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Mostrando postagens com marcador Albert Hirschman. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Albert Hirschman. Mostrar todas as postagens

terça-feira, 4 de fevereiro de 2014

Albert Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman, CUNY, March 13th

Hirschman and Latin America

Reform, Development and Possibilism
url
Jeremy Adelman
Professor of History
Princeton University
Moderator
Mauricio Font
Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies


Thursday, March 13, 2014, 4PM
The Graduate Center, Room 9205/06
365 Fifth Avenue (@ 34th Street)
Born in Berlin in 1915, Albert O. Hirschman grew up during the Weimar era and fled Germany when the Nazis seized power in 1933. Amid hardship and personal tragedy, he volunteered to fight against the fascists in Spain and helped many of Europe's leading artists and intellectuals escape to America after France fell to Hitler. His intellectual career led him to Paris, London, and Trieste, and to academic appointments at Columbia, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was an influential adviser to governments in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, as well as major foundations and the World Bank. He studied Latin America and addressed fundamental issues about development and social change in the region. Along the way, he wrote some of the most innovative and imoprtant books in economics, the social sciences, and the history of ideas. Throughout, he remained committed to his belief that reform is possible, even in the darkest of times. See below for list of publications.
Jeremy Adelman1
Jeremy Adelman studies the history of Latin America in comparative and world contexts. Worldly Philosopheris the first major account of Hirschman's remarkable life, and a tale of the twentieth century and Latin America as seen through the story of an astute and passionate observer. After graduating from the University of Toronto, he earned a master’s degree in economic history at the London School of Economics (1985) and completed a doctorate in modern history at Oxford University (1989). He has been teaching at Princeton since 1992. The recipient of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, he was the chair of the History Department for four years and occupies the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor in Spanish Civilization and Culture. At present, he is the Director of the Council for International Teaching and Research at Princeton University. See below for publications.
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Publications by Albert Hirschman: National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1945), Colombia; Highlights of a Developing Economy (1955), The Strategy of Economic Development (1958), Latin American Issues; Essays and Comments (1961), Journeys Toward Progress: Studies of Economic Policy-Making in Latin America (1963), Development Projects Observed (1967), Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States(1970), A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America (1971), The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph(1977), National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1980), Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond (1981), Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (1982), Getting Ahead Collectively: Grassroots Experiences in Latin America (1984), Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays (1986), The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy(1991), A Propensity to Self-Subversion (1985), Crossing Boundaries: Selected Writings (1998).
Publications by Jeremy Adelman: Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (2013), Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada (1994), Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the New World (1999), and Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (2006). Professor Adelman is the editor of The Essential Hirschman (2013) and coauthor of Worlds Together, Worlds Apart(2008), a history of the world from the beginning of humankind. He is currently working on two books. The first studies the history of Latin America since 1492, analyzing the ways in which the region was a human laboratory for global change from the moment of European-American contact to the present. The second explores how intellectuals grappled with social crises over the past century.
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quarta-feira, 7 de agosto de 2013

A frase da semana: Albert Hirschman sobre governos e gangsters

Comparando, com um interlocutor americano,  no outono de 1940, o submundo de Marselha, onde ele tentava escapar dos nazistas que tinham derrotado a França pouco antes, com os gangsters de Chicago, o jovem Albert O. Hirschman, alias Albert Hermant na ocasião, estendeu a comparação à sua Alemanha natal, inteiramente dominada, então, pelos gangsters nazistas:

"Na Alemanha, os gangsters e o governo são uma coisa só!"

(In Germany, the gangsters and the government are the same people.)

Soa familiar, pois não?

[ from: Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odissey of Albert O. Hirschman. Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 178 ]

sexta-feira, 19 de julho de 2013

Albert Hirschman: um filosofo deste mundo, e de um outro, melhor, masno futuro...

Exit, Voice

‘Worldly Philosopher,’ by Jeremy Adelman

By JUSTIN FOX

The New York Times Review of Books, July 19, 2013

The life that the economist Albert O. Hirschman lived in the 1980s and early ’90s was the stuff of an intellectual’s most self-aggrandizing daydreams. There were honorary degrees (at least a dozen), prestigious prizes (wouldn’t you want a Thomas Jefferson Medal from the American Philosophical Society?) and conference after conference held in his honor. It’s customary for a distinguished professor to get a “Festschrift” of writings by students and disciples; Hirschman got four.
This Hirschmania paid no mind to national borders. When Hirschman lectured in the Grand Ampitheatre of the Sorbonne, before a packed house of Parisian intellectuals, it was in barely accented French, the second of his six or so languages. As the Berlin Wall fell, he resurrected his rusty German and became an intellectual celebrity in his native land after barely visiting for 50 years. In South America, where he had doggedly supported moderate economic reformers through decades of dictatorship, he was personally invited to the presidential inaugurations of Patricio Aylwin, who took over after the ouster of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a longtime friend and intellectual collaborator in Brazil. Back in the United States, if Hirschman had something on his mind he would compose an elegant essay (Montaigne was a lifelong inspiration) and fire it off to Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books, who would of course run it.
You’ve got to admit, it all sounds pretty great. But who, you may be asking, was this Albert O. Hirschman?
Until about a year ago — when a journalist friend urged Hirschman’s book “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” on me, and a business-school professor did the same with “The Passions and the Interests” — I don’t recall ever hearing of the man. This probably reflects more on my poor college course choices than on Hirschman: his work still shows up on a lot of class reading lists. But for someone whose star shone so brightly two decades ago, and who was still alive until a few months ago (he died in December), Hirschman has receded quickly from view. Compared with more easily classifiable economists of his generation like Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson, his name just doesn’t come up that often.
Then again, neither of those guys has yet been the subject of a doorstop of a biography like “Worldly Philosopher,” the hugely engaging 740-page epic that Jeremy Adelman has just delivered. The battle for posterity is far from over, and Hirschman has a formidable ally in Adelman, a Princeton historian who knows how to construct a narrative.
The drama and variety of Hirschman’s first 40 years do give a biographer an awful lot to work with. Adelman’s protagonist was born Otto Albert Hirschmann in Berlin in 1915 to parents of Jewish descent who named him after the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, and had him baptized as a Lutheran. Otto, in his first year at the University of Berlin when Hitler came to power, was active in the anti-Nazi Socialist youth movement. Five days before his 18th birthday in April 1933, afraid he was about to be arrested, he fled to Paris.

