Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (85 page)

Conversations with friends also appear in these notes. Hirschman circled back to Amartya Sen. While their families vacationed together in the summer of 1975 in Sabaudia, on the Central Italian coast, Albert was by then the “rich uncle” from America, treating everyone to ice cream. But he also made sure to go on long walks with Sen, who had recently published a landmark essay in
Economica
called “Behaviour and the Concept of Preference,” based on his inaugural lectures at the London School of Economics. Already en route to fame for his
Collective Choice and Social Welfare
(published in 1970, which would help earn him the
Nobel Prize in economics in 1998), Sen was hard at work exposing the limitations of the prevailing dogmas about the narrowed self-interested
homo economicus
. A subsequent essay, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory,” was a chattier version of the complex
Economica
paper, but it was more accessible to Hirschman, for whom Sen’s mathematics was beyond reach. Albert wanted to know more and plumbed his nephew, Amartya, now married to his niece Eva. By 1978, his reflections on Sen were thickening. Note: “Amartya’s meta-preferences come in to play role when there is something wrong with actual preference—it’s not necessary to
invent
new set, there is always one waiting in the wings [sic].” Quentin Skinner appears throughout, from his point that Calvin’s idea was that “all citizens could do in the public realm was to obey the sovereign—he is not supposed to meddle (action for the public weal becomes meddling),” to, some pages later, “Quentin: In repressive regimes it’s up to individual how much he is going to get involved; in open societies it’s often a question of his ability, whether he is
asked
to ‘run’ for this or that office [sic].”
²⁶

Hirschman was always eclectic in his sources. But the summer of 1978 brought a veritable explosion ranging across languages (English, French, German, Italian) and genres—classical literature to consumer-choice theories. It is no wonder, as he explained to Kenneth Arrow, that he found this the hardest project he had ever tackled. Indeed, to call it a “project” (which was his word choice) exaggerates his sense of direction.
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
and
The Passions and the Interests
had the virtues of being able to start with a small idea and billow into a book, the first prompted by observations about responses to monopoly in Nigeria, the second to an enigma posed by Montesquieu. What he confronted now was much broader, more diffuse, an intellectual temper incarnate in ideas of “public choice.” One has a sense that the whole business was overwhelming him—and that his inability to find a way out was beginning to weigh him down. However, an invitation from the economics department at Princeton University to deliver the Eliot Janeway Lectures on Historical Economics in honor of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter gave Hirschman the right motive to air his alternative to the impossibility theorem
that he had ascribed to Olson. While he was wracking himself over “Public vs Private,” his tentative title, American television screens were flooded with scenes from Tehran, where radical students had seized the US embassy. That Thanksgiving, Albert and Sarah invited some friends over—the Brazilian literary scholar Roberto Schwarz and the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and their wives—for goose. They were riveted to the television and worried about the government’s response with the elections looming. The images of crowds “seemingly so full of hatred against the United States” were utterly depressing. It was not just the hatred on display in Iran, it was the sense of “unity” in America and portents of a “turn inward” that concerned him. “This may well be the end of public interest in development in the Third World—so, from the point of view of my interests, I also see it as the end of an epoch.”
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With the hostage crisis in the background and long queues forming at gas stations as the United States was struck by a second energy crisis, Hirschman was understandably nervous about his reasons for optimism. Still, in December, he walked before the podium at Dodds Auditorium in the Woodrow Wilson School to deliver two lectures to large crowds of students and faculty at Princeton: “Private and Public Happiness: Pursuits and Disappointments.” As with
Passions
, the choice of conjunction was vital for what followed—for Hirschman there was no basic choice between the two; it was not
or
that adjoined public to private; the private and public domains were not exclusive. The point of the lectures was to argue that people were always
choosing
depending on their moods and inclinations. It was this
activity
that Hirschman wanted to draw out.
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
was a peerless book about
how
people made a variety of choices that changed institutions; the issue now was,
why
did they make choices? Not unlike
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
, what followed were thoughts based on observations of everyday reactions to peoples’ behavior (like the tunnel effect and BMW ads), as well as weaving in lessons from various of the welfare state “crisis” projects and the engagement with Latin American colleagues on dictatorships. Indeed, these were the empirical skeletons of “Public and Private Happiness,” although it was impossible for anyone to know. The decision to keep these projects separate
from his answer to the impossibility theorem and free-rider problem was probably a mistake. Many would find the eventual book arch, removed, speculative—short of a new model of social science.

This does not mean that the lectures were separated from the world. They were not abstract, but they were theoretical; Hirschman’s internal jousting with Olson, and more broadly with individualism, got him closer than ever to his grail, an endogenous model that explained human behavior that motivated social change. A quarter-century after his battles with development planners in the Third World, he was no less insistent that a deeper explanation—and thus a
theory
of reform—had to avoid the
deus ex machina
, the external event or force that would move societies from one place to the next—technological changes, foreign wars, the imported (or imposed!) master plan, external infusions of capital, “foreign aid,” disasters, or discoveries that moved history along from one phase to the next. These kinds of providentialist explanations were not only self-limiting, they also did not illuminate possible alternatives to a problem since the trumping breakthrough had to come from the outside. They also tended to point to the agency of outsiders—the well-meaning expert, the foreign capitalist, the enlightened few who looked at societies from the outside-in.

