Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (86 page)

The pendular image was an invitation to trouble. Wasn’t it just as deterministic as some of the theories he was trying to challenge? Some,
like Bob Keohane, tried to dissuade him from emphasizing too much the pushing drive: “It seems to me that you vastly underestimate the attraction of public life to many people.” When Hirschman presented a version of the work to colleagues at Stanford, not a few argued back: how could young people at the head of public demonstrations possibly be motivated by disappointment with the pursuit of material goods they never enjoyed? Maybe, as Keohane pointed out, the problem is the search for a “fully endogenous model?” Is there not something intrinsically appealing about engaging in public activity? Hirschman may have conceded too much to the fatalists who saw public pursuits as intrinsically prone to disenchantment.
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It was an important comment, and certainly not the first time that Hirschman was questioned for relying on the precept of diminishing returns in his model. One is reminded just how economically Hirschman was thinking in his effort to counter Olson and others in their own terms. Certainly, what he had done was tie private pursuits and public passions together into a rivalrous sibling relationship. They were not autonomous fields; they were not the subjects for ideological interventions. The model’s automatic corrective features could not explain how or why behavior could get stuck or, worse, swing much more dramatically to one side. This meant that Hirschman’s herald of the return of public man seemed so utterly at odds with the electoral tide. He was shocked at the Reagan victory and even more dismayed by the shift of the 1980s.

It was one of the few times Hirschman tried to be predictive—and it would bear out his reasons for avoiding punditry. But it deserves to be said that he was not just aiming at the ranks of gloating neo-cons. His eye was also trained at notable Cassandras, such as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, whose lament for “the atrophy of public meaning” stood for a more general cry against the mindless consumerism and atomism of the modern world, or Christopher Lasch, whose
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979) was a runaway hit that decried the egotistical individualism of the age. This kind of pessimism was “not only impoverishing in itself” for the same reasons that Olson’s impossibilism was, but it also condemned public action “to periodic spasmodic outbursts of ‘publicness’ that are
hardly likely to be constructive.” What Hirschman wanted—the “moralizing claim implicit in my story”—was an unstable balance. Not an equipoise of selfless angels or an equilibrium of utility maximizers. He called for more “publicness” injected into everyday living, including work and consumption, “fostering in the private sphere that fusion of striving and attaining that is characteristic of public action.” The person who does so is “superior” to the rational-actor of the Republican juggernaut because he or she can “conceive of
various
states of happiness.” This “bungler” and “blunderer” was thereby connected to “nobler and richer qualities.”
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His lectures were clarion calls to resist the climate of despair and summons (from the Right) for citizens to run for the “exits” of public involvement or (from the Left) to shriek about the intractable forces conspiring against collective progress.