Over the next two decades, Otto, in chronological order, (1) got a business degree in Paris; (2) studied at the London School of Economics; (3) fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War; (4) earned a doctorate in economics at the University of Trieste while acting as a courier for the Italian anti-Fascist resistance; (5) served in the French Army during its futile defense against German invasion; (6) biked and walked to the unoccupied Vichy southern France where, under the alias Albert Hermant (and the nickname Beamish, for his ingratiating manner), he helped spirit Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall and thousands of other refugees from Marseille to the United States; (7) made his own way to New Jersey, where he changed his name to Albert O. Hirschman; (8) continued west to the University of California, Berkeley, where he wrote his first book and met his wife-to-be, a beautiful French-Russian refugee who had been a favorite student of Simone de Beauvoir in Paris; (9) volunteered for the American Army, ending up as a translator for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the C.I.A., and serving as interpreter for a German general in the first Allied war-crimes trial; (10) worked for the Federal Reserve in Washington as a top adviser on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe; and, (11) driven from employment in cold war Washington by suspicions about his colorful past, moved with his family to Bogotá in 1952 to advise the Colombian government on behalf of the World Bank.
The Colombia years made Hirschman an expert in the new field of development economics, and the increasingly in-demand nature of this specialty enabled a late-blooming academic career back in the States. Hirschman went to Yale as a visiting professor in 1956, then moved on to jobs at Columbia, Harvard and finally (in 1974) the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where he and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz carved out a space for the social sciences in that famed haven for physicists and mathematicians.
In the inevitably less dramatic second half of the book, Adelman, who has already made the case that Hirschman is interesting, tries to convince readers that his subject is important. The effort is valiant, and it certainly worked on me, although I fear the world at large may be harder to win over.
Hirschman left no simple, predictive models for understanding society. His big development theory was that big development theories tend to be wrong. His view of the relationship between free markets and collective action was that a good society needs both, in varying degrees depending on the circumstances. He was suspicious of bold ideas, even his own, titling one of his books “A Propensity to Self-Subversion.”
These traits make Hirschman enormously appealing. The question nags, though, whether they will stand in the way of lasting impact. Hirschman’s most-cited book is “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” which examines the choice we face as citizens and consumers between giving up on a product or an organization that’s failing us (exit) and agitating for improvement (voice). Exit is economics, voice is politics — and Hirschman makes quite clear that there are important phenomena in this world that economics alone just can’t explain. He doesn’t tell us, though, what the optimal mix of exit and voice is. In fact, he was dubious that such an optimum exists.
Economics evolved during Hirschman’s lifetime into a discipline that’s all about optimization, preferably expressed in a mathematical model. His influence on his own field thus seems scant. And while he had lots of fans among historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists, it’s hard to detect anything like a “Hirschman school” out there.
If only there were. Hirschman believed in the potential for societal improvement, steering a course between leftist visions of a perfect world and conservative concerns that reforms always backfire. An intellectual and political environment where that was the dominant attitude would definitely be an improvement.
Justin Fox is the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

segunda-feira, 1 de julho de 2013

Albert Hirschman and the Hiding Hand - New Yorker

BOOKS

THE GIFT OF DOUBT

Albert O. Hirschman and the power of failure.

BY New Yorker, JUNE 24, 2013

Hirschman was a planner who saw virtue in the fact that nothing went as planned. Illustration by Ricardo Martinez.
Hirschman was a planner who saw virtue in the fact that nothing went as planned. Illustration by Ricardo Martinez.

In the mid-nineteenth century, work began on a crucial section of the railway line connecting Boston to the Hudson River. The addition would run from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy, New York, and it required tunnelling through Hoosac Mountain, a massive impediment, nearly five miles thick, that blocked passage between the Deerfield Valley and a tributary of the Hudson.
James Hayward, one of New England’s leading railroad engineers, estimated that penetrating the Hoosac would cost, at most, a very manageable two million dollars. The president of Amherst College, an accomplished geologist, said that the mountain was composed of soft rock and that tunnelling would be fairly easy once the engineers had breached the surface. “The Hoosac . . . is believed to be the only barrier between Boston and the Pacific,” the project’s promoter, Alvah Crocker, declared.
Everyone was wrong. Digging through the Hoosac turned out to be a nightmare. The project cost more than ten times the budgeted estimate. If the people involved had known the true nature of the challenges they faced, they would never have funded the Troy-Greenfield railroad. But, had they not, the factories of northwestern Massachusetts wouldn’t have been able to ship their goods so easily to the expanding West, the cost of freight would have remained stubbornly high, and the state of Massachusetts would have been immeasurably poorer. So is ignorance an impediment to progress or a precondition for it?
The economist Albert O. Hirschman, who died last December, loved paradoxes like this. He was a “planner,” the kind of economist who conceives of grand infrastructure projects and bold schemes. But his eye was drawn to the many ways in which plans did not turn out the way they were supposed to—to unintended consequences and perverse outcomes and the puzzling fact that the shortest line between two points is often a dead end.
“The Principle of the Hiding Hand,” one of Hirschman’s many memorable essays, drew on an account of the Troy-Greenfield “folly,” and then presented an even more elaborate series of paradoxes. Hirschman had studied the enormous Karnaphuli Paper Mills, in what was then East Pakistan. The mill was built to exploit the vast bamboo forests of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. But not long after the mill came online the bamboo unexpectedly flowered and then died, a phenomenon now known to recur every fifty years or so. Dead bamboo was useless for pulping; it fell apart as it was floated down the river. Because of ignorance and bad planning, a new, multimillion-dollar industrial plant was suddenly without the raw material it needed to function.
But what impressed Hirschman was the response to the crisis. The mill’s operators quickly found ways to bring in bamboo from villages throughout East Pakistan, building a new supply chain using the country’s many waterways. They started a research program to find faster-growing species of bamboo to replace the dead forests, and planted an experimental tract. They found other kinds of lumber that worked just as well. The result was that the plant was blessed with a far more diversified base of raw materials than had ever been imagined. If bad planning hadn’t led to the crisis at the Karnaphuli plant, the mill’s operators would never have been forced to be creative. And the plant would not have been nearly as valuable as it became.
“We may be dealing here with a general principle of action,” Hirschman wrote:

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

And from there Hirschman’s analysis took flight. People don’t seek out challenges, he went on. They are “apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence of a challenge—because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be.” This was the Hiding Hand principle—a play on Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.
“We have ended up here with an economic argument strikingly paralleling Christianity’s oft expressed preference for the repentant sinner over the righteous man who never strays from the path,” Hirschman wrote in this essay from 1967. Success grew from failure:

And essentially the same idea, even though formulated, as one might expect, in a vastly different spirit, is found in Nietzsche’s famous maxim, “That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger.” This sentence admirably epitomizes several of the histories of economic development projects in recent decades.

