Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (67 page)

I must say that this is a nice way to treat a guy who has bought Fords for the past twenty years. You can also be assured that I absolutely will not purchase a Ford of any kind no matter what your usual form letter to me will say. Or does Ford now have a policy of not answering letters too!!
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In early spring 1969, Hirschman reached out to Nader and explained that he was studying how people were responding to the large organizations that shaped market life, which gave him material he aimed to use for a course next year at Harvard. Nader was excited. He replied immediately, sharing his admiration for Hirschman’s international work, and volunteered material for the course (including Sobeck’s plea), bemoaning how “our system has institutionalized ‘exit’ into an ideology and a remedy for a wide variety of abuses.” Now, as a Chevy man, Hirschman may have appreciated the blast against General Motors (though, he too would soon give up on his brand in favor of the upscale Saab). Either way, his ties to Nader were important for his project. Nader was interesting not just because he ventilated in such an articulate way how Americans were experiencing the corporate oversight of everyday life; he had tapped the disappointments of consumers whose activities had a special appeal for a Hirschman who was seeking to place consumerism into the broader panel of peoples’ responses to American capitalism. The fact that Nader’s casus belli was a car—the maligned Corvair—only added to the appeal.
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“What’s good for GM is good for America” was a risible reminder of duped bygone days, as was the image of the straightlaced, obedient “organization man.” Indeed, organizations had ceased to be synonyms for order and stability—more and more they were seen as the purveyors of disenchantment and treachery.

Hirschman described the setting in Palo Alto once he’d moved in: each of the roughly fifty visitors at the Center for Behavioral Sciences “occupies a cell in a very beautiful location, with superb views, but without telephones or any contact with the world beyond. If this was a paradise, Hirschman conceded that “there are a number here who appear on the verge of a nervous breakdown in this monastic regime.” This was as good as it could get given the accumulation of writing projects. To top off his pleasures, he bicycled from the house through the campus’s eucalyptus-lined lanes to his office. “When I close my eyes (very briefly!) I imagine myself on the Tiergartenstrasse chasing a bus.” To add to the memories was the rumor that Richard “Rix” Löwenthal, Hirschman’s mentor from the ORG days, was due to visit the center from Berlin’s Free University. In a curious twist, Löwenthal would help Hirschman apply his thoughts to party systems in decline; one can only speculate whether they talked about Weimar—if they did, the traces are imperceptible in the text or notes.
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Albert, Stanford, 1969.

As Hirschman settled into his cell and unpacked his bulging files of clippings and yellow notepads, one aspect of his ruminations in his “Confessions—Mine” was clear: his determination to get beyond the vocabulary that he and Shura had been using over dinner. “Social science is compartmentalized,” he noted, adding that “cross connections can be found perhaps best by those who haven’t acquired Veblen’s ‘trained incapacity’ ” (that is, the acquired incapacity to comprehend or even perceive a problem). What he was now pursuing was a “unity of social sciences—communication across disciplines, economics, politics, social psychology, morality” precisely to overcome what he perceived to be creeping narrowness of disciplines.
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It was something of a paradox of the age that the professionalization of the social sciences appeared to Hirschman to blinker scholars just as the challenges of modern society mounted. The paradox drilled a dilemma into his sense of purpose: at once Hirschman was seeking to shape the social sciences while trying to transcend the ever-rising boundaries separating the disciplines from each other. It would, as we shall see, account for the runaway success of his new project while at the same time unmoor him from the field of economics.

Where the divide immediately came to the surface was not, however, with his mother discipline, but rather with its cousin, political science. Gabriel Almond had maneuvered behind the scenes to get Hirschman to Stanford in the hopes of forging a collaboration. It did not come to pass. The divergence of their relationship reveals a great deal about Hirschman’s difficulties in the quickly shifting landscape of the American social sciences. As a political scientist, Almond saw in Hirschman a rare economist who used the tools of his discipline to illuminate politics while thinking politically about economic matters. Their relationship thinned in part because, by the time Hirschman arrived in Palo Alto, the original questions about technology and choice had veered onto a very different track. Hirschman felt a twinge of guilt that his sojourn did not yield to the collaboration that Almond had in mind. But there was more. Almond was a practitioner of structural-functionalist analysis, which could occasionally get worked up about elaborate explanatory schema that never appealed to Hirschman’s interest in paradoxes, inversions, and unexpected side effects. A gap was
widening between Hirschman and a growing scientistic trend in the social sciences; economists tended increasingly to enhance their progress by eliminating exogenous forces from their models, and political scientists were doing the same, explaining political change wholly in terms of political categories. Hirschman marveled at, as he put it elsewhere, “the noble, if unconscious, desire to demonstrate the irreducibility of the social world to general laws!”
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If he found the search for “parsimonious” theories in search of universal explanations a fruitless pursuit, in less charitable moments he called it “mindless,” bent on oversimplifying in order to control.

