Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (55 page)

Chenery was not the only reader who wondered about some of the assumptions built into Hirschman’s
Strategy
. A young economist, Amartya Sen, wondered if Hirschman had not created something of a false dichotomy between “balanced” versus “imbalanced” growth. Asked by Austin Robinson to write a short note on the book for the
Economic Journal
, Sen normally considered much of what passed for development economics as “exceedingly boring.” But
Strategy
, he felt, belonged to a different league—and deserved a fully engaged review. Sen’s criticism was that neither balanced nor unbalanced models stand up in their pure form; they differed only in the degree of interdependence each assumes. But he bowed to the pummeling of the orthodoxy and “this cliché-ridden branch of economics.”
³⁰
C. P. Kindleberger, an otherwise sympathetic reader, found himself running out of patience with the book after the seventh
chapter; so much of the book was organized around illustrating the special twists and hidden dynamics of growth that “paradox is piled on paradox; frequently, however, what is discussed is only a paradoxical aspect of a larger question, with the issue left unresolved whether the paradoxical aspect outweighs or simply modifies the normal analysis.” Kindleberger wondered whether Hirschman ever really showed that capital shortages were not the problem to begin with. In the end, he echoed Chenery: “Authorities of developing countries can find warrant for practically any course of action they may choose to take.” Still, Kindleberger’s review acknowledged the originality of the analysis and where it now stood in the field: “With the publication of
The Strategy of Economic Development
, the scales have tipped against balanced and in favor of unbalanced growth.”
³¹

There could be no complaint that readers were not taking the book very seriously. It was clear that
The Strategy of Economic Development
would not go the way of
National Power
. Having spent two very productive, highly concentrated years writing and reading, positioning himself at the forefront of a looming debate, Hirschman had succeeded. His book became an instant landmark. But establishing his profile had taken some of the adventure out of life, adventures of the sort that provided the opportunities for travel and observation in Colombia that were so vital to conceiving
Strategy
. The book complete, Hirschman’s wanderlust caught up with him. Writing to a friend, Paul Streeten, a Balliol College don who had authored a shorter critique of balanced growth theory around the same time, Hirschman noted that “now that I have emptied my bag, I really feel like filling it up again at some faraway place, but our children being soon 12 and 14, I suppose we should stay put for the next few years.”
³²
It would not take long for a new opportunity for adventure to come along.

The decisive moment in the history of mankind is everlasting. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things to be of no account are in the right, for nothing has yet occurred.

  
FRANZ KAFKA

A
fter
Strategy
, then what? The book had clear, entwined objectives—to recast the debate about Third World development and fulfill a personal dream of being an intellectual. But basic issues about life remained in the air. Two years away from Bogotá, where was the family to live? Tasting the beginnings of success in the United States as an intellectual, Hirschman now wanted to stay. But he was without a job, hustling for work and contracts. By the summer of 1958, he was on month-to-month earnings with two teenage daughters. Hirschman, undimmed in his determination, saw the problem coming. “Nothing is easier,” he told Ursula, “than to pursue a goal if that goal is clearly and convincingly visible. The most difficult thing is to continue to believe that the goal is possible if it has already slipped through our fingers several times or turned out to be brittle and rotten. The willingness to recognize a new goal (or rebuild an old one), to continue waiting for the moment where it suddenly might reveal itself—that is the task, together with the willingness to give it up, if necessary, to ‘betray’ it.”
¹

As Sarah always marveled, Albert exuded confidence that things would work themselves out; he enjoyed the persona of the improvising, solving
débrouillard
. But few could play the part with his uncanny skill. This time, his gambit worked. The success of his publications and his unique hands-on experience threw open a flurry of opportunities, as he
had hoped. History favored him.
Strategy
appeared just as the pace of African and Asian decolonization gathered speed, and nationalist and radical alternatives to capitalism gained increasing followers. Radical, Marxist appeals for revolution and anticapitalism argued for a complete break with the West and its legion of economic missionaries wielding master plans drafted in Washington, London, and Paris. Hirschman had something different to say about development, which, as the demand for alternatives rose, would send him on voyages that ended with meditations about the soul of reform in a new age of revolution.

Among his suitors were some of America’s leading foundations and think tanks. This activity put him in touch with scholars in Latin America at a time in which there were few contacts and even fewer collaborations north-south. As Hirschman became a go-between figure, he not only became more influenced by Latin Americans, he also grew more and more aware that intellectuals themselves played a role in the social changes they studied. He caught his moment: if nothing else, the 1960s was going to be a decade to register the power of ideas, as well as their limits.
²

No sooner had the ink dried on
Strategy
than Hirschman was summoned by Norman Buchanan at the Rockefeller Foundation. Buchanan’s desk was piling up with overtures from Raúl Prebisch and Victor Urquidi from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, the ambitious Jorge Mendez, director of the economics department at the University of Los Andes in Colombia, and the troupe of modernization theorists like Max Millikan and Everett Hagen from MIT, who were keen to promote links with peers south of the border. Buchanan wanted guidance and asked Hirschman to draft a confidential report on how North American scholars were approaching development.