As was nearly always the case with Hirschman’s writing, he made his argument without mathematical formulas or complex models. His subject was economics, but his spirit was literary. He drew on Brecht, Kafka, Freud, Flaubert, La Rochefoucauld, Montesquieu, Montaigne, and Machiavelli, not to mention Homer—he had committed huge sections of the Odyssey to memory. The pleasure of reading Hirschman comes not only from the originality of his conclusions but also from the delightfully idiosyncratic path he took to them. Consider this, from the same essay (and, remember, this is an economist who’s writing):

While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian’s finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede—in fact we find it intolerable to imagine—that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning. . . . Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry: we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth.

“Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman” (Princeton), by the Princeton historian Jeremy Adelman, is a biography worthy of the man. Adelman brilliantly and beautifully brings Hirschman to life, giving us an unforgettable portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary intellectuals.
Hirschman was born in Berlin in 1915, into a prosperous family of Jewish origin. His father was a surgeon, and the family lived in the embassy district, near the Tiergarten. Hirschman was slender and handsome, in the mold of Albert Camus. He dressed elegantly, danced skillfully, spoke half a dozen languages, and had a special affection for palindromes. He was absent-minded and distractable. While lecturing, Adelman writes, “He rambled. He mumbled. Mid-sentence, he would pause, his right hand supporting his chin, his eyes drifting upward to fasten on a spot on the ceiling.” He would call his wife upon taking his car somewhere because—as he once said—“I do not know how to put it among two other cars on the sidewalk.” “When you spoke to him,” a friend said, “it was sometimes five or ten seconds before he would show any sign of having heard you.” He was also deeply charming when he put his mind to it.
The great influence on Hirschman’s life was his brother-in-law, the Italian intellectual Eugenio Colorni. Colorni and Hirschman were as close as siblings, and when Colorni was killed by Fascist thugs in Rome, during the Second World War, Hirschman was inconsolable. Adelman writes:

Colorni believed that doubt was creative because it allowed for alternative ways to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable circles and self-feeding despondency. Doubt, in fact, could motivate: freedom from ideological constraints opened up political strategies, and accepting the limits of what one could know liberated agents from their dependence on the belief that one had to know everything before acting, that conviction was a precondition for action.

The phrase that Hirschman and Colorni would repeat to each other was that they hoped to “prove Hamlet wrong.” Hamlet shouldn’t have been frozen by his doubts; he should have been freed by them. Hamlet took himself too seriously. He thought he needed to be perfect. Colorni and Hirschman didn’t. Courage, Colorni wrote, required the willingness “to always be on guard against oneself.”
Doubt didn’t mean disengagement. In the summer of 1936, Hirschman volunteered to fight in Spain on the side of the Loyalists, against General Franco’s German-backed Fascists. He was twenty-one and living in Paris, having just got back from studying at the London School of Economics. He was among the first wave of German and Italian volunteers to take the train to Barcelona. “When I heard that there was even a possibility to do something,” Hirschman said, “I went.”
Hirschman rarely spoke about what happened in Spain. Decades later, Adelman recounts, Albert and his wife, Sarah, went to see a film about the Spanish Civil War. Afterward, Sarah asked Albert, “Was it like that?” His response was a deft non-response: “Yeah, that was a pretty good film.” On this subject, as on a few others, Sarah felt a certain reticence in her husband. Still, as Adelman remarks, “the scars on his neck and leg made it impossible for her to forget.”
Adelman interprets Hirschman’s silence as disenchantment: “The endless debate rehearsed in Berlin and Paris over left-wing tactics was more than a farce, it was a tragedy of epic proportions.” Hirschman saw the Communists move in and, in his mind, the spirit of the cause became contaminated. It broke his heart. But Hirschman would come to recognize that action fuelled by doubt allows for failures to be left behind. Spain was a tragedy, but it was also, for him, an experiment, and experiments go awry.
Hirschman liked to say that he had “a propensity to self-subversion.” He even gave one of his books that title. He qualified and questioned and hedged as a matter of habit. He never trusted himself enough to indulge in grand theorizing. He pursued the “petite idée,” the attempt, as he said, “to come to an understanding of reality in portions, admitting that the angle may be subjective.” Once, when a World Bank director sent him a paper that referred to the “Hirschman Doctrine,” Hirschman replied, “Unfortunately (or, I rather tend to think, fortunately), there is no Hirschman school of economic development and I cannot point to a large pool of disciples where one might fish out someone to work with you along those lines.”
Hirschman spent his career in constant motion. After doing graduate training in London and Italy, fighting in Spain, and spending the first part of the war in France, he left for the United States, by which point he had begun to lose track of his own movements. “This makes my fourth—or is it fifth?—emigration,” he wrote to his mother. He accepted a fellowship at Berkeley (where he met the woman he would marry, Sarah Chapiro, another émigré), did a tour of duty for the O.S.S. in North Africa and Europe, and, with the war concluded, served a stint at the Federal Reserve Board, where he grew so unhappy that he would return home to his wife and two daughters in Chevy Chase, shut the door to his study, and bury himself in Kafka. He worked for the Marshall Plan in Washington, providing, Adelman says, “the thinking behind the thinking,” only to be turned down for a transfer to Paris because of a failed national-security review. He was in his mid-thirties. On a whim, he packed up the family and moved to Bogotá, Colombia, where he worked on a project for the World Bank. He crisscrossed the country with, Adelman writes, “pen in hand and paper handy, examining irrigation projects, talking to local bankers about their farm loans, and scribbling calculations about the costs of road building.”
Writing to her parents about the family’s decision to move to Colombia, which was then in the midst of a civil war, Sarah explained, “We both realize that you should think of the future—make plans for the children etc. But I think we both somehow feel that it is impossible to know what is best and that the present is so much more important—because if the present is solid and good it will be a surer basis for a good future than any plans that you can make.” Most people would not have left a home in Chevy Chase and the security of a job in Washington to go to a Third World country where armed gangsters roamed the streets, because they would feel certain that Colombia was a mistake. Hirschman believed, as a matter of principle, that it was impossible to know whether Colombia would be a mistake. As it happened, the four years the family spent in Bogotá were among its happiest. Hirschman returned to Latin America again and again during his career, and what he learned there provided the raw material for his most brilliant work. His doubt was a gift, not a curse.
Hirschman published his first important book, “The Strategy of Economic Development,” in 1958. He had returned from Colombia by then and was at Yale, and the book was an attempt to make sense of his experience of watching a country try to lift itself out of poverty. At the time, he was reading deeply in the literature of psychology and psychoanalysis, and he became fascinated with the functional uses of negative emotions: frustration, aggression, and, in particular, anxiety. Obstacles led to frustration, and frustration to anxiety. No one wanted to be anxious. But wasn’t anxiety the most powerful motivator—the emotion capable of driving even the most reluctant party toward some kind of solution?
In the field of developmental economics, this was heretical. When people from organizations like the World Bank descended on Third World countries, they always tried to remove obstacles to development, to reduce economic anxiety and uncertainty. They wanted to build bridges and roads and airports and dams to insure that businesses and entrepreneurs encountered as few impediments as possible to growth. But, as Hirschman thought about case studies like the Karnaphuli Paper Mills and the Troy-Greenfield folly, he became convinced that his profession had it backward. His profession ought to embrace anxiety, and not seek to remove it.
As he wrote in a follow-up essay to “The Strategy of Economic Development”:

