Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (79 page)

While all of this was transpiring over lunch and in the hallways of the institute, the trails into intellectual history never led Hirschman far from his concern with the twentieth century, the problems of development, and the shadow of Latin America’s despots. As the final picture of his project was forming in his mind, he felt compelled to remind himself of “The Reasons for Undertaking this Project.” “So What?” he asked. So what if early modern thinkers saw the coming of capitalism with “extravagant hopes” it “totally failed” to deliver? Writing in the climate of the mid-1970s, “capitalism
was born
alienated and already repressed and repressing.” In the gloom of the mid-70s, this was hardly an original observation. Many Latin Americans were telling him this. So were Marxist students and colleagues.
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Did it all have to be just so bleak? Smarting after watching his earlier hopes for development and reform run afoul, Hirschman was grasping at
an
idea
that “a certain type of economic relations leads to a certain type of politics.” But it was far from a simple idea, because he was searching for a way to be “deterministic” (as he had pressed Guillermo O’Donnell in his own search for the links between development and dictatorship in Latin America) and yet contain within his model multiple possible outcomes. In fact, he was dueling with two currents and thus staking a double-edged position. What made the result all the more remarkable was the deceptively simple prose in which he wrapped it. On one hand, Hirschman was after an idea that would illuminate the ties between economics and politics in a way that did not force a narrowed version of the latter to conform to the expanded needs of the former. This, of course, was the prevailing view among
Pinochetistas
in Chile and an emerging brand of “new” conservatives in Europe and North America who thought the rabble-rousing of the 1960s had pushed participation to extremes and made countries “ungovernable.” How could an active citizen be kept active in a way that allowed the pursuit of honor and glory, and expanded politics, to yield socially desirable results? At the same time, there was an opposing thrust. He wanted an economy composed of self-interested people capable of wielding power in such a way that imposed “constraints on policymakers” while hoping that their pursuit of private self
ish
goals might yield to the “paradoxical consequences of the introduction of certain institutions”—institutions that could govern countries. In this fashion, unbridled ego-driven individualism might beget individual-liberty-protecting governments.
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This meant reckoning with the ancients.

The ancients, like Machiavelli, with whom Hirschman dined and conversed in his head were shrewd observers of what went on around them and detected new meanings in the unheroic activities of Men. Maybe he was “doing an injustice to these thinkers by comparing their fond predictions to the dismal outcomes”? It is often true that realities fall short of tall orders; Hirschman, of all people, could be accused—and many did—of overselling Hope. “But so it is with any perception of the possibility of change!” he exclaimed. “And they at least dared to speculate,” he went on. “Nevertheless—what vision!” he exclaimed again to himself.
And, winding himself up a bit more, he could not resist a speculation of his own: “perhaps they increased, by their speculations, the chances of
sometimes
achieving the goal of a more humane polity.”
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This was a virtuous formulation, a lighthouse for the darkness of the 1970s, a key to Montesquieu’s puzzle. It was not original, but rather a recovered tradition into which Hirschman was placing himself in order to declare it still alive. He aimed to recover the idea that “the expansion of commerce and industry is useful because it will deflect men from seeking power and glory, [and] will keep them busily occupied making money which is harmless and perhaps even socially useful.” Citing Hegel, he concluded that “the heroic ideal” was now “demolished” and had given way to “change by praxis.” “Man can be changed by what he is doing,” he scribbled.
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The problem became consuming and helps account for why Hirschman was pulling away from his fieldwork in Latin America and his engagement with development economics. There was more. The search for the right mixture of pursuits and constraints, economics and politics, interests and institutions might even provide some clues to help pull development thinking out of the somber impasse into which it had run. The result left him feeling all the more muddled about his own field, and more specifically—and rather melodramatically—torn about the unforeseeable consequences of some of the doctrines he himself had espoused. “I feel incapable of further devoting thought to development until I begin to see a few paths in this foggy landscape for fear that by successful development or even by improving income distribution I contribute to the destruction of the human spirit.”
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For now, the pathway to recasting self-interest in a way that did not make it incompatible with the public good required going back centuries to the founding of its modern meaning.

These visions were the ones that Hirschman set about to recover in
The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph
, published by Princeton University Press in 1977.
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In the examination of discourses, literally arguments, about market life and behavior through the visions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political economists, what he revealed was equal parts anxiety about
human motives, passions as well as interests, and equal parts homage to the creativity of a language with which to control and channel them into socially useful pursuits. In a sense, Hirschman read Montesquieu and others just as he had “read” the policy makers of
Journeys toward Progress
, examining how they understood the world around them through their vocabulary and word games. At the core of
The Passions and the Interests
was a dynamic of words and arguments getting absorbed or “imposing themselves” to assuage, assimilate, or even anesthetize what was once so shocking about Machiavelli as the first big unmasker of the Modern Age. In his telling, arguments propelled arguments along—constituting an “endogenous process.” The sum was intended “to renew the sense of wonder about the genesis of ‘the spirit of capitalism.’ ” For two hundred years after Machiavelli sought to account for “man as he really is,” writers grappled with how to think about moneymaking, considering the ways in which selfish wickedness might be thought anew. Mandeville and others argued that the luxury trades and pursuit of “private vices” could be good for “publick benefits” through “dexterous management.” In this fashion, personal drives could appear less shocking, and the message about them could be absorbed into “the general stock of accepted practice” by changing the language and rebranding personal passions into interests, first as a substitute coinage, and eventually, as Hirschman told an audience at the Collège de France, into a useful euphemism for self-satisfying activity.
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This set the stage for Adam Smith, who took self-interest one step further with the doctrine of the Invisible Hand. The shift was inscribed in the famous line, whose vocabulary laid the tracks for a triumphal formulation: “It is not from the
benevolence
of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” with Hirschman underscoring Smith’s choice of words, “but from their regard to their own
interest
.” It was not to their “
humanity”
that society appeals, but to their “
self-love
,” not to “
our necessities
” but “
their advantages
.” Hirschman underlined the keywords in his copy of
The Wealth of Nations
. Here, Smith famously stripped interests of their “unsavory synonyms” (these now being Hirschman’s choice of words) and elevated them to undeniable good thanks to men’s “trucking
disposition” (back to Smith’s words) without a concession to private, hidden vices.