The difference was laid bare when a Berkeley graduate student, the Argentine Oscar Oszlak, invited Hirschman to a conference in Asilomar. Hirschman accepted and proposed the title “The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding.” Oszlak’s dissertation advisor, David Apter, another prominent political scientist, inquired whether Hirschman had accepted. If so, what was his paper about? When the Argentine explained, Apter smiled and countered with his own paper title, “The Use of Paradigms as a Help to Understanding,” to defend his side.
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Hirschman did not mince words when it came to the imperialist features of some of the ornate, “theoretical” suppositions of the social sciences. In this, he returned to an old obsession to defrock the expert suffering from “the visiting economist syndrome”:

In the academy, the prestige of the theorist is towering. Further, the extravagant use of language intimates that theorizing can rival sensuous delights: what used to be called an interesting or valuable theoretical point is commonly referred to today as a “stimulating” or even “exciting” theoretical “insight.” Moreover, in so far as the United States is concerned, an important role has no doubt been played by the desperate need, on the part of the hegemonic power, for shortcuts to the understanding of multifarious reality that must be coped with and controlled and therefore understood at once.
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The new breed of social scientist and revolutionary “experience the same compulsion,” argued Hirschman. The revolutionaries now cite Marx
without understanding him, arming themselves with “laws of change” to justify the view that interpreting the world is inferior to changing it. This was a not-so-subtle dig at American students and Latin American radicals who denied the possibility of change without revolution. More troublesome and pernicious was a “cognitive style” that was, as he put it politely, “unfortunate.” The problem was not which side to be on; it was the “impatience for theoretical formulation.” To make his case, he compared two books, John Womack, Jr.’s recently published profile of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and James L. Payne’s study of violence in Colombia. Womack, it needs to be said, was an assistant professor at Harvard, and Hirschman liked him immensely—not least because Womack did not hide his affection for Mexico and sympathy for Zapata’s cause behind a patina of objectivism. Payne, on the other hand, “exudes dislike and contempt” for the society he studied. Womack’s fine-grained narrative—“one might say Flaubertian”—about a redemptive struggle, contrasted with Payne’s neutral application of the latest “theories” to explain Colombians’ “self-made hell” and to tout a model that could be applied anywhere. Payne was the butt of Hirschman’s ridicule, which bordered on the cruel; his “model is as wrong as it is outrageous.” Worse, it was banal, “at best [it] leaves us with the proposition, which incidentally is both platitudinous and wrong, that if the politicians are vicious, the ensuing politics are likely to be too!”
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Heat like this in Hirschman’s prose is rare, and it suggests that he was unhappy about the drift of entire sectors of American social science that he considered ruinous. He scribbled a Payne-inspired diatribe about “the conservative, anti-change chamber of social theories.”
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Testing variables, valorizing parsimony, and seeking generalizability all as ends in themselves had the additional ignominy of being painful to read. There was, of course, the charge that Hirschman valued complexity, which to some of his critics meant messiness, as an end in itself, and there are times when his work is not immune to the charge. But it misses the point of
his
cognitive style, which might be located in an unstable—and squeezed—middle. He was not calling for a grand unified social science, but rather a careful rebuilding from
petits
steps, or “mini-building blocks” that did
not appeal to dependence on exclusive categories or magnify the distance between reality and intellectual schema. It was perhaps more elegantly framed by Paul Valéry, whom Hirschman was reading as he composed “The Search for Paradigms”: “Tout ce qui est simple est faux. Tout ce qui ne l’est pas est inutilisable.”
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In the course of penning his diatribe, Hirschman added a little aphorism for himself in response to Payne: “Hope as a principle of action.” Another petite idée to stash away.

What Hirschman did happen upon at Stanford was social psychology. Hirschman had always had an eye out for the psychological underpinnings of behavior and had never found the conventional self-interested
homo economicus
an especially revealing subject.
Strategy
had leaned on some social psychology to illuminate the ways in which people made decisions. Ideology and perceptions played a role in the habits of reformmongers. And the boundary between trait-making and trait-taking elaborated in
Development Projects Observed
had required some insight into more than just utility maximizing, which is why Albert and Shura burned the midnight oil. Indeed, we can see the strands of the challenge starting to interlace in the presentation Hirschman made in 1963 to the Institut d’étude du développement, when François Perroux had invited him to share his recent thoughts about the “obstacles” to development with a French audience. Hirschman seized the opportunity to try to shift the debate away from the “objective” constraints such as lack of roads or pervasive illiteracy. He wanted to draw attention to the ways in which perceptions of obstacles were sometimes thornier than the obstacles themselves; they could be intractable products of the beholder’s eye and thus get in the way of potential alternatives and reforms. And some obstacles could be turned into an advantage when seen differently. The outline notes to what would eventually become “Obstacles to Development: A Classification and a Quasi Vanishing Act,” sported a headline: “VICIOUS CIRCLES.”

Soon his desk groaned under the weight of piled-up evidence that people made decisions in complicated and often counterintuitive ways. The effects of experiments by Jack W. Brehm, the late Arthur R. Cohen,
and most of all, Leon Festinger—the Stanford psychologist who had pioneered the theory of cognitive dissonance and written a book that Hirschman admired,
When Prophecy Fails
—dominated his reading. The latter, a 1956 classic by undercover psychologists about a UFO cult that predicted the end of the world, piqued Hirschman’s interest for its use of a “case study” method drawn from a newspaper headline and applying the new concept of cognitive dissonance—just the kind of raw material Hirschman relished: everyday occurrences that yield new insights. How did believers keep up their faith when the prophecy from the planet Clarion did not materialize in Armageddon? Many, for reasons that went beyond simple dismissals of irrationality, hung on. Cognitive dissonance helped explain how disconfirming information and deep beliefs can be reconciled. The heart of the psychological enterprise inverted the customary (and still-resilient) precept that peoples’ attitudes shape their behavior. What psychologists did, which Hirschman took to the core of his own approach, was to flip the equation, to treat behavior as a shaper of beliefs and attitudes. Hirschman sent Festinger a draft of the “Obstacles” paper and asked him to review his treatment of how an economist might draw from his work on cognitive dissonance. Festinger, a notoriously irascible man, was impressed. “The remarks you make about dissonance theory and the implications for the theory are quite correct technically. In addition, I think you make them cogently and interestingly.”
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