Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (2 page)

It is the making and life of this pragmatic idealist that is the subject of this book. But as the reader of
Worldly Philosopher
will learn, books themselves have stories and biographies born of ideas. So, too, with this book.
Worldly Philosopher
was my wife’s idea. Thank you for starting me on this journey and being my company throughout.

  
Worldly Philosopher

I
n early April 1933, a spasm of anti-Semitic violence rocked Berlin. Thugs beat Jews in the streets. Shops owned by Jews were looted and burned. Hitler slapped restrictions on Jewish doctors, merchants, and lawyers. For the Hirschmann family, well-to-do assimilated Jewish Berliners, the distress paled beside a more immediate shock. The family huddled in a cemetery as a coffin bearing Carl Hirschmann was lowered into his grave. His wife wept. His children did too. Except one. Otto Albert, known to us by a different name, Albert O. Hirschman, concealed his grief as the family bid their farewells to a father and husband.

This was not the only adieu of the day. Otto Albert, a law student at the University of Berlin and a militant anti-Nazi, was in danger. His friends were being arrested; the university was quickly becoming a hive of intolerance. So he decided to go clandestine and then leave for France. When the funeral was over, the seventeen-year-old Hirschmann announced to his anguished family that he was leaving Germany, promising to return after the passing of the storm surrounding Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power. Decades would pass before he did. Thus began an odyssey in the making of a pragmatic idealist that would send our subject across continents and languages on a journey over the frontiers of a century’s social science.

Albert O. Hirschman detached himself from his family and city, but he never defined himself against them; neither did he mourn the loss or carry his displacement like a badge, a familiar default for exiles. While he never rejected his forebearers, he did not cling to them. Hirschman balanced a life between the inherited and the acquired: he adapted to and learned from new environments while never losing sight of his heritage; without forgetting his past, he did not yearn for “return.” In this he had no choice; for over a decade, there was no Ithaca, no wife, no son, no title to go back to. Persecution, intolerance, and war had destroyed the cosmopolitan world that many of his generation had fought to defend.

Hirschman’s departure from Germany was the first of many flights. His was a life of repeated departures that began in a Mitteleuropean upheaval, the largest intellectual and cultural exodus the world has ever seen. In France, Spain, and Italy he would toggle between antifascist fights until it was too dangerous to stay, and so he too fled to the United States to contribute to the overhaul of American intellectual life by European émigrés. However, for those in the swelling ranks of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who made a career out of chasing suspects, his track record of political activism tainted him with enough suspicion that he was forced to decamp once more in the heat of the McCarthyite purges. His new destination: South America. There, he would reinvent himself anew—this time as one of the great thinkers of development.

There was a wrinkle in how Hirschman handled his displacements. For someone who meditated over the nuances and tensions between leaving, fighting, and accepting—or as he would later put it, exit, voice, and loyalty—it is fitting that his own exits were hardly clear-cut. Often, he chose to leave as much as he was driven out; he was a willing Odysseus. Hirschman was an unusual exile. Cosmopolitan by choice and chance, he occupied, and to some extent opened, a penumbral space as the insider-outsider—between the establishment and the dissident—to author works that crisscrossed the line separating manifestos from monographs. Uprooting and delocalization placed him outside any single cultural tradition, intellectual genre, or national place—a figure we might consider an antecedent to our more “globalized” intellectual type. Some readers
might regard him as the first truly global intellectual, a term that would probably make him wince. Certainly,
his
version of being a global intellectual never cut him off from the multiple roots of his imagination; he was global not because he stood above them but because he could so artfully combine them.

Choice or chance … chance with choice … At times, I have often felt that making sense of the mixture of forces that compose a life history, especially one so replete with breaks and ruptures, leaves too much to the author. A tempting solution to the problem is to treat them in the subject’s own vocabulary; as it turns out, the role of choosing and chance translate into terms familiar to the republican topoi in which Hirschman was steeped and with which he closely identified,
virtù
and
fortuna
. He would recount how Fortune must have smiled upon him when he made his getaway from the police in Marseilles at the end of 1940 or when a surprise letter invited him to Yale in 1957. But he was never lured into believing that there was anything providential at work; he did, after all, have a hand in his own fate—even if it was not always a visible one. Either way, virtù and fortuna entwined to yield one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable intellectuals, one who devoted a lifetime to thinking about the role of choice and making the best of chance in human affairs.

The key was to be open to possibilities. More than that, it meant creating them. This is why his exile was not experienced as being severed from home, separating a self from one’s past, as Edward Said famously put it.
¹
Separation created possibilities for new combinations. Indeed, Hirschman coined a term,
possibilism
, or, perhaps more accurately, adapted it from Søren Kierkegaard’s famous aphorism “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never!” to evoke Hirschman’s disposition. For someone growing up in the shadow of fascism, war, and intolerance, this upbeat was not an expected point of arrival. In fact, most intellectuals of his generation—and Hannah Arendt, his elder by a few years, comes most readily to mind—worried more than they hoped, saw catastrophe instead of opportunity. But possibilism was more than just a personal disposition; it was also an intellectual stance for his brand of social science. The more familiar search for probabilistic laws based on a list of preconditions
for events or outcomes all too often led to the dismaying conclusion that most societies would be unable to solve their problems and break out of vicious cycles on their own. This didn’t, in the end, leave much to the imagination and left Hirschman pondering what the point was—ethically as well as intellectually—to being a scholar. He yearned for a social science that reset the imagination of the intellectual to consider combinations that might take anomalous, deviant, or inverted sequences and make them a potential course; to explore combinations that might lay the tracks for different histories of the future.

