Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (68 page)

Praise like this must have brought glee. But the author of
When Prophecy Fails
turned out to be a recluse and had no interest in reciprocating Hirschman’s overture to collaborate. Instead, Hirschman happened upon one of Festinger’s young colleagues, Philip Zimbardo, who had just joined the Stanford psychology department and was delighted to team with the distinguished economist. At the time, Zimbardo was working on illusions of choice before people made decisions; how they attached to decisions they found most laborious or identified with groups (like fraternities) they suffered to join (like humiliation rituals). Hirschman loved this kind of work and appreciated the careful parsing of questions such as, How long do loyalties last? When does dissonance become intolerable? How do group dynamics perpetuate or crumble? Hirschman and
Zimbardo, himself an antiwar activist and teach-in organizer, spent many hours over lunches and coffees talking about their respective interests and groping for an understanding of how intentions translate into actions. Along with one of Zimbardo’s graduate students, Mark Snyder, the three of them designed an experiment on “The Effects of Severity of Initiation on Activism,” which proposed to figure out what people do when they find out a group is less enjoyable or profitable than their expectations. Nothing came of it, in part, ironically, because a wave of revolt finally struck the Stanford campus the following academic year—which made getting human subjects to work on conformity and noncomformity seem a bit beside the point. Eventually, the idea rested in a forgotten appendix.
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What had started out as a central premise in Hirschman’s thinking about economic development—disequilibrium—was broadening to fathom the reasons for the underlying volatility of the world. This was, after all, the tenor of the times; the happy, all-good-things-go-together mood that had inaugurated the 1960s was quickly dissipating. Confidence in progress and planning was giving way to crises and clashes; finally, the world appeared to be catching up to Hirschman’s instinctive search for the unbalanced aspects of social life. At the same time, Hirschman realized, there was a basic difference between creative disequilibria and a complete breakdown. It was a fine line he would later have to identify when the turmoil ceded to a darker mood in the 1970s. For now, what was necessary was a social science that brought out “the inborn tendencies towards instability.” It was not enough to preach imbalance or advocate antennae for unintended consequences. Hirschman was groping for something more fundamental, more
internal
to the black box of human behavior, a way to make good on what was still so unresolved but central to
Strategy
: the quest for an endogenous theory of how things changed. It was becoming more important as the shine on reform was quickly wearing off; an endogenous theory would clinch the case that reform was always possible because little about the world was as fixed, entrenched, or intractable as it seemed.

What was becoming clearer was that people were internally mixed, always amalgamating motives and dispositions. Nowadays, with the modernist
faiths behind us, this may seem self-evident. But in the late 1960s this was not a widespread acknowledgement. There were others groping around for similar coordinates. Erik Erikson advocated a psychosocial approach to the human ego, which had discrete stages to its development and was vulnerable to “identity crises.” An ur-text for radical readers, Herbert Marcuse’s
One-Dimensional Man
blasted the view of modern Man as a creature of Reason—an ontological fiction that had to remove “him” from a dialectical relationship with society or nature in order to subordinate “him” to what Marcuse called “technological rationality and the logic of domination.” The underlying tone of alienation and crisis, which could be marshaled to justify a range of responses, from defying the draft to hurling Molotov cocktails, never appealed to Hirschman. When students pressed these works on him, he was usually polite but always dismissive. Hirschman was after something that simultaneously embraced instability while still being basically about redeeming the core of human behavior, a way to capture the multidimensional features of modern life. He fastened on two expressions. One was the decision to speak out against misdeeds and wrongdoings; the other was to defect. The first was what he saw in the griping about Nigerian railways, the second was the decision to opt for the intrepid truck; the first was protest against the military draft, the second, flight to Canada; the first was fight in the inner-city ghettos of Newark and Los Angeles, the second was to move up the economic ladder and out of the trap. The first, Hirschman labeled “voice,” the second, “exit.” This coinage would go on to have an august career of its own.

