Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (53 page)

The multiple sources of inspiration can be gleaned from files labeled “Strategy Notes,” which were compiled as he composed. One important font was a literary tradition of dissent from the onrush to devise master plans to right the world’s problems. The disparate traditions of skepticism about great idealist movements were hardly new discoveries. Hayek, Benda, the defiant Italian antifascists—in various guises these prophets
reverberated in his irritation with the planners in Colombia. The claim to knowledge dressed up in grand theories about the world could, as Hirschman would later write, prove a hindrance to understanding it. Edmund Burke was one influential skeptic.
Reflections on the Revolution in France
had been one of Hirschman’s favorite works, not just because it challenged philosophers who wanted to play on the political stage with what Burke sarcastically called the “pulpit style” and its attendant conviction that philosophers could do more than merely know the world, they could change it. The pulpit style could also author beautiful horrors. What appealed to Hirschman was less Burke’s famed (if misunderstood) conservatism than his skepticism. It was not the “philosopher in action” that was the problem. If anything, Hirschman admired thinkers with an engaged style. Nor was revolution the problem. If anything, Hirschman sought bold, audacious alternatives. Rather, it was the leap from abstraction to prescription that concerned him. Settled at Yale, Hirschman pored over the “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol,” a pamphlet denouncing politicians who “have split and anatomised the doctrine of free government, as if it were an abstract question concerning metaphysical liberty and necessity; and not a matter of moral prudence and natural feeling.” It prompted him to scribble to himself: “Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.”
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Hirschman’s dissent from the rage to plan gave way to a broader cautionary position about the role of governments as mechanisms to rationalize the world. This brought Hirschman back to Hayek, whose
The Road to Serfdom
, a jeremiad against the certainties of grand engineers and the convictions of state socialists, moved him while serving in the American army. He read Hayek more widely, including the musings on Auguste Comte. Hirschman quoted Hayek’s dismay about “the demand for unity and systematization” and quoted the Viennese philosopher’s observation about Comte that there is “nothing more repugnant for real scientific spirit than disorder of any kind.” Hirschman was starting to see that the disordered nature of development, and its fundamental disequilibrium, required specific strategies, not overarching solutions, even Hayek’s own
great flywheel—the price system. “Strategy Notes” is full of annotated passages about the “fallacy of abstraction” (Harold Laski) and “premature, impatient pseudo-insights” (inspired from reading Karl Wittfogel).
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Favorite works of literature fill his pages. He read Dostoevsky’s
The Demons
. And there was the touchstone, Franz Kafka. This time he read the short story
The Great Wall of China
, a fictionalized retrospection by a Chinese intellectual who recounts the making of one of the world’s great monuments as an example of the folly of grand designs by great “scholars.” The immensity of the project doomed it to prolonged incompletion. Meant to defend the kingdom from outside hordes, it had to be seamless, impregnable, encompassing—and therefore impossible. No amount of planning and engineering could compensate for the improvisations and imperfections required to advance the interminable project. And since the great barricade was supposed to be a projection from the emperor’s mind’s eye, one had to presume that blemishes and flaws were of the ruler’s intent. This was Kafka’s tongue-in-cheek jab at idealists of all stripes. To Hirschman, the great malefactor was impatience. He transcribed Kafka’s words: “all human error is impatience.” It was the source of the cardinal sin. “Because of impatience,” wrote Kafka, underscored by Hirschman, “we were driven out, because of impatience we cannot return.”