One way to prevent a life of trouble from becoming one of tragedy was through ironic, humor-laced detachment, a stance that never got in the way of empathy or commitment. Varian Fry, with whom Hirschman worked to get refugees (including Hannah Arendt) out of Marseilles as the Nazis swept across Europe, once recalled how the police finally caught up with Hirschman not because he
had
false papers but because he had
too many good ones
, which made him suspicious. Included in these bogus documents was the certificate that “M. Albert Hermant” was a Frenchman born in Philadelphia and cards testifying that he belonged to a number of associations, including a Club for People without Clubs. His seamless French helped cover his German origins and antifascist tracks. The German sociologist Wolf Lepenies once mused about Hirschman, “We have here a criminal with too many alibis.”
²
After an unplanned vascular operation while he was visiting Berlin around the time of the fall of the Wall, Hirschman came out of the fog of the anesthetic, turned to his doctor, and asked in German, “Why are bananas bent?” The doctor smiled and shrugged. Hirschman replied, “Because nobody went to the jungle to adjust it and make it straight.”
³

This was not the only banana joke. In the 1950s, while the Hirschmans were living in Bogotá, Colombia, they made a habit of sending Christmas cards to their friends around the world. In 1952, a friend of theirs, Peter Aldor, a Hungarian cartoonist who had moved to Colombia to become one of that country’s great political satirists, drew a card for them. It featured Albert the economist perched in a banana plant clutching a sheet of graphs and figures. Below are his wife and daughters harvesting the fruit, whose production Albert is supposedly planning. The caption reads: “An excellent food is the banana. Let’s eat it today and plan it mañana.” The joke is layered with meanings, one of which was a dig at colleagues who believed in the lofty promises of economic planning.

A holiday card from the Hirschman family, drawn by Peter Aldor, c. 1955.

Humor was central to a literary personality; the form of the argument could not be so easily unraveled from its substance; indeed, late in life he would focus his attention on how people in modern society argue about public affairs. His last major work,
The Rhetoric of Reaction
(1991),
tackled the way intransigent arguments threatened to weaken democracy, precisely because they narrowed options and alternatives. At the core of his argument was an observation about how social scientists played with words that had political and economic consequences.

He should know—he was a master player in his own right. Hirschman amused himself with words, their sounds, and their meanings. Adept as he was at double entendres in German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English, his play with words meant careful attention; language and words were to his craft what the scalpel was to his father, the surgeon. Play with words was often a reminder that in the freedom of language one could find light even in dark times. In June 1932, as National Socialists were broadcasting their bile, Hirschman wrote his elder sister to warn her that a long-delayed letter was still being composed. “Do you know why you haven’t received this one yet?” he asked her. “Because it is awaiting transportation! Oh the poor one, sometimes at night I can hear it whining, awaiting [
harren
] its transportation.”
⁴

It was in words that his play came to full fruition. He loved a well-turned phrase, especially when twisting the familiar into the self-mocking. “The dead end that justifies the means! But does the end justify the meanness?” and “I am anxious for criticism as long as you find me seminole” can be found among his jottings. One can find “Metaphors in search of a reality,” a formulation he instantly doubted and then swapped for “metaphors in search referent,” folded into his notes on the problem of freight rates on Nigerian railways.

Word play was not idle play. The paradoxical, backward, inverted developments one finds in his favorite images and aphorisms mirror the style he brought to bear in his outlook on the world. Like baguettes (with which he became a self-proclaimed world-expert sandwich-maker) that get soft, not hard, as they go stale, Hirschman enjoyed finding meaning from the way History defied “universal laws.” Out of the inversions and “wrong-way-around” sequences, came possibilities for things to be different—like the life that springs from what appear to be dead tree branches at the end of each winter. This impression, too, came to him as he gazed out his kitchen window at home in Princeton. As Hirschman
joked to Clifford Geertz many years later, too many of their colleagues fell prey to “Law No. 1 of the Social Sciences. Whenever a phenomenon in the social world is fully explained, it ceases to operate.”
⁵

It was in palindromes that his fascination was realized, and one can detect in his public writings from the 1960s onward a sharp eye for the right phrase: “exit, voice, and loyalty,” “the tunnel effect,” “the passions and the interests.” These were his Flaubertian mots justes. Perhaps his best palindrome—certainly his fondest—was “Senile Lines,” composed in a collage of tongues around 1971. It starts like this:

I,

REVOLT LOVER,

FOE OF

PARTY TRAP
EVIL IGNITING I LIVE
.
NAOMI, MOAN!
MAORI, ROAM!
HARASS SELFLESS SARAH!

DIE, ID!

NEIN SEIN! RÊVE: NADA, NEVER.

A world of ideas wrapped in carefully chosen words.

Behind his great books was a clandestine life—not of espionage (though Hirschman did have a brief career as a member of the antifascist underground, and he was once a member of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) nor of secret lovers or double lives. As Hirschman became one of the world’s foremost social scientists, he launched a sideline in 1972. With a group of fellow palindrome aficionados, he founded the 4W Club (Where We Went Wrong) to bombard a fictive Dr. Awkward with a letter campaign. It was one of the few international organizations that he was actually glad to direct. Albert’s favorite correspondent was the Guatemalan Augusto Monterroso, with whom he shared some
tesoros
. “AMO IDIOMA!” he exclaimed to the famous poet.
⁶