Book review: Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012) lived a dramatic twentieth-century life and sought to use it to create a more humane social science.

He was interested in social science as a form of moral inquiry and not as the building of models or the manipulation of large data sets. He dreamed of a “social science for our grandchildren.” Over an illustrious career that spanned nearly half a century he contributed not only to economic theory but to the sociology and economy of development, the history of ideas, political psychology, and political philosophy.

..he was completely right in establishing clear connections between military aggression and foreign trade that went beyond the traditional leftist belief that capitalism necessarily led to imperialism. He also foresaw very clearly the need to regulate the world economy, predicting that economic integration without regulation would not lead to peace among nations. Hirschman argued that a new model of national sovereignty was needed: one that federalized economic sovereignty.

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman 

By Jeremy Adelman

Reviewed by Seyla Benhabib

It is an interesting oddity of Albert O. Hirschman’s life, a life that spanned and was directly touched by the twentieth century’s most momentous events, that his most important insight struck him while he was contemplating, of all things, the trains of Nigeria. He traveled there in the mid-1960s and, during a ghastly journey on the state-operated railway system, started thinking about why the railways performed so poorly in the face of competition from trucks, even for the transport of peanuts grown some 800 hundred miles away from the ports. Competition, according to most economists, is supposed to improve performance in such cases. But Hirschman made the counterintuitive observation that in this case, competition from trucks meant that the weaknesses of the railroad system led many simply to abandon the rails rather than fight to improve them.

This insight led Hirschman, by 1970, to publish his best-known work, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. “Exit” means that individuals abandon a product, firm, brand, organization, or association when they are no longer satisfied and see no chance for improvement. “Voice,” by contrast, suggests that they seek improvement and want to make their preferences heard and see their choices respected. “Loyalty” characterizes one’s commitment to associations such as the family, the nation, the ethnic group, or religious congregation that are based on formative and deeply held values.

In the Nigerian case, Hirschman observed that instead of exercising “voice” by protesting the railway’s inefficiencies, the population practiced “exit,” and state managers tolerated inefficiencies in the rail system that they may have been less inclined to accept had they been subject to loud protests. These options held true, he wrote, not only in the economic world but in social life at large: Reflecting on the worldwide youth protest movements of the late 1960s and the anti-war movement in the United States, Hirschman mused that since young people did not feel their voices heard by traditional political institutions, they chose instead to “exit” established representative political systems via street protests and demonstrations.

While Exit, Voice, and Loyalty may have been Hirschman’s most striking contribution, it was hardly his only one. He was interested in social science as a form of moral inquiry and not as the building of models or the manipulation of large data sets. He dreamed of a “social science for our grandchildren.” Over an illustrious career that spanned nearly half a century he contributed not only to economic theory but to the sociology and economy of development, the history of ideas, political psychology, and political philosophy.

Yet it is thanks only to this remarkable biography by Jeremy Adelman, a professor of Spanish civilization and culture at Princeton University and a one-time colleague of Hirschman’s, that we now have the first comprehensive view of the man and his work. Adelman writes with affection and respect and chronicles Hirschman’s life through painstaking archival work, extensive interviews, and the examination of personal and professional papers. He brings the work alive by exploring the origins of Hirschman’s achievements in the twists and turns of his life—a life, Adelman notes, that “was a personal history of the twentieth century.” It was also a life of intense political commitment and activism that transmuted itself into a relentless reformism with the passage of time... 

In April 1933, after his father’s death and after Berlin was rocked by anti-Semitic violence, the 18-year-old Hirschman left for France, not to return until decades later.

Paris in the interwar years was teeming with refugees, militants, and expats of all political stripes. German-Jewish refugees like Arendt and Walter Benjamin were there, as were White Russians such as Alexandre Kojève, whose lectures on Hegel electrified a generation of French intellectuals, including Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty. They were soon joined by many others, such as Colorni, fleeing Mussolini’s fascism. Others were fleeing not fascism but Stalin’s communism: notably Rafael Abramovitch Rein, a leader in exile of the Russian Workers Social Democratic Party, a journalist for the American Jewish Daily Forward, and a surrogate father figure for Hirschman for some years. These groups formed that “other Europe” of the anti-fascist resistance, which remained “uprooted from country yet loyal to cause.” Between 1935 and 1938, Hirschman shuttled across four countries: France, Italy, Great Britain, and Spain. From July to October 1936 he fought in the Spanish Civil War near Barcelona with the Italian and German émigré battalions of volunteers, loosely under the leadership of the leftist but anti-Stalinist POUM. It was an experience that must have left him with not only physical but also deep psychological wounds, because to the very end of his life, he refused to talk about it even with his wife, Sarah Chapiro, a Lithuanian-Jewish, French-educated refugee.

The last episode of Hirschman’s dramatic time on the European continent came in 1939, when he was drafted into the French Army to fight against Germany. Hirschman was lucky to have been drafted because the French shortly thereafter started interning all male German refugees who were not in the military. When France capitulated in the summer of 1940, Hirschman and his comrades convinced their commander to release them with fake military passes. Assuming the pseudonym of Albert Hermant upon being discharged from the French army, he started making his way toward the South of France. Soon he met a young Harvard-educated classicist, Varian Fry, who had come to Marseilles on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee.

Fry and Hirschman spent the next five months preparing the departures of refugees whose names read like a who’s who of intellectual Europe: Arendt, Andre Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Siegfried Kracauer, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, and so on (but not, alas, Walter Benjamin, who would commit suicide in September 1940 in the coastal Spanish town of Portbou while waiting for papers to transit to Portugal). Hirschman himself was not among the luminaries. read more:

http://www.democracyjournal.org/30/oracles-odyssey.php?page=all