The urge to resolve, to rectify, and to remedy in a hurry, Hirschman felt, hindered rather than helped people consider alternatives. Its wellspring was partly the result of an overconfidence in a particular model of knowledge and, as he put it elsewhere and traced later, a “cognitive style” born of the social sciences in the eighteenth century. But part of it was motivated by a different kind of human drive. To this end, Hirschman probed into psychology and psychoanalysis. Compared to reading Burke, Hayek, and Kafka, the behavioral sciences were new hat. Freud had not been discussed at home in Berlin; indeed, there was a strong current of suspicion and discomfort with talking about unconscious, prereasoned impulses and motives. How Hirschman forayed into this field is not known. But he did. What he got was the tail end of a shift away from imagining the behavioral aspects of human change as if they were subject to natural laws. The “scientistic” view that biological and mechanical laws
and images provided the best way to understand the world was, by the 1950s, in retreat. The turn toward efforts to understand the self—its constructions and pathologies—that is, an inward gaze, combined with anxieties about the uprootedness and alienation of modern society, had social scientists turning to psychologists. “Look in psychoanalytic theory,” he enjoined to himself in his jottings.

In this “theory,” he found a burgeoning literature about group dynamics and personal responses and the basic clashes and frictions they involved. He read numerous books on psychoanalytic concepts and took extensive notes, more than from any other set of readings. What caught Hirschman’s eye was the importance of one basic trinity: frustration, aggression, and anxiety. The latter, in particular, was most intriguing, especially as digested from Erich Fromm, which reminded him that the modern condition did not absolve people’s problems, but rather created a whole new set of troubles out of meeting personal needs in competitive settings—and the attendant anxieties in turn yielded to efforts to avoid them. Extensive notes from D. Hobart Mowrer’s
Learning Theory and Personality Dynamics
(1950), especially from
chapter 19
(“The Problem of Anxiety”) reveals his interest in a basic distinction between “normal” anxiety and “neurotic” anxiety, with the former not being disproportionate to the objective threat, but being instrumental to meeting it. It was precisely this “normal” anxiety that gave individuals and groups a basic psychic resource to overcome their difficulties, as well as the capacity to learn from experience. Notes on another author find Hirschman fascinated with the notion that failure, and learning from it, was a strategy for success; failure and achievement did not necessarily have to be seen as setbacks to each other.
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Skepticism and thinking about the microfoundations of behavior had Hirschman thinking hard about development neither as something that could be imposed or introduced from without, nor as something that could be driven by unlocking some special secret force, like a
deus ex machina
. Instead, he fingered social agents overcoming difficulties as the central pieces of his conceptual rebuilding. But how to think about this as a process? Overcoming a difficulty meant not just removing an obstacle, but
rather seeing that it began as a perception—that is, that the impediments to moving forward lay as much within human agents’ heads; the inner fetters were the hardest to overcome. If this could be applied to how people dealt with the emotive world, why not with the economic one too, just as a therapist might urge a patient to confront an obstacle by apprehending it? Many times this exercise might end in failure and frustration, but over time it would yield a change. “The repeated coming up to it (the obstacle)—you get to know it,” he noted. This centerpiece of analytic practice, now transposed to thinking about society, was not altogether new. Characteristically, Hirschman found the classics already mulling these kinds of dilemmas. He found special significance in Burke’s line from
Reflections
that “our antagonist is our helper. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill”; to this Hirschman added his own line about “our evasion of and intimate acquaintance with difficulty.”
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This all pointed to a different spirit of reform, not one directed at smashing up external obstacles and thwarts as if they were the true chains preventing traditional societies from enjoying modern destinies buoyed by a new equilibrium of rational actors and benevolent institutions. Reform meant embracing tension, internalizing it. “Do we
need
tension to function, or only adjustment?” he asked, leaving little doubt that his sympathies lay with the underlined, to surmise the following: “In the case of individual: is there such a things as in economies ‘optimal tension.’ ” There was, therefore, a fundamental distinction for Hirschman in approaches to reform. On one hand, reforms were aimed at removing tensions that prevented change, as if change were a frictionless leap from one condition to another. On the other, reforms produced tensions that compelled change, as if change were fueled by conflict and without it would stall. The distinction sheds light on a variety of types of reformer. Two kinds materialize in Hirschman’s notes. More would come later. There were “those who want to change things because they
are
wrong.” And there were “those who want to change the present because of knowledge that it leads to unbearable or catastrophic future,” an addendum from reading Isaac Deutscher in the
Partisan Review
in 1958, “The Jew as Non-Jew.”
