Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (87 page)

What Hirschman did was tack where he faced the least resistance. He elaborated the passages and arguments that were already strong. There were many more quotes from the classics. He added more detail on consumer theory as well as on theory and evidence of the history of political participation. There were top-ups to make up for bibliographic oversights. He did address, albeit in a few paragraphs, the role of ideology in the making of meta-preferences and added a section based on his reading of Harry Frankfurt’s distinction between first-order desires and second-order desires (that is, desires about desires). Cicero, too, per Skinner’s suggestion, makes an appearance. But little of this was evidence of the kind his readers yearned for. It did not really address the more fundamental issue of how the oscillation between the two connected spheres was supposed to be explained, since this was the internal motion of his endogenous theory. Page 114 featured an image he found in the Bibliothèque Nationale of a worker giving up his gun and bullets to cast a ballot, with the suggestion that universal male suffrage was a way to channel the
desires of an “expressive” citizenry and thus give up the notoriously rebellious ways of Parisian rabble-rousers. Otherwise, there was not much history making the case. Hirschman dug in his heels and called the book “a conceptual novel.” The introduction explained that the book was by definition speculative and tentative and acknowledged that there were problems choosing the very term
cycles
to account for the swings between private pursuits and public action. But he soldiered on.

The decision not to address the analytical problems was costly. None of Hirschman’s work had elicited such mixed reviews. Indeed, compared to the rhapsodies that greeted
The Passions and the Interests, Shifting Involvements
was a painful letdown. Hirschman himself may have anticipated this when he flew to Sweden in September 1982 to attend a conference to honor
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
as well as
Shifting Involvements
. After the gala dinner, he was invited to share some remarks. There he confessed that the “shifting” activity was often unsmooth, uneven, and riddled with obstacles. This was at odds with the smooth, gravitational movement of the pendulum swinging away between the covers of his book. The failure to deal with these and the other questions it raised became a refrain. A reviewer in the
American Political Science Review
hit the same mark: though it weaves a lot together “Hirschman’s theory might unravel if we tug on its dangling threads.” The
American Journal of Sociology
found room to praise “the flowing style and flood of new ideas that we have come to expect from Hirschman” but complained that there was a basic asymmetry between private
consumption
and public
action
and concluded that “its major thesis is uncharacteristically strained.” The criticisms did not stop at the doors of the disciplines. Robert Heilbroner tackled the book for the
New York Review of Books
, treating the moment as one to introduce the author of
Shifting Involvements
to a wider public; he too found the evidence for pendular swings so sparse as to make many of the arguments “unpersuasive.” The chief merit, as far as Heilbroner was concerned, was in bringing to the fore the great issues of political economy in the tradition of Adam Smith. Jon Elster noted in the
London Review of Books
that Hirschman was in league with the world’s leading social scientists and was “at the pinnacle of the profession,” but
he worried whether Hirschman “had been spoilt by success.” Elster found “an element of self-indulgence, sometimes self-congratulations, that prevents him from achieving the same rigour and clarity that characterised his earlier work.” The engagement “in a highly speculative sociology of knowledge” Elster found especially bothersome. Skinner rushed to defend: “The modesty of his grasp of your thought seems to me to sit very displeasingly with the astonishing confidence with which he delivered himself of his Olympian judgments.”
⁴⁶

It was not all so gloomy. In other domains, the book struck an instant chord—and struck hard. Lewis Coser reviewed it for the
New Republic
, using the occasion to add a long biographical profile as a coming-out narrative about one of the country’s greats—“America’s eclectic economist.” Peter Berger called Hirschman “one of our most distinguished economists” in the
New York Times
(which prompted Hirschman to fire off a letter to Katia, gushing that he had finally “made it into
The Times
!” though he added that the review was a little less than he would have hoped for). It was also translated more swiftly than any previous book into French and German—and treated to even more laudatory reviews. Michel Massenet called Hirschman “easily recognized as a true
savant
” in
Le Figaro. Le Monde
featured the book on the front page. David Riesman, author of
The Lonely Crowd
, wrote him and called it “an extraordinary experience to read and ruminate about this book.” Other friends shared some more critical remarks in a constructive spirit—but in the context of the reviews, they only added to the chorus.
⁴⁷

