Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (23 page)

Ursula, Silvia, and Eugenio, Trieste, 1937.

Ursula and Eugenio’s marriage was already in trouble by the time Otto Albert arrived. Ursula has left readers with a revealing memoir about a highly intellectual and political union, often lacking in personal romance or affection and afflicted by sexual frustration. Eugenio left no such disclosure. Matters worsened in the summer of 1936, when Ursula was pregnant with their first child, Silvia. Her terrors about labor, her moods, and her sense of being trapped in a city isolated from friends drove them apart. When Silvia was born, she was frequently ill, which aggravated the stress.
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Eugenio was not without some skill at handling the situation, which gave the marriage a lifeline. He consoled her. He cared deeply for Silvia, doing what he could in the midst of his escalating political involvements and his plunge into theoretical physics and the philosophy of science. And he took a fascination for the baby’s every development, finding, characteristically, in the observations of his little daughter a source for larger questions. “Has nature arranged its laws to fit the needs of man or is it rather man who has taken advantage of a certain number of things in accordance with his needs and has arranged them for his convenience? And then, after so arranging them he has said: ‘Here are the most perfect laws of nature as they have been arranged by Providence for my use.’ With these laws of his own making, man has built up his own concept of nature.” He closed his musings with the kind of aphorism that would become a hallmark of Albert Hirschman’s own writings: “Nature, believe me, is like a mirror that reflects the image of him who scrutinizes it. And man, the most intelligent of all animals, substitutes his own image for the mirror.”
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Otto Albert was almost certainly aware of the difficulties Eugenio and Ursula faced as the winter of 1937 saw the marriage sink to its nadir. He and Ursula shared everything, and Eugenio had grown into the older brother that Albert never had. It must have been painful to witness.

