What Kind of Life Did "the Greatest Intellectual of Our Time" Lead?

This is the first full-length biography of Albert Hirschman. It has won the Association of American Publishers' honorable mention for biography, the Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year, the Guardian Best Book of the Year, the Bloomberg Businessweek Best Book of the Year, and the Joseph J. Spengler Prize for the best book in economic and social history, among other awards.

Title:

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

About the Author:

Jeremy Adelman is a well-known American historian, a professor at Princeton University and director of Princeton's Global History Lab. His other books include Frontier Development: Land, Labour and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, and he edited The Essential Hirschman.

Book Excerpt:

Introduction: The Most Fitting Words (Excerpt)

In early April 1933, antisemitic violence shook all of Berlin. Mobs beat Jews in the street as they pleased. Jewish-owned shops were looted, some of them burned. Hitler's government began restricting the movements of Jewish doctors, merchants and lawyers. The Hirschmanns — a thoroughly Germanized family who had lived in Berlin for years — had to survive in that dangerous city, and had a more immediate grief to bear as well. In a cemetery, the family stood together and watched the coffin holding Carl Hirschmann's body lowered slowly into the grave. Carl's wife wept without restraint. His children wept too. One person did not: Otto Albert, the other name of the man we know as Albert Hirschman. At the moment the whole family said goodbye forever to a father and a husband, Otto Albert held his grief in.

It was not the only farewell that day. Otto Albert, a law student at the University of Berlin and a stubborn, combative anti-Nazi, was already in serious danger. His friends were being arrested one after another, and his university was fast becoming a nest of racists with no tolerance for "heresy." So he decided to go underground and then make his way to France. As soon as the funeral ended, the seventeen-year-old told his family — still sunk in the pain of their loss — that he was leaving Germany, and promised that once the storm raised by Adolf Hitler's rise to power had passed, he would come back. He never guessed that keeping the promise would take decades. And so Otto Albert set out on his odyssey and began writing the epic of his own life. He would cross continents, master several languages, and become a practical idealist who stood at the front of the social sciences for most of a century.

Albert Hirschman left his home and the city where he grew up, but he never set himself against them. Nor did he sink into grief and spend his life mourning what he had lost. Exiles are usually out of step with their new surroundings; the lament of being a stranger in a strange land is a badge they carry with them everywhere. Hirschman was never like that. He felt no resistance to his forebears, and still less did he cling to them. He lived between what he had inherited and what he had acquired, and kept a delicate balance between the two. He could learn from a new place and adapt to it quickly without losing the insight tradition had given him; he never forgot his past, but he had no longing for a life of "returning to tradition." In a sense this was a choice he made when he had no choice. In the decade and more after he left Germany, Germany was no longer his Ithaca — no wife or children waited there, and no reason compelled him to return. Persecution, racial prejudice and war had already destroyed the "international community" his contemporaries had fought so hard to defend.

Hirschman was among the first to leave Germany. More than that, he was a miniature of the great wave of intellectuals who left. It was an outflow of knowledge and culture with no precedent in world history, and everyone's point of departure was this violently unstable country at the center of Europe. Over the next decade or so Hirschman moved among France, Spain and Italy, joining anti-fascist struggles of every kind, until his life was directly threatened and he could no longer stay on the continent. In the end he too fled to the United States and became one of the European émigrés who enriched American scholarship. But to the so-called agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, who won promotions and fortunes by hunting down suspects, Hirschman's record of active political involvement was of course highly suspicious, and in the fever of McCarthyism he was forced to flee again. This time his destination was South America. There he would remake himself once more, and become one of the greatest development economists in the world.

There is, of course, a logic to how Hirschman handled the question of staying or going. Anyone who has thought about the fine distinctions and the tensions among walking away, fighting back and quietly accepting — what Hirschman would later call "exit," "voice" and "loyalty" — will agree that once a person has existed in a place, complete exit is close to impossible; his exit always looks a little unfinished. As a rule Hirschman retreated exactly as far as he was driven, and no farther; he was, in that sense, a "willing" Odysseus. By any measure he was an unusual exile. Partly by his own choice and partly by the favor of fortune, he became an "internationalist." He was an insider among outsiders, occupying a penumbral space between inside and outside the establishment — a space that, in a sense, he opened up himself. The books he wrote were like monographs but not quite monographs, like manifestos but not quite manifestos, and they broke through every conventional dividing line. A rootless life with no fixed home meant he belonged to no single cultural tradition or school of thought, and to no nation or country either. Hirschman may well be a forerunner of today's more "globalized" intellectuals.