Shifting Involvements
may have been a flawed book, but it was a brave one. There was a political argument involved and directed at fellow intellectuals. As people leave the streets and plazas disenchanted with politics to seek happiness in the shopping malls, what will happen to them when consumption yields its own eventual diminishing returns, when the exit option of private pursuits don’t work? What will happen if the art of voice has been lost? Public life had its problems—it could be too absorbing and too boring. This was the point of representing actors as neither heroes nor victims, but rather as fallible choosers muddling through imperfect alternatives. The politics of his argument was made explicit at a conference
at Berkeley in March 1980, just as he was revising his manuscript. He asked himself, “What was so
moral
about my inquiry?” When he got to the podium, he explained how Princeton students were rather “shaken up” by the original happiness lectures. Students were more accustomed to learning about human nature in terms of “the rational actor beloved by economists.” When Hirschman presented Man as “a blundering idealist, someone with interests
and
passions,” it sounded to them as a moral observation. Either-or commonplaces made Hirschman’s kinds of stories appear muddled and confused. Really, what Hirschman wanted was a human actor “as a more lovable character, somewhat pitiable, but also a bit frightening—hence tragic.”
⁴⁸

This tragic character sometimes needed some help. It was the job of intellectuals to be constructive, because the existence of public life as a refuge for disenchanted consumers required a practice that intellectuals had played a special role in refining, the art of voice. To throw up their hands now, to concede defeat of “public man,” and to give up hope that the citizen still had a pulse within the body of the consumer was, Hirschman argued, self-defeating. Hopelessness would be self-fulfilling. The ethical implication was that intellectuals had a place in all this as the guardians of voice, even in the moments of its atrophy or disfavor. Be ready, Hirschman argued, for day in which the citizen swung back into public action; the ability to deliver rewards for returning to the streets and plazas depended on their capacity to imagine social change, not as total overhauls that were bound to fall short of great expectations—and thus drive the citizen back to private ways. Instead, help the fallible citizen, this imperfect subject, to imagine alternatives without making them impossible. This argument was not so easy to distill from the long excursions through consumer choice and the oscillations of the suffrage. Having missed his mark, uncharacteristically, this was a
big
idea that would consume him for years to come.

In the meantime, Hirschman bristled with disappointment. Insecurities that lurked below the serenity of his outward appearance, a carefully groomed style crafted to rise above the disciplines and precision that now found him wanting, broke through. As the reviews came in, he pored over
them, underlining the lines of praise and leaving the criticisms conspicuously untouched. His letters also reveal traces of bitterness. Writing to his friend Reisman, he noted that most reviews reacted to the public-private cycle, “whereas this for me was more like a rod and hangers which for me merely served to lend support to a series of carefully crafted garments. These people criticized the rod and hangers and didn’t say anything about the garments.”
⁴⁹

He lived up to his own model, however: faced with disappointment, find pleasures elsewhere. As he did so often in his life, he set his sights on new horizons.

A belief like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

  
FRANZ KAFKA

I
n the summer of 1979, a trio of Berkeley professors decided to organize a conference called “Morality as a Problem in the Social Sciences.” Aiming at the functions and malfunctions of a “value neutral” social science, it was dominated by heavy-weight philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor. There were other notables, such as Norma Haan and Michel de Certeau. Bellah asked Hirschman to come; Hirschman accepted, on condition that Mike McPherson be included. He felt it was important to have economists in the midst. McPherson welcomed the opportunity as an honor—and then trepidation: when the program came out, he gasped to see that the famous German philosopher, Habermas, was going to be his commentator.