In the meantime, however, Trieste was a hub of antifascist sedition—which helped smooth over some of the fissures at home. But for Otto
Albert, arriving in Trieste not only opened a new front in the war against despots, his head was still brimming with ideas about pursuing his research interests in recent French economic history. How many of his notes from his work with Barrett Whale he had with him, we do not know. Nor do we know if he carried with him his copy of Keynes’s
General Theory
. It is most likely that he managed to gather them during one of his courier operations to Paris. Either way, with Eugenio’s help, he was put in contact with a group of statisticians at the Istituto di Statistica at the University of Trieste, led by Pierpaolo Luzzatto-Fegiz, to deploy one skill that Hirschmann did have from his years of statistics and accounting at HEC—how to conduct fairly sophisticated counting measures. Luzzatto was en route to becoming an influential social scientist, but his math was not as strong as his background in jurisprudence, and so Hirschmann could compensate; he went to work on a study of Italian demographics, a discipline for which he developed a lasting fondness. Poring over censual data to measure fertility and child mortality rates, and from them to develop more accurate estimates of population growth rates, Hirschmann drew insights from the pioneering British demographer George Knibbs, who argued that the wrong meanings can be derived from the same data. Knibbs insisted that population growth had to consider age and complementarity between the sexes (to get beyond the standard “neuter” approach), so Hirschmann tabulated the fertility rates of Italian “Donne” by age of marriage and numbers of offspring—to show that women played a distinctive role in Italian fertility. The consequence was an ironic finding that warmed Hirschmann’s heart: fascist pronatalist policies, which rewarded women for reproducing, could lead to higher fertility rates
and
higher child mortality rates. As under Whale, Hirschmann made some basic insights go a long way. Knibbs’ massive
Mathematical Theory of Population
was Hirschmann’s guide in developing a more nuanced model for Italian demographers, and one can detect already at this stage a fondness for paradoxes produced by human behavior.
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His work at the Istituto di Statistica afforded a lot of autonomy. It led to his first publication, in
Giornale degli Economisti
, a technical essay stemming from his reading of Knibbs about how to correlate matrimony,
mortality, and fertility rates in a way that would reveal celibacy patterns (choices governing when, who, and how men and especially women would have sex).
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But he also became a specialist in the Italian economy, building on what he had already learned under Whale about France. As fascist rulers controlled the official press, it became harder and harder to figure out how the economy was really faring. Hirschmann was one of the few to be able to understand—and read between the lines of—official fascist data. To this he added a habit of stockpiling data from quarterly reports and the financial press (
Il Sole, Ventiquattro Ore
). In developing his own tables of industrial output, real salaries, and balances of foreign trade, he “took pleasure in this kind of detective work,” especially when it “revealed patterns that the fascist authorities tried to hide.”
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His findings came to the attention of several French economists, who solicited Hirschmann’s second publication for the Société d’études d’informations économiques. A descriptive account of Italian public finances, monetary policy, prices, and commercial balances, it showed that the Abyssinian war, rearmament, and the recent shift to autarky and the closing of international trade were putting enormous strains on the fascist political economy. Already in 1938, Hirschmann described the signs of spending deficits, creeping inflation, borrowing from private banks, and government controls to contain consumer prices. He revealed a façade of “prodigious techniques” to hide the impression of Italy’s “breathlessness.” Crafty uses of reserves and the expedient of bank borrowing got the fascist economy thus far—“but the future is coming under auspicious clouds.” This was Hirschmann’s first stab at “economic intelligence,” which Whale had predicted he would be good at, in the service of stripping the economic robe off the Emperor in Rome.
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The University of Trieste also afforded him the time to return to his interest in the French balance of payments and the franc Poincaré. He found a way to register at the university to receive a
laurea
(formal doctoral programs came into existence only after the fall of Mussolini). Several research papers—an analysis of the Philippines balance of payments problems, a short analysis of Italy’s monetary policies, a brief on the devaluation of the French franc—entered his file of accomplishments. Mussolini’s Milizia Ferroviaria may have gotten the trains to run on time, but when it came
to regulations on doctoral training at the University of Trieste, the rules were hardly strict. From what we can tell, Hirschmann labored on his own in these shorter papers and on the eventual doctoral dissertation, a 160-page (a standard length at the time) expansion on his study of the ill-fated franc Poincaré. In this portrait of French public finances, the mixed success of monetary controls, and the end of the gold standard, Keynes makes no appearance. Nor do contemporary debates about international economics. Hirschmann was more interested in the futility of traditional state controls in increasingly interdependent economies. It would satisfy the requirements for a Trieste
laurea
degree, which Otto Albert Hirschmann was awarded in June, 1938—and which he would later translate as a doctorate.
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Delving into economics and demography felt more and more like a way to make good on his commitments to social improvement without having to be too concerned with the chronic pressure to account for one’s “position.” By dumping the illusory quest for ideological consistency, which dominated much of the left-wing debating, he gained some freedom to search for something else—more analytical coherence and observational insight. This is what he honed as he turned the figures of the Italian economy inside out. Helping him to refine this sensibility was Eugenio. When Franco Ferraresi interviewed Albert Hirschman for
Corriere della Sera
in October 1993, he broke into the journalist’s depiction of Colorni’s “rigorous ideological coherence.” His correction: “Coherence yes, but not ideological.”
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What Colorni had, and which Otto Albert had pined for since his departure from Berlin, was books—many books, which Hirschmann was at liberty to borrow. Colorni’s personal library was supplemented by the shelves at the famous antiquarian bookstore on Via San Nicolò operated by the Jewish poet Umberto Saba, where the city’s literati would gather—to procure their books, read, and discuss in a secure and friendly atmosphere. Saba’s was the unofficial center of unofficial cultural life. After the Spanish crucible, Eugenio appreciated Otto Albert’s need for new intellectual directions and so fed him a steady diet not of social science (which Hirschmann picked up more on his own), but of literature. It was in Trieste that the full literary impact of Colorni’s influence came to
bear. Flaubert’s
Correspondences
, his
Education sentimentale
and
Madame Bovary
, Saint Simon’s
Mémoires
, Laclos’s
Liaisons dangereuses
, Benjamin Constant’s
Adolphe
—all of these OA started to read after leaving Spain. If Hegel had been his rite, the Flaubert was now an elixir. Hirschmann became fascinated by his attention to the particularity of each word in his prose and correspondences; the search for the right word,
le
mot juste, was as worthy as a political cause.
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Eugenio added Croce and Leopardi’s poetry. It was a long list whose unity lay in the microscopic view of psychologically motivated plotlines about the making and unmaking of romantic and familial unions. Hirschmann immersed himself in the inner lives of actors and authors, the relationships and the worlds they spun from their mind’s eye. Sarah recalled the discovery of his fascination for how protagonists, placed in particular circumstances, engaged in cognitive and emotional processes that motivated their decisions and actions. A foundation was laid, especially by the French masterworks, for Hirschman’s interest in the psychological processes lurking behind individual and group behavior. “He admired,” recalled Sarah of his encounter with Colorni’s reading suggestions, “how [authors] contrived these situations to bring out psychological outcomes rather than the other way around.”
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If there was one author who captured Hirschmann’s imagination, it was Michel de Montaigne. The highly personal vignettes, meditations, and moral reflections shook Hirschmann to his core. He immediately grasped the power of the essays—Montaigne questioned absolute forms of knowledge by submitting everything to the interrogating eye of the observer, starting by looking at himself, turning himself over and over to capture the multiple points of perspective or the multiple forms of the self. “We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves,” Montaigne wrote. “Whoever would do what he has to do would see that the first thing he must learn to know is what he is.” The roofbeams over his library were painted with Pliny the Elder’s words:

Only one thing is certain: that nothing is certain

And nothing is more wretched or arrogant than man.

Montaigne’s affection for the aphorism, for accumulating quotes, rubbed off on Hirschmann instantly, and he began to stockpile his own, starting with a mantra from Montaigne; “observe, observe perpetually.”

Montaigne’s ode to humility and the spirit it shaped rang so true for the young Otto Albert, whose patience with the ideological certainties and blindness that had warped the Weimar Republic into oblivion, and were now tearing Spain’s republic apart, had long since run thin. Doubt was in fact the reason why Eugenio pressed the
Essais
on Otto Albert; Montaigne the jurist had been witness to the brutality of sixteenth-century religious conviction and strife in the same way that Hirschman was becoming witness to twentieth-century bloodshed in the name of ideological certainty; Montaigne’s “forlorn France” presaged Hirschmann’s “forlorn Europe.” The tales of personal experience, which filled the
Essais
, recounted a fascinatingly complex and playful challenge of the absolute distinctions between the subjective and objective worlds. After Hirschmann procured his own copy of the
Essais
, either from Umberto Saba or during one of his trips back to Paris, Montaigne’s ironic detachment corroded what was left of his obsession with outer truths and realities. “Except you alone, O Man, said that god, each creature first studies its own self, and according to its needs, has limits to his labors and desires. Not one is as empty as you, who embrace the universe: you are the seeker with no knowledge, the judge with no jurisdiction and, when all is said and done, the jester of the farce.”
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