What mattered for Hirschman was how the words expressed peoples’ efforts to mix, negotiate, and
choose
between courses. Perhaps rulers of institutions and organizations might then recognize—instead of suppressing—the need for alternatives and could “improve the design of institutions that need both exit and voice to be maintained in good health.” Herein lay the hope for “recuperation,” a subtle keyword in the text into which Hirschman would pour his thoughts about the world in an effort to bring to light “the hidden potential of whatever reaction mode is currently neglected.” The contrast with the tone of Marcuse cannot be denied. If the German critical theorist wanted to smash the system,
the German economist wanted to make it more flexible. Indeed, the last line of the book would eventually register a personal plea for openness to the neglected, angular, hidden forces at work in society. “Such,” he concluded, “at least is the stuff writers’ dreams are made of.”
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A two-way flow connected the complex views of people and adaptive organizations. Capturing this was the goal of the book, which would be a milestone in the history of the social sciences and which would catapult Hirschman to academic fame. As with
Strategy
, Hirschman drew upon an eclectic disciplinary repertoire. Whereas Colombia had been the laboratory for
Strategy
, Hirschman was now operating at an entirely different scale: the entire world was his observational oyster.

By the end of 1968, he was prepared to unveil thoughts that were inchoate a year earlier. The Center for Behavioral Sciences had Hirschman culminate their fall-semester seminar; he presented a paper called “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.” “In spite of its length,” Hirschman apologized, for he had not taken the time to whittle it down, “it’s still incomplete.”
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People crowded into the room to hear the rambling, not very clear, almost demure presentation. It started by explaining his interest in connecting fields, how an idea might grow and open hidden pathways by combining insights from psychology, economic development, and decision making—what he called “cognitive dissonance in action.” Then came the customary cites of the writers: Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Constant, and Octavio Paz. The paper was hardly a draft and could not have been easy to follow, because Hirschman was still moving his pieces around. Still, the exercise forced him to focus on what undergirded the final text: behaviors that were at odds with attitudes and expected theories, followed by potential explanations for “inconsistent” acts. His goal was to undo “ordinary sequences” that made attitude change a condition for social change, and thus the limits of exhortation as a way to effect it.
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This was his first iteration. While he was writing, he constantly adapted and refined his ideas. He was also updating with imports of breaking events and headlines: the flow of letters that Ralph Nader gave him from disgruntled customers, new issues of
Consumer Reports
, and the fate of the Black Power movement and its academic analogue, Black
Studies, in Bay Area universities. Indeed, Black Studies was an exemplary case. Its proponents asked students and professors to reject a traditional pattern of upward social mobility on the grounds that “it was unworkable and undesirable for the most depressed group in our society.” The old pattern of “exit” of a few select African-Americans into white society, which was meant to promote “collective stimulation” of Blacks and the improvement of the ghetto, did nothing for those who remained. In losing the most promising members, Blacks were deprived of critical voices that might otherwise fight for the lot of the group. The rise of Black Studies represented the surge of a new kind of voice that Hirschman found “strikingly analogous” to the Nigerian railroads and public schools. They were all examples where peoples’ exit was ineffective at getting organizations to change their ways while voice “was fatally weakened by exit of the most quality-conscious customers.” Evidence of this kind of dynamic was all around him. Interestingly, Hirschman made no mention of his own exits—Berlin, Trieste, Paris, Washington—and there is nothing in his notes that suggested a personal connection.
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If the seminar performance was confusing, it was because he was still sorting out his ideas for what would become a deceptively simple formula.