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Finally, among the strands of influence was Shura Gerschenkron’s famous essay about backwardness from the 1952 Chicago conference. Implicitly, Hirschman had already begun to gaze out through a Gerschenkronian lens—Colombia’s “backwardness” was not necessarily a bundle of self-inflicted fetters to progress. But moving to Yale had Hirschman reading other works by his former colleague, particularly his essays on Russian intellectual history and the influence of thinkers on Russian policy and economic development, which conveyed much the same gist—that Moscow’s sense of lagging behind was a strong motivator while an autocratic state had instruments for mobilizing resources that markets were slower to achieve. The sum helped Hirschman see the limits of growth models premised on earlier historical experiences—Walt Rostow, for one, used a stylized history of the British industrial revolution to chart a universal path to “take off.” “One of the astounding feats of modern economics,” Hirschman later concluded, “is the way in which the analysis of the growth process of advanced industrial countries has yielded an apparatus of seemingly ready applicability to the most primitive economies.… [But] the more useful [theories] are in one setting, the less they are likely to be so in a completely different one. An attempt to ‘apply’ them … may turn out to be a lengthy detour rather than a short cut.”
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The book just “flowed out,” especially after the trip to Brazil. One effect of catching up on his economic reading was that he felt compelled to become more technical, and thus upgrade his math. He labored for months trying to convert his ideas into equations. Friends—Schelling, Wallich, and others—disabused him of this eagerness to find the right quantitative expressions; perhaps this was premature, they argued, and that math was not yet able to keep up with Albert’s insights. Hirschman was inclined to agree. Now, whether they were right or not is a hindsight judgment, and some economists have felt that this decision
not
to translate his unorthodoxy into precise, arithmetic formulae deprived the discipline of a major breakthrough. There is truth to this, given the sharp quantitative turn of economics. If Hirschman had wanted to influence the broader discipline, he would have had to conform to this new mathematizing norm. But it is worth recalling that Hirschman never saw
himself as making a necessary choice between metaphors and math, between trying to capture the richness and complexity of the real world or to produce tightly controlled equations to illustrate a concept. The two, rendering reality and conceptual refinement, were entwined. And in any event, the idiom of metaphors and aphorisms that lace Hirschman’s work, starting with this one, was as motivated as the mathematical urge by the need to locate useful analytical keys, not to complete a faithful portrait of the outer world. One of his favorite quotes was from Cervantes’s defense of Don Quixote’s imagination being untethered from reality: “God forgive you for the damage you have caused everyone in wishing to return to sanity this most amusing fool! Don’t you realize, sir, that the benefit that might accrue from the sanity of Don Quixote will never come up to the pleasure he gives us through his follies?”
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Hirschman’s trouble was perhaps more banal. By the late 1950s, putting his work into the kind of language that was more and more the currency of economics did not play to his strength, and he knew it. With the clock ticking and a career on the line, he made a choice to play to his strengths. The result was a manuscript with technical displays interspersed but never the analytical core of any of its arguments. Resolving these problems were more than an intellectual challenge; they raised personal anxieties about his fit in an American academy bound by disciplinary rituals and norms. Writing to Ursula in October of 1957, as the first draft neared completion, he observed that “this life doesn’t come easy to me, I never know how meticulously I have to prepare myself and I therefore feel constantly under pressure. That’s probably how it is at the beginning and gradually everything will improve and of course the first year is particularly exhausting. But I am suspecting that the constant presenting, acting as a professor, representing an authority, really puts one’s critical abilities to sleep and makes them die off. On the other hand, there is the need to be scientifically up to date, to engage with one’s colleagues and to remain intellectually versatile—at our age it is probably important to have such a reliable mechanism at hand that achieves this.” He worried that a “reliable mechanism” was beyond his reach.
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