Hirschman offered a census of the field. The early part of the summer of 1958 was spent reading and consulting with colleagues at the World Bank, Harvard, MIT, and other universities. Then he penned his views of the state of the art. “The field of economic development,” concluded Hirschman, “is in danger of becoming stale.” Though prodigious, it ran the risk of covering everything and therefore saying nothing. Most economists in the field were concerned with taxonomies and definitions, when
the conceptual work had to begin elsewhere. The missing piece was rather a “dominating analytical structure, of some ‘General Theory’ of development which could provide a focal point for theoretical discussion and empirical verification.” Second, it needed a lot more description and empirical evaluation. He called for a combination of new theoretical exploration
and
deep familiarity with cases.
³

Hirschman was positioning himself as an exhibit without making it evident. He concluded by volunteering “Some Suggestions for Research on Comparative Development.” In laying the groundwork, in the form of reports to his benefactors, for an extended, ambitious, personal research agenda, he hoped it would guide him through the coming years. If anyone had doubts about what
he
wanted to do, these were laid to rest. The unemployed economist concluded that it would take only one economist and two assistants with “two to three years for a research team” to compile the data and conduct the analysis. “Few universities professors can obtain this kind of leave,” he nudged. “Many would consider it undignified to ‘bury’ themselves for a considerable period of time in any single underdeveloped country.”
⁴
The method appealed to his taste for the heroic field-worker, a character coming into full bloom with the anthropologist who observed processes in the open (as opposed to the closed laboratory).
⁵

It the end, it was all mothballed. Hirschman’s booster, Norman Buchanan, died suddenly that summer. Still, the field beckoned, at the very least to resist familiar academic temptations of “la rage de vouloir conclure” as Flaubert put it, the urge to theorize and explain all for its own sake.

As the academic year 1958 drew to a close, Hirschman was staring unemployment in the face. It looked like the family would have to pack their bags and return to Bogotá. Instead, they packed their bags for California. At Yale, Hirschman had gotten to know the brilliant, iconoclastic political scientist, Charles (Ed) Lindblom. Lindblom saw a kindred spirit in Hirschman. Not without some hustling abilities of his own, Lindblom had arranged with the RAND Corporation for Albert to join him for the summer of 1958 as a scholar in residence. The Hirschmans installed themselves in a dark apartment with oppressive green walls. At least it
was Santa Monica, distant enough from Sarah’s parents to avoid familial intrusions but close enough to indulge their passion for the beach and Albert’s handstands for his daughters.

Founded after World War II as a research group to advise the Air Force, the RAND was conceived as a means of retaining its intellectual advisors after the war. With a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation, it became a model private, nonprofit research and evaluation enterprise living off government contracts and based in Santa Monica. The idea was that researchers should devise projects and collaborate to meet a burgeoning market for technical expertise when universities were only slowly shifting to large-scale research and applied analysis in the social sciences.
⁶

The horizontal office building surrounded by waving palm trees was open twenty-four hours a day for analysts to work around the clock. Interdisciplinarity was a key factor and a source of some pride, inside and out. Even its detractors, such as Harvard social scientist David Riesman, acknowledged its success at truly interdisciplinary work. As its studies increasingly stressed the complex interplay of factors in Cold War military strategy, the RAND developed a reputation for pioneering systems analysis. Perhaps the most famous work was conducted by Hirschman’s close friend, Thomas Schelling, who pushed the use of complex game theory into the field of war and peace and worked on his
Strategy of Conflict
(1963) at the RAND right on the heels of Hirschman’s final edits to
The Strategy of Economic Development
. In the era of the organization man, what the RAND could dedicate to research was, compared to most universities, very substantial.
⁷

With the globe moving beyond the two-world order, the RAND was quick to keep its edge and moved its sights to the tropics. Hirschman’s sponsor, Charles Wolf, a veteran of the Point Four Program ushered in by President Harry S. Truman in 1949 to promote technical assistance in newly independent countries of what would be called the Third World, was given resources and range to spot talent as the institution branched into security beyond NATO and into economic realms.
⁸
Wolf, who had read drafts of
Strategy
, would go on to head the RAND’s Economics Division and author the influential
Insurgency and Counterinsurgency
in 1965, by which time the organization was cleaved between anti- and pro-war
groups and acquiring a reputation it could not shake off as a think tank for the government’s security apparatus.

For a brief, formative moment, the RAND was the setting for an intense dialogue between Hirschman and Lindblom. This would be a fertile, if at times fraught, partnership. They had begun to work on an essay together in New Haven. What materialized was a curious blend. Hirschman laid out his approach to economic development, and Lindblom outlined his approach to policy making as distinct sections. Then the pair coauthored their converging and diverging views; what they shared were doubts about the quest for the rational and completely informed policy maker as the cure for problems. They wanted to revive ways of thinking and modes of behavior too often dismissed as irrational, “wasteful, and generally abominable.” The collage of separate and combined voices first appeared as a working paper for the RAND in the spring of 1960 and later was published in
Behavioral Science
in 1962. A curious work, it is best seen as a bridge to Hirschman’s growing awareness of policy making and ideas guiding the development process.

It was a bridge engineered of intellectual influence. What started in Santa Monica continued across an itinerant schedule of trips around Latin America over the ensuing years. Lindblom accompanied the Hirschmans on a long trip to Mexico in the summer of 1960 to conduct research for what would become
Journeys toward Progress
. After this, he found a way to join trips elsewhere, to northeast Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, often writing up extensive interpretive impressions en route.

Already famed for defrocking the high priests of the state and their affection for technical components of making a policy or a plan, Lindblom targeted “the widespread tendency to assume that to solve a problem one needs to know its causes.” It made policy makers feel confident about their prescriptions but did little for the predictability of success. But it presumed an impossible degree of intelligibility. Like Hirschman’s urge “to prove Hamlet wrong” by showing that doubt could lead to better learning, Lindblom argued that the world’s problems were sufficiently complex that many could not be fully intelligible as a condition for tackling them—but tackle we must. When Hirschman and Lindblom got to Chile, they got an earful from rival social scientists and policy makers wrapped up in knotted debates over the basic causes of inflation. Solving this big riddle was treated as a necessary step to the “right” policies; in the meantime, the situation worsened and the debate ground to a heated impasse. It was a textbook case of how the grail of complete understanding could make the problem worse.
⁹