Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (80 page)

Like Pocock, for whom classical republicanism was fundamentally a debate about the fears and perils of self-rule, so too were Hirschman’s political economists arguing about the instability and strife associated with market life—anxieties that necessitated a semantic shift: the transmutation of individual passions into interests. The difference was that Pocock’s famous study ended in a worrying register about the world to
come and the end of a republican political ideal, whereas in Hirschman’s account, the semantic moves ended in the “triumph” of a capitalist economic ideal. This artful, unintended, slowly accreted, linguistic turn could then create possibilities for new “discoveries.” Interests—by being domesticated, tamed, and softened in the course of what Montesquieu called
doux commerce
—could create a historical consciousness that permitted their moneyed and propertied beneficiaries to enjoy the good regard of sovereigns. Sovereigns for their part could regard self-interested private men as potential stakeholders in a public system known as the modern state—but this presupposed that rulers also subjected themselves to the self-restraining habits and repressions to which the private passions were also submitted. People would become more governable and governments would become more respectful of the autonomy of interests delicately woven from the strands of thousands of transactions. This is why, as Hirschman noted, alienation and repression could yield some positive results, especially, with an unrestrained Pinochet in mind, an authority that refrains from trampling on the liberties of its subjects. The Chilean dictator exemplified what happens when the state does not restrain itself while, paradoxically, claiming to free people for private pursuits.

If Hirschman had autocratic targets in mind, he was also jabbing at those who denounced capitalism as some scheme to oppress man’s “true” nature. The crusade of 1960s radicals in favor of the “inalienation” of man to free his inner, self-adoring soul to pursue his passions was no less troubling for Hirschman. There were few, if any, communitarian features of the “civic humanist” in Hirschman’s brand of republicanism—which was one that rested on the necessary, creative, and ultimately resolvable and reformable tensions between individualism and the common good. This was reformist ground, not grist for collective revolution. There is a reason why one of Hirschman’s own key words in
The Passions and the Interests
, which comports with his republican sense of checks and balances in all affairs, was
countervail
. He wanted disruption
and
repression, harmony
and
disorder—passions
and
interests. Each force contained within it its own tendency to resist it. This did not make them self-correcting, and Hirschman was not meaning to imply, like Hayek, that complex systems
have an internal, Archimedean point to which they return unless “meddled with.” And from the “countervailing passions” one gets the “countervailing interests,” and from this “counterposing force” one derives a set of principles about restraints. This kind of vocabulary pointed not just to the roots of Hirschman’s optimism, but also to his sense that there was no need for a single insight, or fundamental Historical Law, to command behavior and policy; it was out of the complex mixing, tension, and dialectic that hope would emerge. Consider his exuberant ruminations on La Rochefoucauld’s dissolution of passions and almost all virtues into self-interest:

A message of hope was therefore conveyed by the wedging [note the agency of words and the role of authorial choice] of interest in between the two traditional categories of human motivation. Interest was seen to partake in effect of the better nature of each, as the passion of self-love upgraded and contained by reason, and as reason given direction and force by that passion. The resulting hybrid form of human action was considered exempt from both the destructiveness of passion and the ineffectuality of reason. No wonder that the doctrine of interest was received at the time as a veritable message of salvation!
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While the aphorists of the seventeenth-century human condition knew something of the life of the
libertins
, it fell to Smith to draw this realism to some powerful conclusions. And from his conclusions a new line would be drawn in the social sciences. What Smith accomplished in
The Wealth of Nations
that was so revolutionary was to establish an influential
economic
justification for the pursuit of self-interest; until then most thinkers tended to argue in
political
terms, that self-interest would curb the excesses of rulers. This crucial move, in Hirschman’s view, set the stage for a splitting of politics and economics and made personal pursuits the basis of a more calculable, predictable order. It was important to set the record straight. Smith’s view, according to Hirschman, was “very different from the laissez-faire or minimal state doctrine … still widespread today among economists.” Rather, Smith viewed politics as the realm of
“the folly of men.” So Hirschman tried his hand at developing his own metaphor: Smith was not an advocate of a stripped-down state to let the Invisible Hand work its charm, but a state “whose capacity for folly would have some ceiling.” This metaphor was among those that never caught on. Hirschman’s own view, harkening back to the spirit of Montesquieu’s brand of republicanism, was that the same might be considered applicable to the market, which was not immune to follies—as Smith implied in his sneering words about pedlars. But it was only an implication. In the main, Hirschman argued, Adam Smith converted what were once antonyms, “interests” and “passions,” into synonyms—so that the whole of society is advanced when everyone is allowed to follow their own private interest.
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The Passions and the Interests
was an argument for a historic middle ground of a classical republican sort. His struggle was two-fronted. While he wanted to challenge those who saw the self as a utility-maximizing machine, he also rejected the communitarian nostalgia for a world that was lost to consumer avarice and a celebration of “the love of lucre.” His was a vision, projected through the prism of ancient discourses that aimed to make it normative, of polite, civic-minded people going about their “business” in ways that enabled self-interest and the common good to coexist in the same sentence, a
Harmonielehre
(study of harmony) that could be both realistic and hopeful. It was a delicate balancing act of restraint and freedom in the service of “a more humane polity.” It was also a way of deconstructing the integral self to make him or her more complex yet whole, thereby giving the self a human and humane integrity.