Law and order and the absence of civil strife seem to be obvious preconditions for the gradual and patient accumulation of skills, capital and investors’ confidence that must be the foundation for economic progress. We are now told, however, that the presence of war-like Indians in North America and the permanent conflict between them and the Anglo-Saxon settlers was a great advantage, because it made necessary methodical, well-planned, and gradual advances toward an interior which always remained in close logistic and cultural contact with the established communities to the East. In Brazil, on the contrary, the backlands were open and virtually uncontested; the result was that once an excessively vast area had been occupied in an incredibly brief time span the pioneers became isolated and regressed economically and culturally.

The impulse of the developmental economist in those days would have been to remove the “impediments” to growth—to swoop in and have some powerful third party deal with the “war-like Indians.” But that would have turned North America into Brazil, and the pioneers would never have been forced to develop methodical, well-planned advances in logistical contact with the East.
Developing countries required more than capital. They needed practice in making difficult economic decisions. Economic progress was the product of successful habits—and there is no better teacher, Hirschman felt, than a little adversity. He would rather encourage settlers and entrepreneurs at the grass-roots level—and make them learn how to cope with those impediments themselves—than run the risk that aid might infantilize its recipient. He loved to tell the story of how, at a dinner party in a Latin American country, he struggled to track down the telephone number of a fellow-academic: “I asked whether there might be a chance that X would be listed in the telephone directory; this suggestion was shrugged off with the remark that the directory makes a point of listing only people who have either emigrated or died. . . . The economist said that X must be both much in demand and hard to reach, as several people had inquired about how to get in touch with him within the past few days. The subject was dropped as hopeless, and everybody spent a pleasant evening.”
Back in his hotel room, Hirschman looked in the phone book, found his friend’s number, and got him on the line immediately.
A few years after publishing “The Strategy of Economic Development,” Hirschman was invited by the World Bank to conduct a survey of some of its projects. He drew up his own itinerary, which, typically, involved almost an entire circuit of the globe: a power plant in El Salvador, roads in Ecuador, an irrigation project in Peru, pasture improvement in Uruguay, telecommunication in Ethiopia, power transmission in Uganda, an irrigation project in Sudan, railway modernization in Nigeria, the Damodar Valley Corporation in India, the Karnaphuli Paper Mills, an irrigation project in Thailand and another in the south of Italy.
Adelman is struck by the tone of optimism in Hirschman’s notes on his journey. The economist was interested in all the ways in which projects managed to succeed, both in spite of and because of the difficulties:

Instead of asking: what benefits [has] this project yielded, it would almost be more pertinent to ask: how many conflicts has it brought in its wake? How many crises has it occasioned and passed through? And these conflicts and crises should appear both on the benefit and the cost side, or sometimes on one—sometimes on the other, depending on the outcome (which cannot be known with precision for a long time, if ever).

Only Hirschman would circle the globe and be content to conclude that he couldn’t reach a conclusion—for a long time, if ever. He was a planner who really didn’t believe in planning. He wanted to remind other economists that a lot of the problems they tried to fix were either better off not being fixed or weren’t problems to begin with.
Late in life, Hirschman underwent surgery in Germany. When he emerged from anesthesia, he asked his surgeon, “Why are bananas bent?” The doctor shrugged. Hirschman, even then, could not resist a poke at his fellow economic planners: “Because nobody went to the jungle to adjust it and make it straight.”
While fighting for France during the Second World War, Hirschman persuaded his commander to give him false French papers and he became Albert Hermant. After the country fell to the Germans, Hirschman ended up in Marseilles, along with thousands of other refugees. There he learned that an American named Varian Fry was coming to France as part of the Emergency Rescue Committee—an American group that sought to get as many Jewish refugees out of France as possible. Hirschman met Fry at the train station and took him back to the Hotel Splendide. They hit it off instantly.
Fry had access to U.S. visas. But he needed Hirschman’s help in figuring out escape routes into Spain, procuring false passports and identity papers, and smuggling in money to fund the operation. Hirschman was invaluable. He spoke Italian like an Italian and German like a German and French like a Frenchman, and had so many fake documents—including a card attesting to membership in the “Club for People Without Clubs”—that Fry joked he was “like a criminal who has too many alibis.” Fry nicknamed him Beamish, on account of his irrepressible charm. Beginning in 1940, the Emergency Rescue Committee helped save thousands of people from the clutches of Fascism, among them Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Alma Mahler.
Hirschman was as reluctant to talk about his time in Marseilles as he was to talk about the battles he fought in the Spanish Civil War. As a fellow at Berkeley, in the early forties, he was placed in the International House, and the other graduate students urged him to speak about what had happened to him in Europe. “The newcomer sat there,” Adelman writes, “with his handkerchief twisted in his fingers, nervously waiting for the calls to pass.” Hirschman moved out of the International House as soon as he could. “I couldn’t stand being considered as sort of a wonder of the world or something like that,” he later recalled. “I just wanted to be myself.”
The closest Hirschman ever came to explaining his motives was in his most famous work, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” and even then it was only by implication. Hirschman was interested in contrasting the two strategies that people have for dealing with badly performing organizations and institutions. “Exit” is voting with your feet, expressing your displeasure by taking your business elsewhere. “Voice” is staying put and speaking up, choosing to fight for reform from within. There is no denying where his heart lay.
Early in the book, Hirschman quoted the conservative economist Milton Friedman, who argued that school vouchers should replace the current public-school system. “Parents could express their views about schools directly, by withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another, to a much greater extent than is now possible,” Friedman wrote. “In general they can now take this step only by changing their place of residence. For the rest, they can express their views only through cumbrous political channels.”
This was, Hirschman wrote, a “near perfect example of the economist’s bias in favor of exit and against voice”:

