Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (72 page)

Rethinking hope was not the same as giving it up. When Hirschman returned to Latin America again in the early summer of 1973—as the socialist experiment in Chile reached its acme—he was more determined than ever to uphold a middle ground, in part because it was caving in. To one side was a chorus calling for more radical solutions because anything else was doomed to fail; to the other were the head-shakers believing that all notions of change were futile, self-defeating, and downright dangerous. Hirschman mused over Octavio Paz’s lament about Latin America’s “lack of progress” and his frustration that it refused to learn from past mistakes. This type of defeatist thinking was a nub of the problem. Perhaps, Hirschman speculated, the pattern is more complex and its lessons were too easily forgotten. There “
are
periods of learning” alternating with periods of “
forgetting
past lessons.” The result only contributed to the sense that nothing could be done incrementally, but rather only through a complete revolution. A potential title to Hirschman’s ruminations, he noted in his diary: “The desire for total change as a recipe for disaster.”
¹⁴

By this point, Hirschman was trying to fathom the sources of frustration that often accompanied hope and led many to give it up. The lectures, travels, and conversations yielded a milestone essay aimed at querying the reasons to despair. “Very seldom does it happen,” he noted, “that a new paradigm about the social world leads to modesty rather than to arrogance. If my paper has a virtue this is it, I believe.”
¹⁵
In fact, the essay
was hardly modest. “The Changing Tolerance for Income Inequality in the Course of Economic Development” was a critique of the prevailing disenchantment as well as a masterpiece about the psychology of epochal transitions. Indeed, he located the shift from elation to desolation in the early 1970s as one moment, one pendular swing, from one set of collective feelings to another. “I am working on a new topic,” he told Katia in late 1971. “It’s somewhat related to that famous Tocqueville passage, only that in my scheme people don’t have to get to be actually better off, it’s enough if they see some others beginning to be better off” to make them feel worse. “Envy is such a mean emotion.” Worse, it is the “only one of the seven deadly sins from whose practice you don’t ever get any fun or enjoyment (as you do initially from gluttony, avarice, adultery).” How could one account for the swings, particularly for people feeling worse off when nothing had worsened for them?
¹⁶

The essay unveiled a famous metaphor, “the tunnel effect,” which sought to capture how peoples’ sentiments changed from gratification to indignation, as well as the arithmetic of expectations that governed the shift. One day, while caught in traffic at the entrance to the tunnel to Logan Airport in Boston, he watched the reactions of other drivers as well as his own emotional mercury. As the congestion began to give way, he noticed that those in the stationary lane greeted the advance in the adjacent lane with relief—with the expectation that they too would start to move. As they waited, horns started to honk, drivers grew jealous; relief became envy, and envy evolved into outrage because drivers began to feel that someone up front was cheating them. Their mood, as a result, grew much worse
because
they were once gratified and now felt deprived. If the observation of such a daily emotional routine was one source of insight, Hirschman never let the gains from literature drift far from his mind. As he cast about, he stumbled on La Rochefoucauld, a man dedicated to “his systematic attempt to show the pervasive presence of self-interest in all human conduct and feeling.” It was La Rochefoucauld who “pointed out that when we rejoice at our friends’ good fortune this is not out of friendship but because we expect to extract some benefit from their advance.” Judging from Hirschman’s preferences, he was likely inspired by
La Rochefoucauld’s
Memoirs
, which entwined esteem and enmity in the portrait of his contemporary, Jean François Paul de Gondi, the cardinal of Retz. Now Hirschman was not necessarily endorsing the seventeenth-century French aristocrat; he was trying to expose the apostles of gloominess in the social sciences (like Linder and Huntington) who have “given what seem to me an excessively dominant position to envy, relative deprivation, share-of-the-pie consciousness etc.” What he sought was to understand the oscillation between envy and other sentiments, optimism and pessimism.
¹⁷

