returning to the Wissenschaftskolleg next year. I just feel that I would not be a particularly useful or productive member.”
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Orlando Fals Borda of Colombia’s National University asked him to come to Cartagena for a conference to discuss his work on development
in Latin America. This must have been wrenching, for he had not been back to Colombia for many years. His accident “was quite a trauma,” he explained to his old friend. “I am better than I was, but simply cannot now envision undertaking the trip I was much looking forward to.” A concerned Fals Borda immediately responded with a fax, hoping for a speedy recovery.
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Being immobilized brought on depression. Doctors prescribed Prozac, then Zoloft. But there was little to arrest the steady, ineluctable decline, the deteriorating hearing and speaking, his tortuous difficulty writing, and the loss of affect or expression that had been such a subtle but important feature of his communication. Instead of reading, he spent long hours of the day asleep in his chair. Walks to the institute became prolonged shuffling excursions, which left him even more exhausted.

The Alpine tumble put an end to a long writing career. Words—the spoken and the written—that fascinated him through life became harder and harder to grasp. Their slipping epitomized an ending. As one might imagine, it was difficult to turn away the flow of invitations and solicitations. George Soros asked Hirschman to spend a weekend with him at his country home in Katonah, New York, in May to discuss “the capitalist threat” with a few friends. Unable to turn this one down, Hirschman went, but he was, by all accounts, the shadow of the sage he’d once been. His last writing effort was a short amalgamation of quotes and thoughts about the paradoxes of unintended consequences written for Soros’ Open Society Institute in late 1999.
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In September 1997, the Toynbee Prize Foundation announced that it would confer that year’s prize to Hirschman for his contribution to the “health of the social sciences.” He would join the likes of Raymond Aron, Jean-Paul Sartre, E. H. Carr, and others. Delighted, he accepted, and began to prepare his speech—which he decided would tackle the works of Toynbee and Gerschenkron. But it did not take long for Hirschman to realize that this was beyond his grasp. Having had a chance to reread Toynbee and a few other books, “I feel that I would be unable at this point in my life to generate the enthusiasm and energy needed to write. I hope you will forgive me,” he wrote to the president of the foundation. Besides, he never liked Toynbee and likely
found the exercise less exciting in practice that it was in theory.
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In the end, arrangements were made to have Judith Tendler, John Coatsworth (the director of Harvard’s Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies), and Charles Maier step in with short speeches. Graciously, Maier took the opportunity to salute Sarah and the richness of Albert’s family life that had allowed him to explore literary, philosophical, and psychological connections because he was never alone.

Several publishers moved to assemble his final essays into anthologies. Hirschman gathered his self-reflective, Montaignesque works as a commitment to self-subversion for a collection with the same title, which Harvard University Press published. Some of the essays were personal retrospections and speeches from award ceremonies about the surprising turns of a life. But there was a broader point being made, which was captured in his last serious composition, written, perhaps fittingly, for the one-hundredth session of the Bergedorfer Gesprächskreis (Discussion Circle of Bergedorfer) in Dresden. The attendees were asked to think about “how much community spirit (
Gemeinsinn
) does liberal society require?” Hirschman’s answer began with a tale from Tolstoy about a peasant called Pakhom, who was obsessed with accumulating land. In his exertions to hoard, Pakhom died prematurely of exhaustion, by which time all Pakhom really needed was the plot for his grave. To Hirschman, Tolstoy’s warning was “that this is the amount of land we may well end up with if we fall prey to accumulating passion.” Hirschman was not denouncing greed. He was cautioning Germans against excessive calls for community spirit because it threatened to stultify necessary, but disorienting, conflicts. People had to disagree, struggle, bargain, and experiment; conflict was the real “glue and solvent.” “What is actually required to make progress with the novel problems a society encounters on its road is political entrepreneurship, imagination, patience here, impatience there, and other varieties of
virtù
and
fortuna
. I do not see much point (and do see some danger) in lumping all this together by an appeal to Gemeinsinn.” Closing with Machiavelli was no accident; for the Florentine, politics was an art in need of multiple activities, ranging from exit to voice to loyalty. The range thrived best when adversaries were willing to accept the uncertainty
of their correctness. It withered in the face of intransigence. Hirschman’s version of political economy had never been easy to model because it was not about answers, designs, or solutions in pursuit of an equilibrium or balance. To his Dresden audience he warned that the idea of a prepolitical communal identity missed the point; one’s loyalty came
from
politics, its messiness and its possibilities. The third panel of his famous triptych, exit, voice, and loyalty, was now coming into relief.
¹⁰

The book of which the essay was a part would exhibit his self-questioning at work, to show how the discovery of new meaning can come from subverting one’s earlier arguments. Immediately translated into many languages,
A Propensity to Self-Subversion
(1995) consolidated Hirschman’s global profile as a rare voice of learned humility and self-affirmation. Fernando Henrique Cardoso took time out from his presidential duties to write the foreword to the Portuguese edition—likening Hirschman’s disguised intellectual power and ambition to Machiavelli, “nibbling” at small questions to overturn and reframe grand theories—with a warning to readers: do not mistake nibblings (Hirschman’s petites idées) for fleeting interpretations. Modesty’s purpose is to enhance an argument’s virtue. Hirschman and the Princeton philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, struck up a correspondence about commitments to revisit one’s thoughts. Frankfurt insisted that there was an important distinction between self-subversion and self-refutation; the latter he associated with Bertrand Russell or Hilary Putnam. Hirschman was doing something quite different. “The reason your work is never completed,” observed Frankfurt, “is that you have a propensity to look for ways to enlarge it. What happens to you is not really that (as for Sisyphus) work you have previously done is completely undone, so that you must start again from the beginning.” On the eve of the French publication of
A Propensity to Self-Subversion, Le Monde
featured a long
entretien
of Hirschman, all but inducting him into its Pantheon of the century’s great intellectuals.
¹¹

