Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (59 page)

With this spirit of widening options and accumulated expectations, driven by the rising appeal of more drastic routes to social change, Colombia cast a shadow on the other “cases.” The crisis in the countryside and the violence that ravaged it may have been tragic, but it also presented an opportunity. New groups worked their way into power in part to
find
solutions. This is what brought the idea of agrarian reform before it became a policy. So, a crisis
could
be an important ingredient in problem solving and rally an esprit of policy making around a problem. Whether it was rural unrest, inflation, or a terrible drought, such as the one that visited misery upon the Brazilian northeast in 1958, a problem could summon new ways to think about it and change it. The drought, for instance, was devastating enough to shake up an otherwise flaccid National Development Bank and prompt the Kubitschek government to enlist Furtado,
recently returned from Cambridge, to set up a plan. It was “very beautiful, very brilliant, very quick,” Furtado told Hirschman in one of their long conversations. From this emerged SUDENE, the northeast development bank, which was placed in Furtado’s hands. But it was not just the government that responded, so did the church, with a “bishop’s program” of their own and soon began to mobilize parishioners. Northeastern politicos soon climbed aboard the program. The result was a new coalition of forces able to push through reforms in the face of traditional resistance. Hirschman’s notes on the chats with Furtado reveal his admiration for the alchemy of policy daring and political maneuvering.
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Hirschman’s stories did not always point one way; these were not triumphal accounts of reformers overcoming all odds. A crisis could just as well deepen the problem. In Colombia, once the violence settled down, the underlying problem seemed to recede and some reformers turned down the pressure. The result was a groundswell of impatience on the part of peasants and a revolutionary offensive by guerrillas sensing it might be their last opportunity. As Hirschman was putting the final touches to the book, Colombia appeared to be backsliding in this fashion, despite Peñalosa’s optimism. Chile, on the other hand, was at a crossroads but veering the other way. After years of floundering, which were on display during the
Issues
discussions, the country had appeared to grind itself into an inflationary impasse. Earlier efforts at stabilizing prices by orthodox measures, such as those advocated by the Sachs-Klein Mission (yet another intervention of “foreign experts” to shake up a local logjam), did little to appease anyone. Clotario Blest, the legendary trade union leader arrested for striking against President Ibañez’s economic policies, told Hirschman that a 10 to 15 percent rate of inflation “is a good thing.” Others, like the Chicago School envoy, Arnold Harberger, bewailed it as the source of all evil. Chile’s inflation crisis at first blush was a diorama of futility. The intractable debate between monetarists and so-called structuralists seemed to reinforce the argument that only an overhaul of the “system” would bring price stability. But Hirschman’s tale of frustration and social agitation yielded a very different lesson: the very intractability of inflation led leaders to spotlight problems in the system that might bring on a revolution.
When he sat down to talk with the leader of the new Christian Democratic Party, Eduardo Frei, he got an earful about run-amok prices, food shortages, poor infrastructure, and poverty. How inflation caused them all was not quite clear—but Hirschman was struck by the self-evidence with which Frei bundled the problems and argued that inflation made tackling them all the more pressing. The ensuing conversation with the leader of the left-wing coalition FRAP, a mild mannered doctor named Salvador Allende, pointed to a basic cause: the abuse by foreign copper companies and the drainage of wealth from the country. To Allende, the inflationary symptom demanded deep solutions, such as taking on exploitative companies. They may have been rivals, but Frei and Allende shared the tendency to treat inflation as a scourge remediable only with social reforms. By 1963, this was an urgent consensus that set the stage for a dramatic decade.
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Throughout the stories, the constructive role of tensions and imbalances and the learning by doing and observing became key elements of the histories of reform and policy making. To American intellectuals and policy makers,
Journeys
illustrated the complexity, and occasional violence and high risk, associated with reform. It was hardly the smooth orderly process that could be managed with expertise and foreign aid. It required shaky alliances and “wily and complex tactics” by a breed of locals who must be at the very least understood if their audacity were to work. Then there was a second audience—Latin American intellectuals and policy makers who treated reform as futile. Some saw reform as petty bourgeois sop; others felt that the obstacles and hurdles were so great that reform would stop in its tracks. For both breeds of skeptics, nothing could change unless everything changed. “In a way,” Hirschman mused, “the book provides source material for a ‘reformmonger’s manual’ which is badly needed to offer some competition to the many works on the techniques of revolution, coups d’états and guerrilla warfare.” He imagined
Journeys
, not just jokingly, as a counterpoint to Che Guevara’s best-selling manual,
Guerrilla Warfare
. His purpose was “to break down the rigid dichotomy between reform and revolution and to show that the changes that occur in the real world are often something wholly outside these two stereotypes.” Americans had to accept that revolutionary forces were not
a threat to
progress
; Latin Americans had to see that revolution was not the only way to realize it.
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Journeys toward Progress
caught the pulse of a moment, which made it an immediate sensation. It soon became the reference for an alternative way forward uncharted by extremes, avoiding the national security frame of reform as the lesser evil to revolution while at the same time highlighting the role of the engagé social scientist. Some of Hirschman’s fans found this less-than-critical identification a bit much. Lincoln Gordon was one. As the ambassador, he was watching Brazil veer toward a more radical brand of populism, and he was inclined to blame domestic policies and propensities as the source of all the region’s woes. While he applauded the long analytical chapter on problem solving and policy making and looked forward to reading the studies on Chile and Colombia while on the plane back to Washington, he found the study of the Northeast “provocative.” But, he added diplomatically, “I remain unpersuaded by your intellectual love affair with Celso Furtado and your conviction that SUDENE really is something different from the other experiences,” adding prophetically, “I hope you will consider setting some time aside ten years hence to write a retrospective piece of self-criticism.” This was September 1963, and little did Gordon or Hirschman know just how tragically events would unfold for Brazil—and for Chile—and how difficult it would be for Hirschman to look back on a decade of reformmongering. Developments in Brazil, warned Gordon, “may well go worse before they go better.”
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Journeys
was also personally enlightening. With the surge of reform, from agrarian change in Latin America to civil rights at home, came its nemesis. The perception of the need for reform also spotlighted resistance to it. For some this meant that reform was doomed, and so another way forward had to be opened. To others, the cost of overcoming hurdles could be so destabilizing that it threatened the whole social order. Accustomed to hearing pessimism in Latin America, Hirschman wrote
Journeys
as a way to counter it. But increasingly, he encountered naysayers close by, at Columbia. One was his friend, Samuel Huntington, who grew alarmed that modernization and reform were going to throw the Third World into turmoil, and Huntington’s views, as he moved rightward, began to
strain the friendship. But there were also younger radicals, like Immanuel Wallerstein, an emerging expert on African decolonization, who worried that without radical change, the development would fizzle. Hirschman found himself at odds with Wallerstein’s increasingly, if understandably, alarming view of the prospects for Africa in the world economy.