In the first place, Friedman considers withdrawal or exit as the “direct” way of expressing one’s unfavorable views of an organization. A person less well trained in economics might naively suggest that the direct way of expressing views is to express them! Secondly, the decision to voice one’s views and efforts to make them prevail are contemptuously referred to by Friedman as a resort to “cumbrous political channels.” But what else is the political, and indeed the democratic, process than the digging, the use, and hopefully the slow improvement of these very channels?

Hirschman pointed out the ways in which “exit” failed to send a useful message to underperformers. Weren’t there cases where monopolists were relieved when their critics left? “Those who hold power in the lazy monopoly may actually have an interest in creating some limited opportunities for exit on the part of those whose voice might be uncomfortable,” he wrote. The worst thing that ever happened to incompetent public-school districts was the growth of private schools: they siphoned off the kind of parents who would otherwise have agitated more strongly for reform.
Beneath Hirschman’s elegant sentences, you can hear a deeper argument. Exit ispassive. It is silent protest. And silent protest, for him, is too easy. “Proving Hamlet wrong” was about the importance of acting in the face of doubt—but also of acting in the face of fear. Voice was courage. He went to fight Fascism in Spain. It ended in failure. When the Nazis came hunting for the Jews, he tried again. “Expanding the operation meant, increasingly, that Beamish’s work was in the streets, bars, and brothels of Marseilles, expanding the tentacles of the operation,” Adelman writes. “If the operation had a fixer, it was Beamish. It was a role he relished.”
Beamish screened the refugees, weeding out potential informers. He cajoled first the Czech, then the Polish, and, finally, the Lithuanian consuls into providing fake passports. He made deals with Marseilles mobsters and a shadowy Russian émigré to get money into France. He held secret meetings in brothels. Several times, he was nearly caught, but he charmed his way out of trouble.
When the authorities finally caught onto Hirschman, he escaped across the Pyrenees to Spain on foot, equipped with false Lithuanian papers. On the ship to America, he played Ping-Pong and chess, and romanced a young Czech woman. As Adelman’s magnificent biography makes plain, it was hard not to fall for Albert Hirschman. A colleague from his Marseilles days remembered him, years later, as “a handsome fellow with rather soulful eyes . . . taking everything in, his head cocked slightly to one side. One of those German intellectuals, I thought, always trying to figure everything out.” 

sexta-feira, 28 de junho de 2013

Dani Rodrik: from Harvard to Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study, and a new blog...

Bem, eu já conheço (razoavelmente) o pensamento de Dano Rodrik (senão uma parte de sua obra) desde algum tempo. Agora, graças a seu anúncio de "mudança" para Princeton eu tomo conhecimento de que o Institute for Advanced Studies, onde pontificaram durante muitos anos George Kennan e Albert Hirschman (dois grandes pesquisadores e escritores, mas professores sofríveis) não pertence à Universidade, mas é independente. Eu sempre pensei que ele fosse uma espécie de fundação independente da Universidade, onde estive recentemente justamente para uma homenagem a Albert Hirschman, durante a qual comprei sua biografia por Jeremy Adelman.
Rodrik agora vai ocupar a cadeira que homenageia o grande economista, como ele um multidisciplinar, um pensador social, mais do que um economista.
Meus parabéns, portanto, e sucesso.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Dani Rodrik's Weblog

JUNE 27, 2013

quarta-feira, 8 de maio de 2013

Albert O. Hirschman, by Jeremy Adelman (Cass R. Sunstein, in NYRBooks)

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman
by Jeremy Adelman
Princeton University Press, 740 pp., $39.95                                                  
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Albert Hirschman visiting his son-in-law Alain Salomon’s architectural project to develop a small park for children on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, 1971

