Worldly Philosopher

The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

Bibliographic Data

ID2800285
AuthorsPeter A Coclanis (corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume94
Issue2
Pages303-305
Publication date2014-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2641235
OpenAlexW2332557892
LanguageEN
Citations received18

Situating the German-born economist Albert O. Hirschman has never been easy. He made significant - in some cases, exceptional - scholarly contributions in a half-dozen fields ranging from development economics to international relations and from political theory to social science methodology and statistics. He did important applied work in the field, particularly in Latin America, and labored hard to build institutions and networks supportive of democratic development in both Latin America and other parts of the world. He lived a long, amazingly busy, and crowded life, which ended not with a bang but a whimper and, alas, with more than a touch of professional disappointment. We have long known a good deal about aspects, episodes, and periods of Hirschman's life, but no one had ever connected the dots, much less made sense of their patterning. With the publication of Jeremy Adelman's monumental biography, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman, we are able to see the man more or less complete - and thus to take his full measure - really for the first time. Because it is so difficult in a short review to do justice to either Hirschman's life or Adelman's account of it, this essay is intended as a précis of a more complete companion assessment on the HAHR website (http://www.hahr-online.org), part of a larger forum on Hirschman's legacy for the study of Latin American history.Undertaking even a bares-bones summary of the highlights of Hirschman's life is a formidable task. Otto Albert Hirschmann (he later changed his name slightly) was born in Berlin in 1915. His parents, prosperous acculturated Jews, provided Hirschman with a fine classical education. The Nazi seizure of power in the spring of 1933 led Hirschman - a precocious student who had already developed potentially dangerous bona fides on the political left in Berlin - to flee Germany for Paris. Between April 1933, when he arrived in Paris, and January 1941, when he arrived in the United States as a stateless émigré, Hirschman lived a life worthy of two or three. To hit the highlights, he engaged in anti-Nazi political activity in France, took an undergraduate degree at a business school in Paris, spent some time at the London School of Economics on a fellowship, volunteered on the side of the Republican forces in Spain during the civil war, worked as a demographer at the University of Trieste - where he also earned a laurea (equivalent to a PhD) in economics - served briefly in the French army after the German invasion of the country, joined the resistance, wherein he played an important role in helping to get refugees (some of them extremely famous) out of France - all the while managing somehow to maintain a most active intellectual and social life in both France and Italy!Things didn't so much slow down for Hirschman as change direction, focus, and emphases in the decades thereafter, at least until the time of his official retirement from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1985, at the age of 70. During this period too his activities were legion. He served a stint in the US Army during World War II, held several relatively high-level governmental posts during the postwar period, and spent time teaching at Yale, Columbia, and Harvard before joining the Institute for Advanced Study on a permanent basis in 1974. However, his most important work and lasting contributions during this period (and really into the early 1990s) were made either in the field in Latin America or while squirreled away in his study writing. Everything else after 1940 was either prelude to, interruption of, or (like teaching) impediment to the important work at hand: applied development economics and cross-disciplinary scholarship coursing broadly through the social sciences and humanities.Many readers of this journal are familiar with Hirschman's field studies in development in Latin America - mainly in Colombia - but fewer are probably aware of why the economist found himself, literally and figuratively, in Latin America in the period between 1952 and 1956. In one of the most interesting sections of Worldly Philosopher, Adelman documents how Hirschman's early contacts and associates on the political left, both in Europe and America, made him vulnerable to suspicions among some in governmental circles that he was, if not a fellow traveler, nonetheless a bit too progressive for the times. Although there was little truth to such suspicions - Hirschman had long since lost his early sympathies for hard-left positions - his career in both the US Army during World War II and in government service in the years thereafter was held back because of unsubstantiated rumors about his loyalties. Frustrated by his inability to rise into positions of interest and/or major responsibility, Hirschman, to our everlasting good fortune, opted in 1952 to leave government service - and, indeed, the United States - to take up a position with the World Bank as a development adviser to the Colombian government. The rest is history, as it were.The applied work that Hirschman conducted in Colombia in the mid-1950s allowed him at once to test and refine his economic assumptions and methods and to begin to generate contributions to what might be called middle-range economic theory. The scholarship that eventually grew out of such work began with (and was almost always based upon) close empirical observation of the economic, social, and political behavior of individuals and/or groups of one kind or another - including state actors - in situ. Sometimes his findings pertained to small-ball matters such as electricity rates, technological choice, mechanisms for encouraging small-scale entrepreneurship, or the promotion of research and development. At other times, he drew from his bottom-up experiences in the field, as well as the accumulation and concatenation of what he called petites idées, to make broader points about development.He did this most notably, of course, in his celebrated book The Strategy of Economic Development (1958), in which he challenged then-regnant balanced growth models, offering up instead an alternative "unbalanced" approach derived largely from his experiences in Colombia. According to Hirschman, less developed countries (LDCs) often had far too many dire needs for a balanced growth approach to work without breaking the bank. However counterintuitive, it is, in fact, imbalances - imbalances induced by differential investment in various sectors of the economy of an LDC - that are often most likely to spark broader growth as other economic sectors strive to catch up to those growing fastest because of disequilibrium-creating strategic investment preferences. In many cases, then, imbalances should be sought out rather than feared, much less stamped out.Although Hirschman's book won widespread praise, his position regarding the unbalanced approach is often misunderstood. He never believed the approach to be universally applicable or transhistorical, and he later criticized those that did. Indeed, despite his myriad contributions to the field of economic development, he later lost faith in development economics as a field and voiced his deep concerns in print. Again, though, he never repudiated, much less abandoned, the field, as he is sometimes alleged to have done. The positions he took when writing on development - like the positions he typically took on other economic, political, and social issues - were qualified, contingent, targeted, temporally and spatially specified, not meant to withstand or transcend time and space.The Strategy of Economic Development was actually Hirschman's second book (his 1945 study National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade failed to gain much traction until the 1970s, with the rise of international political economy), but its favorable reception and broad audience presaged things to come. Over the next four decades, particularly during the long 1970s, Hirschman was to publish dozens of influential articles and essays (many on Latin America) as well as a number of estimable books, including three transformative, category-defying works: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970), The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (1977), and The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (1991).During the 1970s and 1980s he kept busy as well, promoting liberal reform in Latin America not only through his writing but also through his support for scholars and institutions favorably disposed to the same. Indeed, his use of his powerful perch at the Institute for Advanced Study to effect this end was to become one of his most lasting legacies. In Worldly Philosopher, Jeremy Adelman offers a brilliant - and brilliantly detailed - portrait of Hirschman, making a convincing case for his place among the giants of twentieth-century social science. After reading Adelman's biography, one is hard pressed to come up with a social scientist who led a richer, fuller, or more meaningful life

Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Psychology

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