The final book,
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
, was an immediate sensation; it had that unique mix of being quickly grasped while exploding in many directions. It explained how a World Bank project in Nigerian railways could aggravate relations between ethnic groups and stoke political exit or secession; it also illuminated how American students’ demand for participatory democracy was starting to slip into the countercultural herald to “drop out” of society and locate freedom through exit. And he was going after reigning theories of monopoly, a major set piece of economics. It both illuminated current events while addressing core theories in the social sciences. What made the text all the more stunning was its economy of words; he could cover so much territory in so few pages. There was enough of a draft for Hirschman to send out something “too long for an article and too short for a book,” ninety-seven pages. Despite protestations about being “out of my depths,” Hirschman was not about to hesitate when he was on
to something. And he knew he was on to something. “It’s still rough and incomplete,” he told the Harvard historian Ernest May, “but I decided to circulate it now in this form, get started on something else and later in the year complete the essay when I shall have gathered some comments and second thoughts.”
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Another copy went to departmental colleagues Ken Arrow and Harvey Leibenstein and to Columbia’s Gary Becker, whom Hirschman had met at Cape Cod the previous summer. Arthur Stinchcombe, the Berkeley sociologist, also gave it a read and made some suggestions about the formal models, which later got demoted to the first four appendices of the final work. Hirschman worked furiously with the feedback, elaborated his points, and salted in the day’s news. Nothing was going to get in his way. “It has been a book that wrote itself,” Albert mused, “with no premeditation on my part.” By the end of the summer of 1969, a draft was finished. As they packed their bags and prepared to return to a sundered Cambridge, Albert had to confess that the isolation had allowed him to break his own personal record. Now he had to brace himself for a return home to his cleaved university, friends who were no longer talking to each other, and the angst of teaching.
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Nine short but wide-ranging essays explored one of the soon to be most-cited analytical trilogies in the social sciences: “exit, voice, and loyalty.” So it was that the petite idée germinated into a panoramic book at the heart of which—nestled in the middle of his manuscript—was the answer to the Nigerian puzzle, a seven-page essay called “How Monopoly Can Be Comforted by Competition.” As he put his final touches on the manuscript, he reflected on the way in which this book “of vast scale and ambition” had evolved. It reminded him of the ways in which Eugenio had urged him to think of ideas and their unintended directions. “I have decided,” he informed his sister, who may have had mixed feelings about the gesture, to dedicate it to Eugenio, “who taught me about small ideas and how they may grow.”
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Two general propositions shaped the book. One was that the institutions that arranged public life for at least the previous half century were “in decline.” Companies, governments, and organizations like universities, all were included. “Decline” was perhaps a misnomer; some organizations
were in the throes of fundamental transformations and were hardly archetypes of sclerosis. At the time, it was not so easy to see this, and so the distempers of the late 1960s were seen as a symptom of demise. Hirschman was not alone in thinking this way, indeed decline and crisis were about to put an end to the flower-power happiness of the 1960s.

The second precept followed: faced with decline, inherited patterns of loyalty no longer kept “consumer-members” in their place. General Motors’ loyalists were grumbling; some were defecting to other brands. Young Americans increasingly objected to the draft; some were bolting for Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere. The result was an expanding array of reactions, which Hirschman catalogued into two varieties: exit/desertion and voice/expression. One involved withdrawal in favor of another institution, product, or faith. The other meant that people raised hell at the status quo, arguing opinions, criticizing, and protesting. Each response tended to conform to disciplinary domains. For political scientists grounded in the theory of a social contract, voice was the operative term. For economists and their supply-and-demand laws, exit was likened to the workings of a market.

The brilliance of the book was partly in casting basic, visible reactions in simple, accessible words, but it was also capturing the feeling that people were torn between them, sorting out the relationship of exit to voice. Do I withdraw, or do I speak out? When do I choose between them? Here is where psychology helped sort through the ways in which people and societies wrestled with and justified their choices precisely because real-world choices were not always clear-cut; people were seldom die-hard defectors or pure hell-raisers. Reactions sometimes substituted for each other, other times exit and voice were complements, and other times they undermined each other. It was the alchemy of mixing and switching between them that occupied the essays and for which the psychological forces helped account for choices. Thus, what was at first blush a simple book about alternatives quickly became complex; rather than stylize reality with a basic theory, Hirschman proceeded very differently. He deployed everyday words to capture some basic drives and then showed how their activity created a fluid, combined, imperfect reality. The world was
hardly governed by pure competition, a fluxing universe of “exiters.” Nor could it sustain itself on an unfettered, cacophony of “voice.” Hirschman neither touted the exit-market option nor the voice-political one. Everything was computation. There may have been an “optimal” mix, but the blend was not a stable one. Even behind loyalty there was a churning, cognitive process. One of Hirschman’s favorite passages was Kierkegaard’s famous rendering of Abraham’s angst over the sacrifice of his son as a gesture of his fidelity to God. Before Abraham’s “infinite resignation” came his journey and choosing, and therein lay his freedom. For Hirschman, the interpretation “makes one realize that, in comparison to that act of pure faith, the most loyalist behavior retains an enormous dose of reasoned calculation.”
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