Albert Hirschman, who died late last year, was one of the most interesting and unusual thinkers of the last century. An anti-utopian reformer with a keen eye for detail, Hirschman insisted on the complexity of social life and human nature. He opposed intransigence in all its forms. He believed that political and economic possibilities could be found in the most surprising places.
Hirschman is principally known for four remarkable books. The most influential, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), explores two ways to respond to unjust, exasperating, or inefficient organizations and relationships. You can leave (“exit”) or you can complain (“voice”). If you are loyal, you will not exit, and you may or may not speak out. The Passions and the Interests (1977) uncovers a long-lost argument for capitalism in general and commercial interactions in particular. The argument is that trade softens social passions and enmities, ensuring that people see one another not as members of competing tribes, but as potential trading partners. Shifting Involvements (1982) investigates the dramatically different attractions of political engagement and private life, and shows how the disappointments of one can lead to heightened interest in the other. For example, the protest movements of the 1960s were inspired, at least in part, by widespread disappointment with the experience of wealth-seeking and consumption, emphasized in the 1950s.
Finally, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) is a study of the reactionary’s tool kit, identifying the standard objections to any and all proposals for reform. The objections are “perversity” (the reform will make the problem even worse), “futility” (the reform will do nothing to solve the problem), and “jeopardy” (the reform will endanger some hard-won social gain). Hirschman shows that these objections are stupefying, mechanical, hyperbolic, and often wrong. In 1845, for example, the historian Jacob Burkhardt deplored the rise of democracy and the expansion of the right to vote on the ground that he did not “expect anything from the despotism of the masses but a future tyranny, which will mean the end of history.”
Hirschman’s work changes how you see the world. It illuminates yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His categories become your categories. A lot of moderate Republicans are disenchanted with the Republican Party. Do they “exit” or do they use their “voice” to try to change the party? In much of the world, nations and regions are now riven by religious and ethnic tensions. Should they emphasize how much their citizens can gain through trading with one another? If people are willing to buy your product, you might not care which god they worship. The Arab Spring saw an extraordinary outburst in political engagement. Is disappointment with the early results shifting people’s involvement toward the private sphere?
The current debate over gun control is a case study in “the rhetoric of reaction.” Those who object to legal restrictions urge that far from decreasing the risk of violence, such restrictions will actually increase it. For Hirschman, this objection would be an example of “perversity.” Opponents also contend that if we want to save lives, gun control will have essentially no effect—the argument from futility. We can find precisely the same rhetorical gambits in countless other debates, including those over Obamacare, increases in the minimum wage, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage.
Hirschman, born in 1915 in Berlin, was an economist by training, and he spent a lot of time reading Adam Smith, but his great intellectual loves were Montaigne (with his advice to “observe, observe perpetually”) and Machiavelli. To support his points, Hirschman drew on Dante, Jane Austen, Flaubert, Chekhov, and Yeats. He had a keen interest in social psychology. Crossing Boundaries is the title of one of his books; another is called Essays in Trespassing.
Part of what made Hirschman distinctive, even unique, was his ability to develop large themes from sharp observations of particular practices, and thus to connect apparently unrelated social phenomena. It was an observation of the behavior of motorists in a tunnel in Boston—who honked with outrage when people in an adjacent lane started to move while their lane remained stuck—that helped him to develop a general theory of disappointment and indignation. He was also wry and mischievous. As he wrote in the preface to Exit, Voice, and Loyalty:
Having found my own unifying way of looking at issues as diverse as competition and the two-party system, divorce and the American character, black power and the failure of “unhappy” top officials to resign over Vietnam, I decided to let myself go a little.
As Jeremy Adelman shows in his astonishing and moving biography, Hirschman sought, in his early twenties and long before becoming a writer, to “prove Hamlet wrong.” In Shakespeare’s account, Hamlet is immobilized and defeated by doubt. Hirschman was a great believer in doubt—he never doubted it—and he certainly doubted his own convictions. At a conference designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his first book, who else would take the opportunity to show that one of his own central arguments was wrong? Who else would publish an essay in The American Economic Review exploring the “overproduction of opinionated opinion,” questioning the value of having strong opinions, and emphasizing the importance of doubting one’s opinions and even one’s tastes? Hirschman thought that strong opinions, as such, “might be dangerous to the health of our democracy,” because they are an obstacle to mutual understanding and constructive problem-solving. Writing in 1989, he was not speaking of the current political culture, but he might as well have been.
In seeking to prove Hamlet wrong, Hirschman was suggesting that doubt could be a source not of paralysis and death but of creativity and self-renewal. One of his last books, published when he was about eighty, is called A Propensity to Self-Subversion. In the title essay, Hirschman celebrates skepticism about his own theories and ideas, and he captures not only the insight but also the pleasure, even the joy, that can come from learning that one had it wrong.
He insisted that human history provides “stories, intricate and often nonrepeatable,” which “look more like tricks history has up its sleeve than like social-scientific regularities, not to speak of laws.” He was interested in “the many might-have-beens of history,” including “felicitous and surprising escapes from disaster.” One of his most important essays is called “Against Parsimony,” which argues that people sometimes choose to change their own preferences (consider, for example, efforts to quit smoking), and that some resources, such as love or public spirit, “may well increase rather than decrease through use.”
Hirschman was delighted by paradoxes, unintended consequences (especially good ones), the telling detail, inventories of actual practices (rather than big theories), surprises, and improvisation. In his view, “history is nothing if not farfetched.” He invented the term “possibilism,” meant to draw attention to “the discovery of paths, however narrow, leading to an outcome that appears to be foreclosed on the basis of probabilistic reasoning alone.” In his lifetime, one of many such outcomes was the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, which almost no one anticipated. Speaking of paradoxes: an economist by profession, he wasn’t great at math, and he wrote with remarkable clarity and subtlety.
Hirschman’s work is more than interesting enough to justify a book (or two, or ten), but Adelman’s achievement is to demonstrate, in novelistic detail, that he also lived an astounding life, full of narrow paths and ridiculously improbable twists and turns. Brought up in Berlin, he was raised during the better days of the Weimar Republic, when Berlin was alive with the avant-garde. Both of his parents’ families had converted from Judaism to Protestantism, and the family celebrated Christmas, not as a religious occasion but as a social one, with gifts for the children. Hirschman was baptized but declined to be confirmed: “Somehow I wasn’t impressed by the minister, and I asked my parents to stop.”
At the age of nine, he was sent to the Französisches Gymnasium, an intellectual hothouse from which he graduated in 1932. In the early 1930s, of course, the influence of the Nazi party was swiftly expanding. Hirschman engaged in countless discussions with his Nazi classmates; his physical education teacher wore a swastika. Communism was also an important presence, and so Hirschman had early and close experience with intransigence on both the left and the right. The topic of his final exam was a quotation from Spinoza: “One should neither laugh nor cry at the world, but understand it.”