Hirschman felt the need to address futilists of all stripes head on. An invitation from François Perroux, of the Institut d’étude du développement économique et social and the Collège de France, invited him to speak to an international audience about “obstacles” to the development process. What came of this was a trilogy of essays that confronted the ways in which social scientists, starting with Wallerstein, perceived change and how these perceptions shaped the prospects for change. His lecture was called “Obstacles to Development: A Classification and a Quasi-Vanishing Act.” When he stood before his Parisian audience, he had circled and emphasized the words “Vicious Circles” at the top of the first page of his script. Futilists were circular thinkers: reform was impossible because the conditions were not there to support them, while the absence of the conditions is what made reform so vital. This was unhelpful thinking. Hirschman was not so naïve as to think that all hurdles were surmountable. But there were “obstacles” that could be turned into advantages, like the extended family among cacao farmers in Ghana or the surviving skilled European artisans. To see the difference depended on the attitudes of the observer and meant ceasing to treat the past as nothing but a giant source of constraints. Backwardness was not destiny; there was plenty of room for alternatives as long as one did not feel obliged to wait for the “necessary conditions” or seize the “perfect solution.” “Obstacles to Development” was the first installation growing out of
Journeys
and was aimed directly at social scientists, to register alarm about the ways in which they contributed to the problems they sought to explain. In due course, he would grow increasingly impatient with this new patient. But for the time being, he seized the opportunity to cite the Marquise de Merteuil in Laclos’
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
, “Believe me, one rarely acquires the qualities he can do without.”
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To believe in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made. That would be no real act of belief.