The
perception
that rewards were being doled out or denied—what Hirschman called “semantic inventions and inversions”—could reverse moods. The tunnel effect represented the first moment of elation; it described the “tolerant” 1960s, which were giving way to the politics of envy and outrage of the 1970s as the tunnel effect wore off. As in
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
, there was a sliding scale of alternatives, from friendship and amity to rivalry and enmity, whose expression depended on circumstances; it was not necessary, he believed, to invoke dismal laws of human nature to reinforce “revolutions of rising expectations,” anger from “relative deprivation,” or “mobilization which outruns institutionalization”—stock-in-trade clichés of social scientific gloom. Rather, what was remarkable was the amount of “stability that has prevailed,” whose persistence “cries out at least as much for an explanation as the occurrence of rioting, coups, revolutions, or civil wars.” Still, in Latin America, what captivated people was the instability; even Hirschman had to conclude that there was reason for “more to come.”
¹⁸

The essay on inequality was one of Hirschman’s most influential, in league with the witty blast “The Search for Paradigms as an Obstacle to Understanding.” Clifford Geertz, who singled out “The Search” as one of the landmarks for what would later be coined “interpretive social science,” applauded this one too. “This seems to me a wonderfully vivid metaphor; more valuable than a thousand flow charts linking one ism with another. It also confirms my long held suspicion that the car (automobile!) is the social psychologist’s moving laboratory: the one venue in which human nature is revealed raw and undisguised.” Geertz must not have known of
Hirschman’s delight in driving and high threshold of tolerance for doing it so badly. Quentin Skinner, who read the essay several years later, called it “a fine example of your most delicately ironic manner of writing.”
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Not everyone welcomed this appeal to understand how perceptions can lead people to abandon hope. Some figures on the Left, for whom Hirschman’s thinking was altogether too bourgeois, too accepting of power structures, too reliant on voluntarist solutions, found the proposition an affront. Hirschman sent a preliminary version of the essay to Octavio Paz, who immediately asked if he could publish it in his magazine,
Plural
. When it hit the stands in September 1972, the article elicited outrage from one of Mexico’s most prominent sociologists, Rodolfo Stavenhagen. Stavenhagen was irritated by insinuations that if the masses could just wait, they would get their just deserts; the problem was all in the head, which all too often lapsed into a justification for autocratic regimes to handle involuntary emotional switching. The Third World was teeming with indigence. No wonder there was so much contention! He argued that the tunnel effect was actually a “cul de sac,” condemned to keep social scientists from focusing on real material inequities. Hirschman countered that it was precisely the relative deprivation theory that he wanted to challenge; his goal was to transcend the oversimplifying precepts about the minds of the poor, their impatience and envy—and, in a typical inversion, he charged Stavenhagen of simply collapsing into the same facile theories about what made people tick and explode. Instead of dismissing the importance of want, he was trying to spotlight precisely why inequality was a more important issue than ever. The pages of
Plural
laid bare two diverging currents in progressive thought that would contend for the heart of Latin American social science: Stavenhagen’s strong materialism, which accented the need for fundamental revolution, and Hirschman’s agenda for radical reform, which rested on a more subjective understanding of social classes and their struggles. When Guillermo O’Donnell, a skeptic of doctrinaire Marxism, read the exchange, he despaired for the Left. “This appalls me,” he confessed, “as an indication of the climate which, I fear, is
in crescendo
.… Aside from the real and non-trivial difficulties of mutual understanding there is now an additional decision, an
almost explicit and
self-righteous
decision not to understand and use it to issue ‘denunciations’ to a public that is barely interested in the contents of intellectual debate. That this has reached the ranks ALSO of the Stavenhagens is a very worrying symptom.”
²⁰

What was clear was that if Hirschman had a voice, it was being exercised less in Cambridge, Massachusetts, than in Latin America. Starting with the fall lecture tour of 1971, Hirschman was to return to Latin America with greater frequency than ever. The occasion for his heightened circulation and visibility was not just his essays, which were often immediately translated into Spanish and Portuguese and led to more and more invitations to lecture south of the Rio Grande, but the makings of a network of a new generation of scholars in Latin America who would remap the social sciences and for which Hirschman would serve as intellectual guide and institutional broker. Its seeds were sown in the summer of 1971, when Hirschman accompanied an Argentine political scientist, Guillermo O’Donnell, whom he had met as a graduate student at Yale, to Brazil. Not one to overlook young talent, Hirschman appreciated O’Donnell’s efforts to break away from the straightjackets of orthodox Marxism and radical nationalism that dominated progressive thinking in Latin America. Like Hirschman, O’Donnell was trying to bring the analysis of politics into closer dialogue with the study of economic development.

