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.
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