Hirschman’s last tome was a slender affair including a lecture in Vienna about public and private intersections and his retrospective on the Marshall Plan, capped by a long 1993 interview with Carmine Donzelli, Marta Petrusewicz, and Claudia Rusconi that had been published earlier
in Italian, German, Spanish, and French at the height of the impact of
The Rhetoric of Reaction
. Hirschman fretted over the title and yearned to allude to his theme of trespassing, which entitled his 1981 anthology. In the end, he settled for
Crossing Boundaries
, though his editor at Zone Books, Ramona Nadaff exclaimed that “I still believe it is important to discuss your concept of ‘trespassing’ and its binding force in your thinking.” He tried to oblige. By the end of 1997 it was all he could do to press himself into service to write one last paragraph for the preface.
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So it was that in the 1990s, the curves of history crossed. One charted the world’s ascending interest in Hirschman’s insights and recollections of the twentieth century as it came to a close. The other traced Hirschman’s dwindling ability to summon them.

In all the recovery-mania of the post–Cold War era, one that took remarkably long to surface was the story of Varian Fry and the operation to rescue refugees from Marseilles. As long as the Fry story remained submerged, so did Albert’s. Hirschman was no longer so resolutely tight-lipped about his role in the operation; it’s that the rescue operation was overshadowed by the Holocaust. In 1982, Laurence Jarvik released a controversial documentary,
Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die
, exposing the United States government’s and others’ resistance to accepting Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. It dealt briefly with the Emergency Rescue Committee’s work—and featured black-and-white footage of Hirschman’s testimony to the director, filmed at his home in Princeton. The documentary chronicled the shameful Allied policies and was quickly swept up in a debate about whether more could have been done to save Jews. In this heady climate, whatever examples of saving that did take place were afterthoughts. Indeed, the footage of Hirschman, who spends the filming looking at a spot on the horizon as he recalled 1940, has him putting a damper on the ERC effort: “One tragic aspect of the story was that a great deal was accomplished and we were all very proud of what we accomplished. Perhaps everyone was so proud that”—and at this point Hirschman looked into the questioner’s eyes—“they forgot about the others. Looking back on this episode, that is perhaps, to some extent, the price that we paid for getting out these few.” While Hirschman was fond
of unintended consequences, this self-incriminating twist—or at least what we are shown by a director keen to expose the do-nothing stance of others—merged the details of his own risks into a broader canvas of horror and complicity.
¹³

It was not until the United States Holocaust Memorial Council offered Fry posthumous official recognition in 1991 that the story began to circulate. By then, the memory industry had shifted from revisionist histories of blame to a wave of public memorializing of survival. In 1996, the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem inducted Fry as one of the Righteous among the Nations. He was the first American. Varian Fry’s
Surrender on Demand
was republished in 1997 with an epigram from Beamish. That year, Teri-When Damisch produced a documentary,
Marseille–New York: L’Etat de Piège ou La Filière Marseillaise
, which featured Hirschman playing the part of Fry, Beamish, and raconteur. The film also reunited Mary Jayne Gold with Beamish. Whatever reticence he felt about public speaking melted away as he clearly enjoyed acting. In 1999, an association was formed in Fry’s memory in Marseilles; a French documentary filmmaker, Pierre Sauvage, also became involved in an organization called the Chambon Foundation. Hirschman’s role in the rescue operation, however, remained shrouded. The Varian Fry Institute (a division of the Chambon Foundation) did not include him in its list of sacralized figures. It continues to leave him out, inexplicably. So does Paris’s wall dedicated to those who helped save souls from the Holocaust, inexplicably. It was not until Sheila Isenberg’s
A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry
appeared in 2001 that the fullness of Hirschman’s hidden, and hiding, hand was revealed. Her widely praised account had managed to incorporate results of her interviews with Hirschman before serious memory loss set in. The Jewish Museum hosted a remembrance of Fry’s activities in December 1997. A corner of the Fry exhibition was reserved for Beamish’s role. At the museum’s conference, Hirschman was asked for the first time publicly to recall his part as the last living member of the Marseilles group. By that point, unfortunately, his memory was fading.
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There were other memorial occasions. In June 1997, the Harvard historian Charles Maier organized a symposium in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of George C. Marshall’s famous speech inaugurating the plan that would bear his name. It pulled together scholars and a few of the surviving planners, including some of Hirschman’s oldest friends, such as Charlie Kindleberger, Lincoln Gordon, and Tom Schelling. Stanley Hoffmann was going to coordinate many of the formalities, which was to include an address by the secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. By then, Hirschman was struggling with himself. Though Maier had asked Hirschman to reflect on the European Recovery Program from his perspective as a staffer on the Federal Reserve Board, it was beyond Hirschman’s capacity. Yearning to be there among old friends, however, he wrote a short reflection on the memoirs of two men with whom he worked at the time, Robert Marjolin and Richard Bissell. It was, by all accounts, a grand occasion; Hirschman was excited to have been included though he nodded through much of the proceedings.