It was time for a different story of modernization. Hirschman offered a theory about “pendular movements of collective behavior,” of the dynamics behind swings between happiness and disappointment and between public and private action. He moved from the domain of human experiences to emotional responses, such as anger at educational institutions, self-incrimination for buying a large house and regretting it (buyer’s remorse), and the ever disappointing “driving experience,” which far from yielding to the lyrical joy ride more often plunged the indebted pleasure-seeker into a traffic jam. This is where the BMW ad came in handy; it promised exhilaration but delivered dissatisfaction (and bills). Everywhere happiness was being dispensed and, behind peoples’ pursuits, left trails of disappointment. Disappointment, as he would make clear in the book that emerged from the lectures, was the counterpart to hope, its necessary twin, a force any possibilist had to reckon with. Regret and disappointment
were not just the results of mistakes—but of activities conducted “with high expectations
not
to make mistakes.” Far from trying to eliminate a world of disappointment, Hirschman was trying to call attention to its necessity. To search for models that would dispense with dissatisfactions and regrets would rid the world of hope; here was an indictment of the Utopian thinking that had laced his skepticism of extremes throughout his life. “While a life filled with disappointment is a sad affair, a life without disappointment may not be bearable at all. For disappointment is the natural counterpart of man’s propensity to entertain magnificent vistas and aspirations.” It was not for nothing that a friend of Don Quixote (the Knight of the Mournful Countenance) would lament the curing of his madness, for it now deprived those around him of the pleasures they gained through his follies.
²⁸

Nothing was fixed. Happiness never lasted and was unevenly distributed—and thus could not help but elicit its countervailing force, disappointment. Likewise disappointment was not an equilibrium point; people were inveterate “project-makers” as well as pleasure-seekers. Unless depressed—and psychoanalysis was one example of peoples’ search for “exits” from unhappiness and was also invariably a source of disappointment—people were inclined to swing away from the source of the diminishing returns to their efforts. These efforts could be either private-pursuing or public-engaging; the point is that they were subject to similar propensities. To contrast with Olson’s “logic,” Hirschman presented a “dialectic” that unfolded within the very self that comprised a complex amalgam of drives. Man had been a stage for battles between reason and passion before capitalism; the capitalist experience had not dissolved this fundamental struggle. Hirschman was returning to his case, which had been muted by a complex history in
The Passions and the Interests
, for reviving a more complex, “lovable,” and “tragic” human subject for a different kind of epic—a political economy that did not create itself around dichotomous categories of either-or, which condemned modern humans to be in a state of perpetually tearing their hearts apart.

Here, then, was an alternative that shifted the accent from mechanisms that pulled societies forward to factors that pushed people to change.
These factors explained changes that went back and forth in two directions—to private- and public-oriented activity as a new model of political economy.

It was an audacious effort. It also overreached.

After Watergate, the coup in Argentina, a crisis of the world economy, and the seeming failure of human-rights-guided foreign policy, it is perhaps not surprising that the motor for the oscillations between private and public activities was disappointment. This “elementary human experience” was the touchstone upon which Hirschman elaborated his meditations on peoples’ swings. The accent was now specifically on the role of disappointment, not unlike the diminishing returns a consumer experiences from the purchase of goods, such as consumer durables, or certain services, which were especially “disappointment-prone.” Disappointment could then spur public action; it could tender a ladder, Hirschman explained, on which the consumer-citizen “can climb
gradually
out of private life into the public arena,” and sometimes it could even lead to the corrosion of the ideology on which the pursuit of happiness was premised. This brought him face-to-face once more with Mancur Olson’s analysis of collective action, which by now had become an ur-reference in the muscular drive to decontrol markets with its emphasis on individual cost-benefit arithmetic and the ineluctable problem of free-riding. Of course, Hirschman was not presenting public action as an antidote. It, too, was subject to pendularity. Public action was no less disappointment prone than consumer durables. One hazard was “overcommitment.” Hirschman liked Oscar Wilde’s quip about socialism as self-defeating because “it takes too many evenings.” In societies where “electoral politics are the only politics” and public action is less rewarding than activists hoped, the disappointments can set in early in the cycle of engagement (though often leading to more generalized rage against “the system”).
²⁹

Drifting from consumer theory and Sen’s theory of meta-preferences yielded a paradox about modern politics. In democracies, the vote gives every citizen a stake in public decision making. At the same time, it places a ceiling on participation because casting ballots does not allow for the expression of different “intensities” of convictions. The result: voting has
a “dual character”—to defend against the “excessive
repressive
state while “safeguarding” it against “excessively
expressive
” citizens. Needless to say, this was a very different way to paint a portrait of the voter’s paradox in Olson’s simplistic cost-benefit analysis. The story of the lessons learned from France after 1848, after three revolutions in less than two generations, were his case in point. The franchise was an “antidote to revolutionary change” not by stacking the outcome because there was some underlying “structural” distribution of power (as Marxists would argue), but because it stigmatized more direct, intense, “expressive” forms of political action that have the allure of being
both
more effective and more satisfying. “In short,” argued Hirschman, “the trouble with political life is that it is either too absorbing or too tame.”
³⁰

This was a case for an unstable middle ground, unstable because it was perpetually leaning people toward contrary impulses, and middling because people never swung fully to private or public activities for long. In this fashion, Hirschman refuted the triumphalism (for the Right) and defeatism (for the Left) of those that asserted that private pursuits have bled public man, as if the idea that creating wealth—the objective of private action—were superior to the pursuit of power, which was now seen as “the exclusive goal of public action.” The “ultimate ideological revanche” was to represent the struggle for power as an activity that benefits only the winner, while the pursuit of wealth was “celebrated as a game at which all players can win,” so that complete immersion in private activity could be “felt as a liberating experience not only for oneself, but for all society.” This is what the rising neo-conservatives, and their odds-on favorite for winning the ticket to lead the Republican Party against the crippled fortunes of President Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, were exalting. Hirschman tried to be optimistically prophetic. “The trouble is that our enthusiastic private citizen is now going to meet with the various disappointments” as the drive to consume one’s way to happiness ends in disappointment with consumer durables that people packed into their homes. Gravity dictated that the pendulum would swing back.
³¹