What emerged from their conversations was a lifelong friendship and an important collaboration. Hired by the Ford Foundation, they were dispatched to review CEBRAP (the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning), which had been cofounded by the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso in mid-1969 and was dedicated to social and economic research with the goal of supporting democracy under the shadow of the military dictators. Brazilian universities had been purging faculty from its ranks; CEBRAP was a sanctuary for free inquiry, and it quickly became the hub of debate for dissident intellectuals. However, their contrarian stance set them against the idea of American support, viewing it as a pact with the devil, especially after sensational revelations about CIA subventions to the Ford-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom. On the other hand, autonomy from the military regime required resources. CEBRAP’s
leaders reached out to the Ford Foundation, and especially Peter Bell, a creative and progressive program officer in Rio de Janeiro, for independent support.
²¹
It was not an easy decision and divided the founders. It also created trouble for the funders, for the Ford Foundation bosses in New York were nervous about becoming so affiliated with rabble-rousing intellectuals. Cardoso and Bell agreed to a review of the organization led by a prominent Latin American social scientist (who could tame the passions of the more radical Brazilian scholars) and a respected North American above the fray (and thus able to appease New York). Hirschman and O’Donnell were the team; the exercise worked. Not only did the review open the spigot for further funding, but CEBRAP soon became a model for social scientists evicted from, or constrained by, universities elsewhere in Latin America. Along the way, Hirschman and O’Donnell engaged Brazilian colleagues in intense but friendly criticism, setting a tone for an opening, eclectic dialogue that would remap the social sciences.
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The fate of the Brazilian outpost foreshadowed others’. The question of how to sustain social science research in the age of spreading despotisms sent Hirschman shuffling around Latin America’s major cities as an academic entrepreneur. There was also a spirit in the air to support critical voices unwedded to old orthodoxies, a spirit Hirschman was also keen to shore up. It was with these two goals in mind that he emerged as the broker of a network that would alter the region’s academic milieu. A hub of this network was the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) in New York and its Joint Committee on Latin American Studies, which had been revitalized in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, when Latin America suddenly became a strategic concern for Washington. Under the helmsmanship of Bryce Wood and with generous support from the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation, it promoted innovative research and eventually the formation of the Latin American Studies Association in 1964. Compared to other “area studies,” Wood’s was also unusual because it integrated distinguished scholars from Latin America. The combination of an active staff, energetic international networks, and resources laid the basis for a generational change in the social sciences. In 1971, Wood enlisted Hirschman to join him at a meeting at Yale along with younger
scholars like Louis Goodman, who would eventually replace Wood at the SSRC, to consider the future of Latin American studies. To a promising Ivy League sociologist like Goodman, greeting Hirschman was like meeting an icon. But if Wood wanted a gregarious figure, Hirschman remained reserved and observant. When he spoke, however, all ears perked up: the crisis was an opportunity to open new directions in social scientific inquiry, insisted Hirschman. Bryce Wood saw his opportunity; he immediately brought Hirschman into the Joint Committee.
²³

It was a fortuitous moment in the Joint Committee’s history, for its chairman, Joseph Grunwald (Hirschman’s friend from
Latin American Issues
days and a prominent figure among reformist economists in Chile), announced that non-US scholars would be eligible for grants. This meant that now the SSRC could direct Ford money directly to the pockets of Latin American researchers. To this end, Ford gave the Joint Committee $1.5 million—a substantial sum in those days—to support scholars. On September 1, 1973, Hirschman replaced Grunwald.