As it happens, there was no historic figure whose legacy would be more contested than Adam Smith as his rivals fought to claim him as their forebearer. If there was one man who would set the stage for a great ideological struggle over how to think about markets and politics, private pursuits and public wellbeing, it was Adam Smith. And Hirschman, anticipating the fight, struggled to create a bridge between the sides by positioning Smith as a man who championed private self-interest but never lost his public moral bearings. Not unlike Hirschman himself.

Now, when Hirschman settled into Smith’s writings in the spring of 1973, his first impressions were of an author “contradicting himself in the most
effronté
manner” which “spoilt a neat ideological classification with which I had set out on this whole thing.” But in the end, “it makes it of course more interesting.” He found, upon reading and reflection that perhaps Smith was not such a jumble; perhaps he was using words differently—and in new combinations—which was one of the reasons why Hirschman came to recognize the power of Smith’s rhetoric, leaving him “fairly bubbling over with excitement” at his verbal discoveries.
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Words like
passion
and
vice
gave way, according to Hirschman, to “such bland terms” as “advantage” or “interest.” This was on purpose; by mutating motivations in this way, they could be made more calculable, more predictable, more reliable—a far cry from the bygone rhetoric of unruly aristocratic pursuits. The language of “value” and “production,” “waste” and “idleness” had inverted the scourge, culminating in Smith’s famous passage on how Towns Improved the Country in book 3,
chapter 4
, which accented the unintended effects of personal pursuits on “public happiness,” for neither “great proprietors” nor merchants (“in pursuit of their pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got”) had public service in mind. “Neither of them,” Smith wrote, “had either the knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.” One of Hirschman’s marked passages, it illustrated the workings of language behind the alchemy of the marketplace. It also carried with it political implications.
Smith had no love of merchants, as both Skinner and Winch had pointed out, and the caustic vocabulary about “the pedlar principle” suggests that. “How many people,” Smith asked in a passage that Hirschman underlined in his copy of
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
:

ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys, is not so much the utility as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. (p. 299)

Left to their own devices, interests, not unlike the passions before them, lent themselves to withering depictions and unsentimental views. But from their banality came unintended general goods.

The same kind of force-counterforce portrait that Hirschman drew out of Smith’s portrayal of interests extended to his reading of Smith’s thinking about states, with Smith bowing to a broadly republican spirit that saw government at the service of the people and its prosperity through self-restraining rules. For while Montesquieu could invoke the bill of exchange as a modest engine of change because he could see no end in sight to arbitrary rule in France, Smith’s position was quite different: he could see examples at home of better government. But he was no less concerned about arbitrariness. Now, fear of the personal passions shifted, in a passage that Hirschman marked in his copy of
The Wealth of Nations
, to the menace of “public prodigality and misconduct.” The people who compose “the court, the ecclesiastical establishment, such people, as they themselves produce nothing, are all maintained by the produce of other men’s labour” (book 2, chap. 3, p. 325). These selections reveal the readings behind Hirschman’s writing. The passages of choice, a few of which filtered into the final, spare narrative of
The Passions and the Interests
, point to a Hirschman looking for Smith’s key words, drawing out both the evolution of the arguments as well as Smith’s own ambivalences as he groped for a way to reconcile republican ideas of virtue with what would soon become liberal notions of rights, civic religion with limited government,
the priority of collective life with heterogeneity of interests—the chasm that was beginning to open up between a traditional language of politics among eighteenth-century thinkers and a vocabulary of the later, liberal age. This struggle within Smith fascinated Hirschman, and he wanted to recover it from the sanitized interpretations of later self-interested readers who had lost sight of the Scottish moralist’s effort to reconcile civic humanism with capitalism in favor of a Smith as an apostle of self-interest. This version of Smith had, in turn, political implications. The juggling act between virtue and self-interest, power and public good, was elegantly captured by David Hume in one of Hirschman’s favorite passages from the 1742 essay “Of the Independency of Parliament.”

Political writers have established it as a maxim, that in contriving any system of government and fixing the several checks and balances of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a
knave
, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, cooperate to the public good. (p. 117)

Whereas the original civic humanist code required of citizens that they serve the public interest directly—as active citizens—Englishmen could now be seen, thanks to commerce and industry, to be promoting the public interest indirectly by pursuing their personal gains directly. For all this to function, for the word games to be effective, interest-propelled activity by governments and people required measures of self-restraint. The Invisible Hand was not a heavy one. This is one of the reasons why, as Skinner pointed out to Hirschman, the verb
to meddle
acquired its derogatory currency over the course of the eighteenth century.
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