Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (63 page)

Academic readers, especially those familiar with Hirschman’s oeuvre (now that he was beginning to accumulate a number of fans),
did
get the bardic cues. Nathan Rosenberg praised it as “a long step in the direction of developing a form of economic (and administrative) sociology which is indispensable if we are ever, as a profession, really to make sense in the advice we offer on matters of economic policy for poor countries.” He had no trouble seeing the ways in which “the level of analysis” was going to rise, thanks to the book, and sent Hirschman a very detailed set of commentaries with this objective in mind. While he was at it, he included an essay he had published on Mandeville and suggested that there was much more in eighteenth-century political economy on the Hiding Hand than he was crediting. Here a seed was planted that took almost a decade to sprout. Walter Salant of Brookings found the essay provocative, precisely because it was one-sided. Hirschman had really only tackled examples where the difficulties and abilities to solve them were underestimated. What about the disaster cases where difficulties are underestimated and abilities to solve them overestimated? Salant was not suggesting
that Hirschman expand the range of comparative cases. Rather, he urged Hirschman to clarify that this
way
of thinking illuminated the variety of successes and failures that deviate from expectations. Hirschman agreed, but added that he wanted to emphasize unexpected successes to show how the Hiding Hand could check risk averters who would prefer not to act, a behavior, he noted, that stood in the way of letting some projects enjoy greater scope for development. In this sense, “ignorance of risk can offset usefully aversion to risk.” Risk averters, by acknowledging the presence of the Hiding Hand, could be risk takers without being the cocky brainiacs who populated the world of foreign expertise.
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Pleased with his twist on Adam Smith, Hirschman was anxious to feature his verbal breakthrough to a broader audience. He inquired at
World Politics
, then turned to Irving Kristol, editor of the
Public Interest
, a magazine of crossover essays between political thinkers and high-end journalism slanted to progressive anti-utopianism. “True,” replied Kristol, “it does step outside the limits we have hitherto imposed upon ourselves. On the other hand, it might be that it is time to revise these limits.” Kristol suggested that Hirschman scrub away references to the World Bank and allusions to a “study,” to emphasize that it was a critique of “the problem of economic development and foreign economic aid.” Hirschman obliged, and Kristol hurriedly gave it his personal extensive editing and pushed it through the publishing mill. The essay was a hit. In rained plaudits from friends and admirers from around the country and abroad. Members of Washington’s Institute for Public Administration read it for insights into how to think about innovation. David Riesman assigned it to his students at Harvard. Goran Ohlin wrote from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development to say that he was applying the notion to industrial investment. Even within the World Bank, some could now see the point of the whole exercise. Andy Kamarck praised it: “You’ve helped in part to remove the unease that I have had in reflecting on the fact that if our modern project techniques had been used, much of the existing development in the world would never have been undertaken. It may be that with a further working out of the ideas that you explore in this chapter, we can avoid this future inhibitory role of economists.”
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One effect of the
Public Interest
story was to widen the gap between Hirschman’s aspirations and the bank staff’s internal concerns. It also took the sting out of the book’s reception. The charge that it was “insufficiently operational” (as one reviewer put it) was irritatingly sticky. Part of the problem was the understandable view that the work was commissioned by the bank or for the bank; that Brookings commissioned more policy-oriented work than academics also added to the impression. In effect,
Development Projects Observed
fell between the cracks. It got neglected as a work of scholarship because it was pegged as a manual, yet it was ignored by practitioners because it was too arch. Hans Singer found the style was “a little recherché” and complained that Hirschman had a tendency to “over-elaborate” in a book that he otherwise found one of the most original in the field. This annoyed Hirschman. When Singer likened Hirschman (in a fashion intended to flatter) to Arnold Toynbee and his theory of challenge-and-response mechanisms in the rise and fall of civilizations, Hirschman lashed out: “My thinking is at the antipodes of Toynbee’s.” Toynbee’s main contribution, in any event, “was nonsense.… The minor idea, that a challenge must be neither too big nor too small, is not Toynbee’s at all, but goes back at least as far as Aristotle who said that virtue lies often between the vices (cowardice-courage-foolhardiness). It is not legitimate to label anyone whose thinking can be supposed to contain some such Aristotelian proposition somewhere as a Toynbee disciple unless the proposition is specifically tied up with the challenge-and-response
Quatsch
[“rubbish,” in German], which it certainly is not in my case.”