  
FRANZ KAFKA

A
flurry of books and breaking into the acme of the American academy did not leave Hirschman with an urge to settle down. If anything, he was more restless than ever.
Journeys toward Progress
was barely out in early 1963 when he issued feelers to the Ford Foundation offering his consulting services. Why? “The cause is good,” F. Champion Ward wrote apologetically, “but, frankly, we don’t quite see why what is essentially a consultant relationship need be independently financed when the results are to be primarily of value to the committee.”
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Two things were going on. First, Hirschman’s itchiness was in part the result of his unease with Columbia. One senses that he felt more at home in Colombia. The university was a congenial place to work; Hirschman had a few colleagues with similar interests in the Third World, such as Samuel Huntington, with whom he overlapped until Huntington returned to Harvard (where he had been denied tenure in 1959) in 1963. He, too, harbored reservations about the Third World modernization euphoria—though his would veer into a more pessimistic track. While Hirschman celebrated the increasing disorder of modernization as a virtue, to Huntington it was a menace. But on one principle they agreed: anyone who thought that the transformations in the Third World could be planned, balanced, orderly affairs arranged by elites and their technocrats were deluding themselves—and everyone else. But otherwise,
Hirschman never connected to Columbia, neither its colleagues nor students. A kind of detachment loomed like a nimbus over “Professor” Hirschman, who preferred field work in Latin America and writerly seclusion on Central Park West.

In mid-October 1963, Hirschman’s phone rang. It was Shura Gerschenkron. They were not telephone habitués, but over the years Albert and Shura had remained in touch and shared each other’s work. A fresh copy of
Journeys
sat on Gerschenkron’s office desk. It was this, no doubt, that prompted the call—and an invitation for Hirschman to come to Cambridge to meet with a class on development taught by Arthur Smithies in early December 1963. Behind the scenes, Shura, at the peak of his influence, had been angling for the chair of the economics department, Carl Kaysen, to have Hirschman as a colleague. He was taking advantage of a movement (short-lived, as it turned out) to create more cross-appointments. Hirschman was being considered as the first professor of political economy appointed through the Graduate School of Public Administration (soon to be renamed the John F. Kennedy School of Government) and jointly named to the Department of Economics as a specialist in Latin America. This was a time in which the discipline still made room for regional or national expertise and area studies was on the rise. Smithies and Edward Mason covered development economics, but neither had extensive experience in the field. Between Harvard’s anxiety to bulk up on the hot development field and catch up in Latin American studies, it did what it does as a reflex: Harvard went faculty hunting. Hirschman and Samuel Huntington were their two big catches that season; Columbia lost them both.

In those days, the business of being a candidate was a more informal, gentlemanly, and inevitably arbitrary and personalized affair. And fast. It was also one in which Hirschman would easily shine. There was a luncheon organized by the dean, Donald Price, and a lecture followed by dinner with Carl Kaysen, Smithies, Mason, and Shura Gerschenkron. The “deliberation,” such as it was, was quick and uncontroversial. Kenneth Galbraith quickly jumped on the bandwagon—and within a week Price was in conversation with Hirschman about the terms of an appointment. Within a few months the offer letter had come through, and the
recruitment, Kaysen recalled, was left to Shura. It was not a tough sell. Hirschman regarded himself as “a hyphen between economists and political scientists.” He fancied this self-image. Beside, it felt like a step up: Harvard had more prestige, better economists, and more “interesting activities for me.” The salary of $20,000 was standard for the day. But he knew he would miss the theater, art galleries, and the foreign films on New York’s screens. Still, he scarcely blinked; a week after getting the offer, he accepted; retention efforts by Columbia’s Dean Andrew Cordier and Provost Jacques Barzun were pointless. Hirschman was gone.
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