The lectures begat a book, one that elicited a cascade of responses from friends, colleagues, and some tetchy reviewers when Princeton University Press’s Sanford Thatcher sent it out for evaluation. In retrospect, this is not all that surprising; none of his books had straddled disciplines and fields, from history to cognitive psychology, with such breathtaking scope—and with the same Hirschmanian economy of words. Remarkably, he covered all this ground in 187 manuscript pages, which inevitably meant large patches were on thin ice. Originally called
Public and Private Happiness
, it was later rebaptized to capture the motion at the core of the analysis,
Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action
. Possibly Hirschman’s most ambitious work, he knew he had stuck his neck out. “I have rarely felt so uncertain about a product of mine,” he told Katia. “Perhaps this is because, as I say in the preface, what I have written is less a work of social science, than the conceptual outline of one or several novels.”
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Indeed, the preface suggests that there is much more of Hirschman’s personal philosophy and life story stirred into the prose. It threatened to become a
Bildungsroman
“with, as always in novels, a number of autobiographical touches mixed in here and there.”
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The fusion of brevity and breadth was at once the work’s immense strength and its weakness. Having covered so much ground, it could not help but do so unevenly and sketchily, and thus, ironically, disappoint.
To some, it contained too little evidence. After the lectures, Skinner, who was immersed in his own work on the origins of humanism in English social thought, composed a long comment about earlier swings from the time that Cicero’s moral theory was translated and printed in the 1480s to shape English humanist writers’ views of a “conception of the best life for man, and thus of man’s highest duties.” Man’s highest duty was to override his self-love and its pursuits, “in order to pursue ‘common weal’, ie. the welfare of the whole (weal is for them the synonym for wealth—used interchangeably—and wealth doesn’t mean wealth in our sense; it means welfare).” Skinner went on to explain that some, like Calvin, saw private pursuits as a good way to frame man’s duties, a view that gathered strength in the sixteenth century, so “minding one’s own business” and not “meddling” (a word that Skinner and Hirschman continued to mull over as it acquired pejorative features) were extolled especially by those with interests to promote, such as merchants. Thus, what started as a distinction to help found a moral theory of Ciceronian inspiration, became deformed. Why not dig into these fascinating antecedents?
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Judith Tendler, his former student, wrote a long letter suggesting that he develop his insights about psychotherapy (and services in general) with its own disappointments. Sex, too, in the age of
The Joy of Sex
and
Playboy
, might make good examples of how people are made to feel that “normal” sexual relations, especially marital ones, are painted as a never-ending shortfall. While the manuscript was “brilliant,” she wanted more examples for how the pendularity actually worked. “Because there are so many good ideas,” she wrote, “it is like an orgy. It’s not just a matter of setting the ms. down for a while, in order to let an idea sink in. One needs, in addition, to have an example to help root the idea—to force you to be with the idea for a little longer, in a way that is less demanding than accompanying the articulation of the idea itself.”
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Writing from Montreal, Lisa also offered her father a few cents about consumer durables (like the Cuisinart), psychotherapy (from her own practice), and the looming referendum in Quebec. A win for the separatists might spell doom for the movement for having lost its “sense of purpose.” Like Skinner and Tendler, she called for more detail—especially, thinking about the vogue for referenda around North America, “what you mean by the vote.”
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The criticism to put more empirical meat on the bones of his analysis was a sign that he had not clinched his argument, even if the style and scope of the work were so captivating. Hirschman’s harshest comments came in the form of a lengthy evaluation for Princeton University Press from Robert Lane, a Yale political scientist. While Lane lauded Hirschman’s previous works for being “seminal”—transcending fields and disciplines to reframe big debates, he was “dissatisfied” with this one. He found that the manuscript treated satisfaction and happiness insufficiently, and cited works in psychology and on the revolution of rising expectations that Hirschman had missed. Some of the recommended readings were welcome: Hirschman scribbled the call numbers in the margins and promptly got copies from Princeton’s Firestone Library. But Lane also raised more serious issues, starting with the tying of public and private activities together. Hadn’t Hirschman tried to compare two completely different species, like “elephants and rabbits?” There was also a scarcity of evidence to justify the claims.
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Lane was not alone in hitting this mark. The historian Joan Scott, whom Hirschman would welcome as his permanent colleague at the IAS, made a similar observation. His “units of analysis” kept shifting from individuals to groups and back again. She also called for more evidence.
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The consensus seemed to call for a longer, empirically driven book. But this was not one of these. It was an “essay,” or series of “essays,” an analytical twist on the Montaigne tradition but pressing up against the limits of the genre.