Nowadays, economic actors are considered as processors of information; we have moved from seeing the market as a mechanical arrangement to viewing agents themselves as mechanisms—a view that places economics on the road to becoming a science. This was a turn that Hirschman found unfortunate and is what spurred him to recover the origins of a different, but ultimately doomed, understanding of economic agents.

There were, therefore, two simultaneous arguments being made in
The Passions and the Interests
. The first was a highly original recovery of the classical thinkers’ ability to present a combined self, one able to subsume passions and interests within the economic soul while at the same
time presenting the autonomy of this recombined self as the bulwark against a trampling, meddling, politically impassioned state. The balancing act cut across a pair of axes: the self and state were each endowed with internally juxtaposing and blending drives, and at the same time there was a delicate equipoise between self-restraining selves and states. The second was about how the broader view of economic man sustained by gentlemanly commercial intercourse was doomed. If these were the arguments for capitalism before its triumph and were original for their prophecies, the very triumph could only degrade them. Adam Smith, in this respect, came across as the hinge in the history of economic thought. By rebranding passions
as
interests, Smith’s formulation “destroyed in passing the competing rationale” of the dialectic between passions and interests. Identifying particular interests with that of the whole made interests seem suddenly not so attractive, almost bloodless and mechanical; interests no longer fought with, or defined themselves at odds with, their sibling passions. They simply ruled. What Hirschman wanted was to restore the necessary competition, the rivalry, the tensions and non-synonymous features of human drives that Adam Smith had dissolved in the alchemy of the Invisible Hand. The complex, combined, but uneasy model of self-hood had gotten lost, which is why Hirschman insisted on going back to the passions to retrieve some of the originary anxiety, for the cleansed view of interests split them from man’s soul and drained them of normative content. By the end, interests even ceased to be a euphemism at all and gave way to the late twentieth-century’s semantic shift to “revealed preferences” and “maximization under constraint,” which Hirschman coded as “neutral and colorless neologisms.”
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At first blush, the war over words might have seemed an esoteric dispute among intellectual historians. It is true that in the history of economic thought, no one had so forcefully combined insights into the simultaneous operations of politics and economics, self and state, by recovering a moment of thinking about capitalism that accepted—indeed, embraced—the idea of the individual as driven by more than the quest for utilities. But there was more going on related to contemporary disputes about how to understand capitalism now that it had triumphed.
The Passions
and the Interests
appeared on the stands as many dismal scientists advocated sparer notions of
homo economicus
, whose striving acquisitive energy had to be freed from the shackles of the state. For those yearning for an expanded view of economics, one that saw through the Milton Friedmans of the world and their iron laws of money, Hirschman’s appeal to a more social and political
homonidae
gave some intellectual muscle to challenge the growing “neoclassical” orthodoxy and its influential battery of foundations and think tanks. At the same time, the view that impassioned public life had to take more seriously economic policy making seemed to many a needed coolant; the scourge of inflation in Europe and the United States could not be so easily dismissed, and the Left did so at its peril; the memory of Allende’s own political fate fueled by economic misfortunes was still fresh in the mind. The passions
and
interests had to be kept in the same syntax as counterpoints to each other; they were, in Hirschman’s mind, codependent. The rule of passions could lead, without checks, to horrible utopias; the rein of interests to soulless pragmatism.