Words were to Hirschman what equations are to other economists. Why did words and writing matter so much to him? For one thing, they were a refuge; they gave some shelter to a man with no "homeland." In the summer of 1944, Hirschman was in Europe, waiting anxiously to join the American forces fighting in North Africa, and as hope thinned he had to look for comfort in words. Thinking about the people suffering in the war, and above all about the prisoners held in the camps, he began to be overwhelmed by despair. Just then he came across a poem by Jean Wahl, and it lifted his battered spirits. The poem read: "Thank you, my corps! How well you do the work an army must do." (Merci mon corps, tu fais bien ton métier de corps.) In a letter to his wife, Sarah, who was pregnant and living in New York, Hirschman exclaimed: "What a fine poem. And how spare the language is! A good poem hits no less hard than a great invention. Simple as it is, every one of us will think about it." Words like these set off many of his ideas, which he called "themes still waiting to be developed." When he died, Albert Hirschman left behind countless diaries, letters and marginal notes, written in the blank edges of the books he read, all of them packed with "ideas," "themes" and "questions." They mark the path his thinking took and point us, in words, toward his mind.

To read Hirschman only this way would be far too gloomy, and Hirschman himself would be the first to object to such a description of his work. And yet — thank God — he would certainly agree that fortune keeps far too many tricks up her sleeve.

So in the course of Hirschman's long search, words collided with thought and thought found expression. Some may see him as a modern Don Quixote, working through his books and essays to reveal possibilities of every kind, even if most of them were only possibilities "dimly glimpsed."

Across a writing life of seventy years, Hirschman's urge to change the world stands out. But no single idea or theme runs through his research. What he paid attention to kept shifting with the tides of history. His subjects were remarkably wide, from the economic roots of imperialism and war to the habits of rhetoric in modern political argument — almost nothing was outside them.

If that style is one mark of Hirschman's work, we should not forget that the style is inseparable from the substance of his thought. It also has to be said that everything he thought about was rooted in his sense of his own existence in the world. The century he lived through may have been one of the worst in human history, and he kept finding himself — in fact he put himself — at the hinges of its great turns. The twentieth century is often described as a hundred years of revolution, war and genocide; when it finally ended, the one thing the whole world could agree on was that humanity had not won dignity, and had only proved its capacity for producing horrifying results. That is why Eric Hobsbawm summed up the long history crammed into that short century as an "age of extremes." Many intellectuals waved the flag for extremism — a great many of them. They served the extremists. And because we are used to seeing the twentieth century as an age of extremes, we pay more attention to the century's extreme "apostles," its "revolutionaries" and its "reactionaries."

But between revolution and counterrevolution, between imperialism and nationalism, between communism and capitalism, there is a wide middle ground, and that is where reform can do its work.

The biography readers now hold is about a man who worked hard to think, and to dig into that neglected, damaged space between the romantic earth of revolution and the dim sky of counterrevolution. It is at once a life and a biography of a mind. It tells how a man in the fullest sense of the word, standing between heaven and earth, held his ground in this world, watched coolly with his own eyes the "great ideas" that gave rise to vast utopian social experiments, and offered "counterpoint" views, or notes of dissent, in reply. But he did more than respond to the extraordinary pull of those grand schemes. He spent his whole life, through his winding experience and his deepening work in the social sciences, looking for the right concepts to understand and grasp the wholeness and complexity of social change itself. We might even say Hirschman proposed a "theory" of social change, though he felt deeply divided whenever he faced the word "theory." His life, in a sense, condenses the entire world history of the twentieth century. That epic is retold through the course of one person's life. In the most terrible times and in the most hopeful days alike, Hirschman never lost the ability to imagine a different, or better, way of living. He often told his readers that the key to the world's problems lies not in more or more advanced technical invention, but in a stronger imagination.

So the story I am going to tell in the chapters that follow is both "a personal history of this world" and "a world history of one intellectual's life."

When we take Albert Hirschman's life as a mirror and think about the problems this world faces, we will never again see reform as a kind of "residual," or reformist thinking as hindsight tacked on afterward — even though the work of other twentieth-century thinkers was ruled by lofty utopian ideas. In the end Hirschman was an intellectual. He spent his life pushing reform forward: he threw himself into rebuilding a Europe ruined by war, worked with real enthusiasm for development in the Third World, and defended a humane capitalism — while trying to get people to accept the idea that keeping capitalism reformable is essential to keeping it humane.

Today we tend to think of reform as a fixed procedure whose job is to patch up something that has broken. To Hirschman, reform was never limited to the technical work of patching. When we believe we have not done all we can, what we are doing cannot be called reform. Perhaps, by looking back over Hirschman's life, we can complete a "biography of reform." Albert Hirschman's story can also be read as a form of collective memory, one presented to readers in the shape of a single extraordinary life. It brings us back to an unusual kind of social science, one that can help us find hope inside disappointment, solutions inside tension, and freedom inside uncertainty, because it treats the social world as a source of possibility. And what an intellectual can do is forge different combinations of humility and courage.

Cover image and in-text images provided by the publisher.