After graduation, Hirschman began to study economics at the University of Berlin, which was of course in the midst of intense political conflict, and which contained a large number of Hitler supporters. In his own account, the situation did not seem truly grave until “the Reichstag fire, which really marked the beginning of the political horror.” Hirschman faced personal horror as well. His father, a physician, was diagnosed with terminal cancer and quickly died. Confronted by a new law that threw Jews out of universities, Hirschman chose to exit while still in his teens and left for Paris, where he formed relationships with a number of refugees from Russia, Italy, and Germany.
As Adelman tells the tale, Paris left an indelible mark on Hirschman. Surrounded by political dogmas of many different kinds but rejecting every “guiding ism,” he developed an immense enthusiasm for what he called “petites idées”—small ideas and little observations that, for the rest of his life, he would write down in notebooks or on scraps of paper. In Paris he developed the habit of rejecting abstract theories in favor of close observations of actual practices.
In dealing with events during the difficult period between 1935 and 1938, Hirschman showed a great deal of resilience and bravery. He decided to fight in the Spanish civil war against Franco with the very first Italian and German volunteers, some of whom were killed on the battlefield. For the rest of his life, Hirschman remained entirely silent about this experience, even with his wife, though “the scars on his neck and leg made it impossible for her to forget.” Returning from the war, he worked closely with the anti-Fascist Italian underground, carrying secret letters and documents back and forth from Paris.
As war loomed between France and Germany, Hirschman became a soldier for a second time, ready to fight for the French in what many people expected to be a prolonged battle. After the French defense quickly collapsed, Hirschman lived under German occupation and engaged in what was probably the most courageous and hazardous work of his life. Along with Varian Fry, a classicist from Harvard, he labored successfully to get stateless refugees out of France. In 1939 and 1940, they created a network that would enable more than two thousand refugees to exit. As Adelman writes, the “list of the saved reads like a who’s who.” It included Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. Meticulous logistical planning was required to work out the right routes and to obtain the necessary exit and transit visas. Hirschman’s “colleagues marveled at his skill; for all his youth he was a font of devious ingenuity and seasoned wisdom.”
It was inevitable that Hirschman would find himself at serious personal risk. The Vichy government was helping agents of the Gestapo to find German Jews. It was time to run, taking one of the same routes that he had devised for so many others. Hirschman threw away everything he owned except what he could fit in a little bag (including his precious copy of Montaigne’s Essais and an extra pair of socks). With two other refugees, he started the long, grueling walk through the Pyrenees. Hirschman had to carry one of his exhausted companions for a part of the way.
After seven hours on foot, they crossed into Spain, and Hirschman made it into Portugal, where he waited for five weeks for the SS Excalibur, the ship that would take him to New York. In his mid-twenties, he wrote his mother, still in Germany, from the ship:
I shall enter this country with the will of getting to something, of showing that I have merited the extraordinary chain of lucky incidents which have led me here. Though I still love France, I am of course disappointed in many ways, and this makes my fourth—or is it the fifth?—emigration easier for me.
Hirschman had of course experienced plenty of horrific bad luck as well, but his characteristic hopefulness stood him in good stead. (One of his books is called A Bias for Hope.) Courtesy of the Rockefeller Foundation, he accepted a two-year fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley. Soon after his arrival there, he met Sarah Chapiro in the cafeteria at International House. Instantly captivated by her, he proposed eight weeks later, and she accepted.
At Berkeley, Hirschman focused on the effects of international trade on national economies. As part of his research, he developed statistical indices designed to measure market concentration (the degree to which a market is dominated by a limited number of firms) and market power. In a letter to his sister, Hirschman described his results as “pretty interesting”—a lovely understatement in view of the fact that those results continue to have basic importance for many areas of economics (including antitrust), under the name of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, which measures the level of concentration in industries, and thus helps show how competitive they are. (Orris Herfindahl is often given credit for the index, but Hirschman got there first.)
Exploring the consequences of national power for the structure of foreign trade, Hirschman published his first book in 1945. Among other things, it addressed an interesting puzzle: Nazi Germany shifted from commerce with other wealthy nations to dealing with its smaller and less prosperous neighbors (Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania). Hirschman explained that it did so in order to achieve economic and thus political dominance over them. The problem is that when some nations are wealthier than others, national sovereignty can produce economic sovereignty over entire regions. Hirschman’s first book, largely ignored in its own time and also ours, helps to explain a number of current predicaments. Consider China’s growing economic power and the political dominance that is resulting from that power.
As the book was being completed, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and the young German economist, so recently a soldier in Spain and France, promptly enlisted in the US Army. Originally assigned to a combat unit, Hirschman was shifted to the Office of Strategic Services, where he worked as an interpreter. He read voraciously, including Albert Camus and Friedrich Hayek, whose great work, The Road to Serfdom, he found “very useful for someone like me who grew up in a ‘collectivist’ climate—it makes you rethink many things….” Notwithstanding his extensive reading, he abandoned the idea of an academic career, believing that he had no future in it.
After the war ended, Hirschman was assigned to be the interpreter in the first Allied war crimes trial, brought against the German General Anton Dostler, who had ordered the execution of prisoners in plain violation of conventions of war. Hirschman sat next to Dostler through the dramatic five-day trial. What must this have been like for him? The only record of his feelings is a single sentence in The New York Times, which reported that the nameless American “interpreter turned pale as he had to utter the death sentence” to the German general. Home in California, Sarah came across a black-and-white photo of her husband, leaning close to the Nazi general. Reading about how the interpreter went pale, she “breathed a sigh of relief that the war had not destroyed her husband’s sensitivity.”
After returning to Washington, Hirschman was hired by the Federal Reserve Board and then the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), where he emphasized the need for multilateral trading and helped to develop the thinking behind the Marshall Plan. With his ECA office just a few blocks from the White House, Hirschman argued vigorously against postwar austerity and for opening rather than closing markets. (It is reasonable to speculate that in the current economic situation, he would be a strong opponent of both austerity and protectionism.) Notwithstanding the high quality of his work, McCarthyism hit him directly and hard. A security review wrongly concluded, on the basis of unsubstantiated rumors, that he had some sympathy with communism. As a result, he was dismissed from the federal government in 1951. Adelman shows that false rumors about his past had dogged him since he joined the army.