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Then there was the voice from the other side. A retrospective history of the World Bank recorded
Development Projects Observed
as the most extensive evaluation of the bank’s techniques of project appraisal. The authors—one of whom was Bob Asher, and not therefore unsympathetic to the project he had helped sire—concluded that the book “does not lend itself to use as a manual for the instruction of the would-be project appraisers, but the insights it provides could be neglected by such appraisers only at considerable cost.” Written in 1973, just as a firestorm over World Bank activities was gathering strength, Asher didn’t connect the
book to the growing chorus of complaints about the bank’s practices in part because, by then,
Development Projects Observed
was all but forgotten beyond a few staffers.
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It was ironic that 1973 saw the smallish Programming and Budgeting Department finally upgraded into the fully fledged Operation Evaluation Division to monitor projects independently from those who managed them. The men behind this quiet but significant shift cited
Development Projects Observed
as the inciter; by then, many on the outside saw this as too little, too late.
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Needless to say, Hirschman was disappointed. He thought that he’d captured some of the mysteries of development, had sung their epic, and had made the case for the World Bank at a time in which doubts and disaffection were spreading fast. Some years later, a young political scientist, Theodore Moran, shared his outrage that the World Bank president, Robert McNamara, declared his intention to focus on income redistribution programs while pumping more money into authoritarian Brazil than into socialist and democratic Chile, whose loan requests were slammed shut. A jaded Hirschman replied that “I am somewhat less excited than you about the inner contradictions of the current World Bank position because I have been through it all before. It’s really a replay (in comedy form, to prove Marx right) of all the naïveté and muddle of the Alliance for Progress.” Having made constructive criticisms before, he was not convinced that speaking out to McNamara was going to have any effect. Any declaration in favor of reformism is less than pointless, “
especially
,” added Hirschman, by now becoming more embittered, “when it is well known that he [McNamara] is tied up in all sorts of ways with the pro-status-quo forces in the to-be-reformed country and has a deadly terror of revolution.”
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This was not the first time he had authored a work that missed its mark. Nor would it be the last; Hirschman’s oeuvre would accumulate big hits and minor disappointments.

But there was not much time to worry. In a sense, by the time the book appeared in 1967, Hirschman was moving on, literally. The academic year 1964–65 had been the time “off” to do the field work. The following year, Sarah and Albert rented a place in Cambridge but were still based
in New York, and Albert did most of his writing from Central Park West. They finally moved to Cambridge in fall of 1966 and bought a house, 45 Holden St., in the thick of a community of colleagues, “very close to the University,” he told Ursula, “which is very nice—but very expensive.” Moving away from New York also meant leaving behind the girls. Missing them terribly, Albert and Sarah accepted any pretext to take the train to New York. Meanwhile, in late 1966, Katia was engaged to marry a student of architecture from France, Alain Salomon. Sarah and Albert were concerned. While “he seems very nice, intelligent, and has talent for what he does,” he had not yet finished his studies. Alain himself was no less worried. During Sarah and Albert’s peregrinations, he frequently stayed at the Central Park West and was daunted by the art, the books, and the aura of the home of a “great man.” One day he traveled up to Cambridge to meet his future parents-in-law; by the time he emerged from the subway station at Harvard Square to walk to the Hirschman’s temporary abode in Quincy House, he was in a fit of anxiety, and by the time he rang to doorbell he could barely speak. To break the silence, Albert proposed a game of chess—after all you are a European, thought Hirschman. Albert’s friendly gesture only worsened things for Alain, who played miserably and in misery. It did not take too much time for Albert to find a hook, a recent book by Christopher Alexander,
Notes on the Synthesis of Form
, which had recently laid out an agenda for revolutionizing architecture. Alain’s eyes widened; an economist au courant with the ur-text for the rebellious, young designers! What he did not yet know was that Hirschman had antennae for clarion calls for the inventive imagination. Alain’s intimidation soon passed—and a genuine fondness took its place.