The event stirred Hirschman to stake out a social science that dealt more directly with ethics, not so much the study
of
ethics but rather the ethics of social science. But he was determined to avoid the moralizing tone that hung over the deliberations. He urged the attendees to consider humans as endowed with self-as well as other-regarding propensities. What is more, these urges jostled with each other. Why do we have to choose what kind of self to favor? This was the same complex self that populated
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, The Passions and the Interests
, and most recently,
Shifting Involvements
. All of these called for a more integrated social science—and indeed one might read them as a serialized
manifesto, or an unfolding agenda, for Hirschman and Geertz’s ambitions for integration. But it was revealing that none of Hirschman’s works offered a unifying social theory. To offer one would undercut the purpose of the IAS school, which favored the study of social meanings rather than causation. At a time in which one was called upon to choose between “rational actors” or some communitarian spirit, Hirschman put the spotlight on humans’ happinesses and disappointments and the ways in which they bungled and blundered their ways through choices.

This combined but unstable subject was a cornerstone of an integrated social science. But it was not easily molded to a unifying theory.

Hirschman’s effort to be “positive” and value free while smuggling in “some strong moral message” went completely unnoticed at the Berkeley conference. The call for a rapprochement among social scientists of different breeds did not appear to have any effect on the gathering. Rather, the conferees seized the moment to pummel “positive social science” and “empiricism” (these being the aspersions of the day) and whipped themselves into a collective fury against mainstream American social sciences. Hirschman remained silent, observant, filling his yellow pads with notes and doodles. There were points at which he found the one-sided exchange too tiresome to remain silent. Delicately, he offered some constructive criticism of the chorus. At one point, he reminded others of the irony that empirical social science is what had allowed the disciplines to be taken seriously in the first place—with the not-to-discrete inference, surely missed by the ranters, that rejecting empirical research was a passport to obscurity.
¹

His interventions did not appear to have left traces on anyone’s thinking. But the event forced him to consider how one might get past what he considered a sterile debate between two kinds of understanding: moralizing and analyzing. He wanted to find a position that was neither mindlessly “detached” nor—unlike some at the Berkeley conference—reverting to social science as moral advocacy. As he explained to the German sociologist Wolf Lepenies, “I would not like to have to say: to restore moral considerations we must
pay a price
in terms of scientific rigor; rather, I like to show that we are losing important insights because
of the failure to ask moral questions and in general to spread our net more widely.”
²

The opportunity to spread his net more widely arose when he was awarded the Frank E. Seidman Award in Political Economy, for which he was expected to deliver an acceptance paper. Given by the trustees of the University of Memphis, its previous recipients included Gunnar Myrdal, John Kenneth Galbraith, Kenneth Boulding, and Thomas Schelling. He took up the challenge he had passed up earlier and composed “Morality and the Social Sciences: A Durable Tension,” in which he picked up where
The Passions and the Interests
had left off, outlining the origins of the social sciences as a struggle to free inquiry from traditional moral teaching, separating learning from preaching.
³
Machiavelli had wanted to study politics from the premise of man as he really is, not what he ought to be. Montesquieu had warned how useless it was to go on about how much political practice conflicts with morality and justice (“this sort of discourse makes everybody nod in agreement, but changes nobody”). And of course Smith had severed the self-interested “head” from the emoting “heart” with breathtaking effectiveness. Even Marx wanted “cool science” to guide his motion of capitalism. But Marx was a cue to a deeper current in the genealogy of the social sciences, for while he wanted neutral, objective laws to dictate his analysis, he was no less inclined to hot tempered “moral outrage.” “It was perhaps this odd amalgam, with all its inner tensions unresolved, that was (and is) responsible for the extraordinary appeal of his work in an age addicted to science and starved of moral values.” This particular point elicited a doubt from Daniel Bell, who thought his friend had missed the way in which Marx and Hegel thought about the unity of theory and practice—not as a pragmatic idea whose truth is revealed in use and consequence, but rather as the entelechy of history. So, socialism was “scientific” not in the sense of it being “positive” but because it was necessary and embedded in the order of things; the is-ought distinction was not one a true Hegelian would have recognized. It was not a major issue, but Hirschman tried to clarify: his point was that “Marx, of course,
thought
he had resolved (
versöhnt
, in the Hegel sense) these antitheses, but my point (to which I would stick) is that he hadn’t
and that his works exhibit a simple juxtaposition of scientific apparatus and moralistic invective, wholly un
versöhnt
.”
⁴