But the problem was not so easily dismissed. The decision to do so would cost him. George Akerlof, of Berkeley, offered a solution to help resolve some of the problems. He got underneath Lane’s complaint that private and public domains were simply incomparable and pointed out that “the author mentions, but fails adequately to deal with the problem that most of his motivations concern
individual
motivations and explain an
individual’s
cycle but he does not explain the
macro
cycle.”
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One of his proposed solutions was to suggest how individual motivations become contagious through ideology. So, for instance, the ideology of “privatization” speeds the transition from public action to private pursuits. Claus Offe suggested much the same—an intermediating or “third” domain
that might help explain the timing and methods of the swings between private and public. This was an old concern of Hirschman’s and certainly would have been easy to work into the narrative while keeping the essay form of the book. Indeed, he agreed with Offe, adding that “another very acute critic raised the same point.” But it was not one he was prepared to pursue. “My present, a bit evasive defense,” he told Offe, “is that I had my hands full making one ‘endogenous’ transition plausible; and that I merely want to show the possibility of a phenomenological portrayal of such transitions without affirming that the ones I am portraying are the only ones.”
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Given the ambition of the lectures, which were now en route to becoming a book—to deliver a counterstroke to those who dismissed the possibilities of effective collective action and to usher a social science that did not ask Man to divide his heart—Hirschman’s decision not to follow up on the quality and quantity of suggestions is hard to explain. We know that fame now meant more and more travel, and Hirschman showed little inclination to separate the essential from the expendable. In the wake of the Janeway Lectures he was off to Bogotá with Guillermo O’Donnell to review for the Ford Foundation Colombia’s premier social science research organization, FEDESARROLLO. Hirschman was also a consultant for the OECD’s Committee on Science, Technology and Industry. He had accepted an invitation to Florence’s European University Institute to be in residence for a month and to deliver the keynote lecture, “New Approaches for the Study of International Integration,” a topic that returned him to his interests of the 1940s. But it required some scrambling. There was, to crowd his calendar further, a commitment to give the lecture “The Crisis of the Welfare State” at the American Economic Association and the “Rise and Decline of Development Economics” paper for audiences at Berkeley, in Mexico City, at MIT, and at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Meanwhile, he went back and forth to Washington as chair of the Academic Council of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and he took part in a conference on agricultural technology in Cartagena, Colombia, an easily declinable temptation if ever there was one. He was selected for the
Frank E. Seidman Award, which involved giving a special lecture. And to cap things off, the prestigious École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris invited him—and he instantly accepted—to deliver the Marc Bloch lectures in 1982.

All of this was in the year and a half he had to rework the lectures into a final manuscript. Even for someone as broad-reaching as Hirschman, this itinerary stretched him perilously, and the frequency with which he was travelling surely dug deep into the time that should have been devoted to the manuscript. “Where I agree with Lane is when he says at the end of his letter that I must have a full agenda,” he wrote to his publisher. “Nothing could be truer.”
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The question nonetheless remains, why accept these extracurricular, if obituary-enhancing (to borrow his own
bons mots
), invitations? In some cases, he did try to back out. When Bob Keohane invited Hirschman to appear on a special American Economic Association panel on the welfare state, Hirschman at first declined, citing “over-commitment.” But his resistance was lukewarm; he went and wrote a paper (which appeared in the
American Economic Review
, his last for the discipline’s flagship)—though he did manage to ward off entreaties from the
Harvard Business Review
to “elaborate” his thoughts on one line from the essay about “the output elasticity of quality.” Some of the same resistance-acceptance behavior surrounded his OECD engagement. When the Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry issued its initial invitation, Hirschman explained that he had limited time but that as long as he was only a “consultant” in the drafting of the report, he would participate. But this, too, led to its inflation: recurring requests to “elaborate” or “expand” on this or that insight. And he was constantly squeezing his trips to Paris between other engagements. In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a certain dose of hubris was involved, which several of his nastier reviewers seized upon. In his defense against Lane to Sanford Thatcher, he described the reviewer as “hostile and aggressive, and this makes it difficult to develop a cool argument.” A peeved Hirschman tried to explain that he was trying to transcend surveys on satisfaction to write a “phenomenology of disappointment through the private and public sphere,” and
found the survey results that Lane pointed to a detraction: “What I am doing throughout the manuscript is theory construction about motivations for changing life-styles—my ‘explanations’ are obviously meant to become hypotheses in the hands of some economist or political scientist who hopefully will devise some way of testing them.” In a move that reveals his yearning to make a mark as a theorist, he added that “this is what has happened with a number of other books of mine.”
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This was not just a heavy card to play, it implied intended theoretical aspirations that previous works did not have. In an age in which books of theory on such large matters were long, complex treatises—John Rawls’
Theory of Justice
comes to mind—Hirschman’s revealed a gap between its claims and arguments, a fatal flaw for any theoretical ambition. His responses to the manuscript reviews were cursory, and the weekly invitations to speak at this or that gathering must have seemed like applause. Thatcher, with the success of
The Passions and the Interests
under his editorial belt, no doubt felt he had another winner on his desk and deferred to Hirschman’s judgment. Certainly, doing otherwise would have risked touching the nerve of his major author.
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