Now with two daughters, Hirschman and his wife made their way to South America and to Colombia. There he went to work for the World Bank, acquired a lifelong interest in Latin America, and shifted the focus of his work to economic development. Advising Colombia’s president, he found a large disconnect between standard economic theory and actual practice. He produced a paper called “Case Studies of Instances of Successful Economic Development in Colombia,” which emphasized surprising success stories, including that of a bank specializing in small loans to individuals, artisans, and small firms, “which has experienced remarkable expansion recently due to novel methods and political support.”
In 1956, possibilism struck home. He received an unexpected letter from the chair of Yale’s economics department, who asked him whether he might be willing to come to New Haven as a visiting research professor. He accepted immediately, and his academic career started in his forties.
In New Haven, he produced his second book, The Strategy of Economic Development, which attacked the prevailing wisdom in favor of “balanced growth” and top-down planning. He argued instead for providing economic support to industries with strong “linkages,” understood as economic relationships with others. If one sector is closely linked to others, its own development, however unbalanced, can spur additional development and promote growth. Hirschman showed that in underdeveloped countries, the iron and steel industry tends to have high linkages; for that reason, it makes sense for such countries to support that industry. He contended that development depends “on calling forth and enlisting for development purposes resources and abilities that are hidden, scattered, or badly utilized.” In Hirschman’s account, history had no single course and could not be planned.
As he completed The Strategy of Economic Development, his exhilaration was palpable. He wrote his sister that an old teacher had explained
that I shouldn’t worry about love—and she stretched out her arms and then slowly brought her two index fingers together from afar—as sure as that, she said, would the girl that I will love get together with me one day. As it may be, along the lines of the example I think that there exists for each of us a personal (and nevertheless general) truth, we only have to trace it and then follow it deliberately and courageously. And I just had these last months the exciting feeling that I am about to succeed in following my truth.
Though the book received favorable reviews (and was destined to become a classic), Hirschman’s visiting professorship had run out at Yale. But in relatively short order, Columbia offered him his first real academic appointment. The only problem was that he hated teaching (and seemed to have a phobia about it throughout his life). In 1963, he moved to Harvard. Influenced by the protest movements of the 1960s, and seeking to challenge the view that market competition was a cure-all, he wrote Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which became an immediate sensation. As Adelman notes, the immense influence of the book stems in part from the familiarity and wide application of the master concepts. Faced with a difficult nation, employer, credit card company, religion, or personal relationship, does one leave, protest, or keep quiet? All of us have had to answer that question, and Hirschman offered a new set of categories with which to answer it.
Despising teaching as much as he loved writing, Hirschman longed to spend time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1971, he asked whether he could visit there for the following year. He was indeed invited and the move became permanent. At the institute, Hirschman became keenly interested in the origins of capitalism and embarked on the project that became The Passions and the Interests. In that work, he rejected the nostalgia, current at the time, for a supposedly lost world of republican virtue, free of commercial avarice. He also rejected the suggestion, prominent then and now in the economics profession, that markets simply take human beings as they are, with their inevitable self-interest.
Instead he observed that the early theorists of free markets thought that commerce would transform people, by cooling our passions and making us gentler. In the words of Samuel Ricard in 1704, commercial interactions would encourage citizens “to be honest, to acquire manners, to be prudent and reserved in both talk and action.” At the same time, however, Hirschman worried that efforts to focus people on economic gain could “have the side effect of killing the civic spirit and of thereby opening the door to tyranny.”
Hirschman’s thinking about the alternating ease and difficulty of getting people to participate in public life led him to Shifting Involvements—a small masterpiece that illuminates the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and protest movements of diverse kinds. Hirschman emphasized that human beings are often choosing between private and public life, and thus between the different forms of happiness that are associated with each of them. He described “pendular motions of collective behavior,” in which people swing from happiness to disappointment in one kind of activity, and then to the other. For example, the disappointments and frustrations of the student rebellions of the late 1960s encouraged a return to private life in the 1970s and 1980s. Rejecting the highly influential idea that the problem of collective action has a kind of invariable, ahistorical “logic,” Hirschman drew attention to the immense importance of history and timing as, in Adelman’s words, “people leave the streets and plazas disenchanted with politics to seek happiness in the shopping malls”—and vice versa.
The Rhetoric of Reaction, written in his mid-seventies, was an outgrowth of the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s, and it speaks directly to our current debates. Hirschman was struck by the routine, stylized, even mechanical character of much conservative thinking—and its close connection, in its rhetoric, to arguments that have been made for hundreds of years. Indeed, conservative rhetoric is the book’s target, perhaps above all in the person of Edmund Burke, who deplored the French Revolution and its emphasis on the rights of men, and who exclaimed, “Massacre, torture, hanging! These are your rights of men!” But in a fascinating flip, the book ends with a demonstration that the left has its own, closely related rhetorical moves. Where conservatives argue that further reforms will jeopardize precious accomplishments, the left throws “caution to the wind, to disregard not only tradition but the whole concept of unintended consequences of human action,” and hence “progressives are forever ready to mold and remold society at will and have no doubt about their ability to control events.”
Commenting on this aspect of his project, Hirschman refers to the
sheer fun in pursuing my argument into this originally unexpected direction. As is well known, criticizing one’s friends is more demanding and therefore more interesting than to expose once again the boring errors of one’s adversaries. So there was some intellectual exhilaration in my exercise at self-subversion.
That exercise was intended to challenge intransigence on the part of both the right and the left—and to get people to listen to one another in a spirit of humility, rather than making their standard, mind-numbing rhetorical moves.
Hirschman was sharp and productive into his eighties, but his faculties started to fail him, and by 1997, he had lost the ability to write or read. Ultimately he withdrew entirely into himself. In Adelman’s words, he was forced “to gaze in silence from a wheelchair” while Sarah “comforted and accompanied an increasingly spectral husband through his decline.” In 2011, Sarah herself fell ill with cancer and notwithstanding “her determination to be there until his end, the cancer would not be stopped.” The morning after her death, their daughter Katia delivered the news. “Albert’s head jerked up and for a moment his body shook before settling back into his remove.”
Of his many books, Hirschman’s personal favorite was The Passions and the Interests. His explanation is illuminating:
It really was the fruit of free creation. I did not write it against anybody…. That book gave me prolonged pleasure: to write, feeling free to discover things without having to prove someone wrong. A very special case.
That special case has proved to be an enduring achievement, not only because of its eye-opening exploration of the softening power of commerce, but also because of its own gentle and capacious spirit. But if The Passions and the Interests was his favorite, and Exit, Voice, and Loyalty his most important, there can be no question about his most characteristic: The Rhetoric of Reaction. The sustained attack on intransigence, the bias in favor of hope, the delight in paradox, the insistence on the creative power of doubt—all these prove a lot of people wrong, not just Hamlet.