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With
Development Projects Observed
off to the printers, Latin America summoned Hirschman back. Part of the motivation was to live up to his Harvard profile as a Latin American specialist: “Je suis accusé être specialiste.” But he was also concerned to stay in touch with colleagues and to follow up on the fate of reform. If the World Bank was not a hospitable place for out-of-the-box thinking, Latin America was becoming more so, and Hirschman was anxious to be there at the creation. “I have decided that it is time for me to return to this Latin America,” he explained to
Ursula. With his classes done, he hit the road once more—a month in Brazil, a week in Chile, a few days in Lima—principally to visit Lisa, who was on a Fulbright scholarship in the Peruvian capital—and then back to his old haunt, Colombia, for three more weeks, where Sarah was going to catch up with him. These were months dedicated to catching up after five years focused elsewhere. A great deal had happened—not least was the 1964 coup in Brazil, which had so disheartened him. Midway through the trip, he was already imagining a book of essays on the political economy of the region. “I am always very happy to be plunged again into these countries—where one lives more intensely, but perhaps it’s not the ideal to pursue? But the truth is, it is difficult to resist.”
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Chile drew his attention in particular. It was an increasingly solitary holdout for development through democratic reform. Whereas Brazilian and Argentine civilian governments had fallen under the heels of the military, Chileans embarked on audacious reform under the Christian Democratic president, Eduardo Frei, whom Hirschman had met during the research for
Journeys
. In addition, the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) was based in Santiago, as was the Latin American Faculty of Social Science (FLACSO), a UN-chartered graduate school. This turned Santiago into a Mecca for progressive social scientists from the region, such as Osvaldo Sunkel, Aníbal Pinto, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso—a future close colleague and eventual Brazilian president. Cardoso, recently exiled from Brazil, was laboring on an essay about employment patterns in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. At the time, there was growing concern about the deep, ingrained—and apparently insurmountable—obstacles to development in Latin America. A growing hypothesis was that Latin America was stuck in an economic cul-de-sac, unable to break out of trap of dependency on primary exports and weak industry. One manifestation of the trouble was the growing “marginalization” of the urban poor, who were pushed to the outskirts of the labor market and chances for upward mobility. None of this convinced Cardoso, who sought to disrupt the emerging consensus by pointing to more historical openings and multiple pathways. He passed a draft of his essay to Hirschman—who read it upon his return to the United States
and wrote a quick note to the young Brazilian sociologist. “We have similar minds,” he observed to a delighted Cardoso.
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Sunkel, Pinto, Cardoso, and others each in their own way caught Hirschman’s eye because they were poised to challenge the view of ineluctable dependency of Latin American economies and unavoidable marginalization of the poor, what he coined as a “structuralist fallacy.” Faced with an ailment, some people convince themselves that there is nothing fundamentally wrong and treat themselves with aspirin to deal with pain. Then there was the opposite—people who prescribe radical cures when only mild treatments will do; this was the mood in Latin America, where many social scientists were concluding that the older growth model of industrialization for the domestic market was exhausted, its populist political pillars of Perón and Vargas likewise spent. The preference for this kind of fundamental diagnosis was especially current in Latin America, where “crisis” was treated as endemic; hence the fallacy that all problems had some deep-rooted cause. It was so pervasive that even Hirschman found himself read as a “structuralist”champion. On a trip to Argentina, at the time under the thumb of a junta, a high-ranking official gleefully told Hirschman that “all we are doing is applying your ideas of unbalanced growth. In Argentina we cannot achieve all our political, social, and economic objectives at once; therefore we have decided to proceed by stages, as though in an unbalanced growth sequence.” Hirschman blanched. Here was imbalance and disequilibrium in the service of breaking up what the generals considered entrenched hindrances to Argentine progress.
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