Woven through the many layers of
The Passions and the Interests
was Hirschman’s Adam Smith. By the mid-1970s, Smith was becoming a figure rolled out as the great apostle of the new economics with its strident defense of the unfettered market, especially upon the bicentenary of the 1776 publication of
The Wealth of Nations
. Chicago’s Milton Friedman, more than anyone, marketed the Scottish moral philosopher as the progenitor of his own convictions. The 1970s would see an intensified political reading of Adam Smith and a mighty struggle over whether to treat him as the prophet of capitalist laws or embrace him as the humanitarian with an eye on moral man. To some extent, Hirschman fell into the trap that Friedman and others had laid: to read Smith as the maker of the bold new world of neoclassical thinking. By terminating “the competing rationale” of interests and passions, Smith cleared the ground for the triumph of the former, whether he meant to or not. This was one of Hirschman’s readings.

But there was another as well. At the same time, Hirschman was resisting his own view; he wanted a Smith who thought in his same, bifocal way—seeing economics through a political lens, and politics through
an economic lens. The result was a Smith forced to play two roles in the drama of
The Passions and the Interests
. Adam Smith took the blame for heralding a new model of economic man. But there was also a way in which Smith was presented as a transitional, possibly tragic, figure: he was still enmeshed in a moral economy but aware of and even predicting the emerging norms and practices of the capitalist world. Friedman had had his own self-interested reading of Smith; but so too did Hirschman, with Adam Smith the last great economist attentive to the currents and countercurrents of the moral and possessive individualist, the last to imagine the philosopher and the political economist as one—that is, until Hirschman breathed some life into this vision of Adam Smith with air drawn from his own lungs, perhaps with an unexamined view of himself as a prophet of the same sort. Smith was, in Hirschman’s eyes not unlike Hirschman himself, poised at a moment in history in which the balance of morals and markets was shifting quickly. Both could not help but struggle to keep alive a complex view of individuals and to promote the idea of a delicate equipoise of society. What Smith saw with foresight Hirschman offered in hindsight.

In the historiography of Adam Smith, Hirschman anticipated what would become an alternative view of Smith as the humanist. Donald Winch’s book,
Adam Smith’s Politics
, which appeared a year later, made this case. So too, against a broader intellectual tableau, would Emma Rothschild’s
Economic Sentiments
(2002). Without the full benefits of these subsequent readings of Smith, Hirschman’s view was still ambivalent, and at times confused and confusing, in no small part because he was still struggling—and would continue to do so—to resolve his own quest to moor a humane economics after capitalism’s triumph.

Hirschman’s version of the intellectual origins of capitalism was greeted by a volley of rhapsodic reviews from quarters in which Hirschman was hitherto unknown. Political theorists such as Alan Ryan sang its praises in
Political Theory
, as did the historian of the eighteenth century Nannerl Keohane in the
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
. Before long, it was being commented upon in Italy, France, Germany, and Latin America. Not even
Exit, Voice and Loyalty
had provoked such a
flurry. Stanford’s Keohane sent him draft chapters of her first book,
Philosophy and the State in France
, to which Hirschman dedicated a goodly part of his summer vacation in Europe in 1977 to pore over. She replied in kind, with thoughts about his reflections on property as having given men “toes with roots” and thus reducing their mobility. “This is an excellent section, imaginatively linking economics with social attitudes and political possibilities,” Keohane wrote. She urged him to have a look at Rousseau’s
Government of Poland
, especially the passage in which he saw patriotism and love of country as precepts to strengthen loyalty and to channel more energy into the making of “public goods.” While including her revised draft of her introduction, Keohane also had gratifying gossip from the American Political Science Association convention in Washington. “Quite a few people at the convention were talking about your book with interest; I recall particularly discussing it with Pocock, who likes it. And I basked in some of the reflected glory when friends mentioned your footnote on my essay on Nicole; it proves in any case that people are reading the book carefully, if they have got the footnotes by memory.” To this Hirschman cheerily replied, relieved to hear that noneconomists were reading his work “as my brethren tend to be totally ignorant of the matters I talk about and are apt to get them wrong as Lekachman did recently in
The New Republic
(even though he meant well).” This capped long comments on her draft and gratitude for the Rousseau tip which “is beautiful and I may use it should I rework my paper.”
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