Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (15 page)

Meanwhile, Hirschmann had ideas for himself. Though he spent the first months wondering how long he would have to wait to return home, it did not take him long to move on. Indeed, there were early indications that he was considering staying in France for a while. In early 1933, as another gray winter was lifting, he wrote a letter to his former girlfriend, Inge Franck, Peter’s sister. He had to apologize for leaving Berlin without saying goodbye and for not having written yet. She replied: “I believe you will always be pressed for time.”
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She was prescient. In the next few years, there would be a sense of restlessness in Hirschmann’s choices and commitments, a waning appeal of return but no clear sign that he wanted to go anywhere else in particular. Hirschmann was neither a cast-away Odysseus struggling to get home nor an immigrant determined to make himself anew in another place. There is more of a wandering quality; one that would detach him gradually from inherited ways of thinking about the world.

The Paris that greeted Hirschmann in 1933 was in some ways not unlike Berlin a few years earlier. The Great Depression had eviscerated the prosperity of the 1920s. France’s slump was less precipitous than Germany’s; it was delayed. By 1933, when Germany, Britain, and the United States were showing inklings of recovery, France was beginning to suffer seriously. Businesses were collapsing, factories shutting down, and the protectionist cycle on the rise. By 1935, one in six workers was unemployed. Wages were cut drastically. Everywhere people tightened their belts and did with less—less food, less coal, less everything. In early 1934, the Théâtre de la Michodière opened its doors to Édouard Bourdet’s
Les Temps difficiles
; factory closures were as much the backdrop as the stage on which the actors performed. Among the options that Hirschmann had, finding a real job with career prospects was not, in these circumstances,
in the cards. Aside from tutoring the Dupuy boys in German, he would have to find his sustenance, and fill his days, doing something else.
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This did not bother Hirschmann; he had a quarry in mind. His brief time at the University of Berlin had piqued his interest in economics. The question now was how to pursue his studies in Paris, where Hirschmann did not have at his disposal the same code of understanding he enjoyed in Berlin. One of his first destinations in Paris was the Librairie Gibert Jeune on Boulevard Saint Michel; he emerged with a copy of
Le livret de l’étudiant
, a bulky compendium of information about Paris’s schools. He began to pore over it and found just the place: the École libre des sciences politiques, known as Sciences Po. This is where he wanted to study. At this point, another contact influenced the course of Hirschmann’s decisions. Ulrich Friedemann, his father’s best friend, had given OA the name of a distinguished French pediatrician, Robert Debré. Hirschmann plucked up the courage to approach him, and Debré invited him over to his home, a capacious villa on the Left Bank, to hear the young German’s story. When Otto Albert explained that he wanted to study economics at a place described in the
livret
, Sciences Po, Debré summoned his son, Michel Debré (later a prominent Gaullist), who was at the time enrolled at that institution. Only a few years older than OA, Michel Debré also listened to Hirschmann’s story. But when he got to Sciences Po, Michel dissuaded him from considering it because “you are a refugee, you can
never
become a diplomat or a civil servant,” and Sciences Po was tailored only for that kind of career. Why not consider another grande école, such as the École des hautes études commerciales de Paris? Better known as HEC, this école was more oriented to people with a business career in mind and still qualified, at least on paper, as one of France’s elite schools. This seemed like sensible enough advice; after all, the stateless Hirschmann was barred from most liberal professions. The elder Debré was keen to see Otto Albert pursue his interests and agreed that his son’s advice probably made good sense. Whether there is a whiff of anti-Semitism in the advice to study business and accounting, not economics and statesmanship, is impossible to know, though Sciences Po was not known for its hospitality to Jews.
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The option for HEC had its appeals, but it had not jumped out from the pages of the
livret
, for the fact was, Hirschmann had little interest in being a businessman. It had no affinity with the liberal arts that he had been raised to value. As a result, Sciences Po would always gnaw at his soul because he hadn’t pursued it more fully; he nurtured a sense that the education he might have gotten there would have better satisfied his academic curiosities, not least because the education that he did get at HEC was miserable. Every time he neared rue Saint-Guillaume, where Sciences Po’s main building was located, an inner wave of lament would sweep over him; in general not a man to nurse regrets, this was a misfortune that was difficult to forget. The main advantage of HEC was that it enabled him to move to the Cité Internationale Universitaire, a cluster of dormitories on Boulevard Jourdan for foreign students and French citizens from outside Paris, and by a stroke of luck, he found lodgings in the Maison des Étudiants Arméniens.

Getting through the dispiriting routine of HEC testifies to Hirschmann’s determination and to his sense that he should make the best of his limited options. Among HEC’s first appeals was that it was perceived as an elite, discerning, place to study. The École des hautes études commerciales was one in a constellation of grandes écoles, selective institutions of higher education designed to train France’s elite to rule the country. And yet, from its opening in the 1880s, it never quite gained the status of its predecessors and was regarded more as a “petite grande école” or for snootier commentators, a “
super-lycée
.” Attending HEC was a way for well-to-do young men to reduce their military service from three to one year by, in effect, taking accounting and banking courses. By 1923, after the upheavals of the war, the HEC directors set out to upgrade the curriculum, and even borrowed examples of the Harvard Business School—with few results and no dent in its reputation as a “wannabe” school. Through the 1930s, it had chronic “empty classrooms and [a] disconnected attitude regarding the life of enterprise.” Admission standards collapsed, thus aggravating the sense that the school did little for elites to perpetuate their status; and with low enrollments, the school’s revenues slumped; and without tuitions, professors’ pay was miserly, and many quit or ignored
their duties.
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For Hirschmann, the heart of the problem at HEC was basic: it did not teach economics. Even in Berlin he was aware that economics was more than the study of how businesses functioned, as if the mysteries of supply and demand could be reduced to routine practices of double-entry bookkeeping and rudimentary engineering. But that is precisely what HEC offered. One of Hirschmann’s courses was on “technology,” which amounted to excurses into various aspects of industrial processing, with special emphasis on
concassage
(crushing). This was a far cry from David Ricardo, Adam Smith, or the analysis of the causes of the Great Depression that dominated his reading in Berlin. OA found it mind-numbing.

There were a few exceptions, but they more often proved the general rule about HEC faculty. Albert Demangeon gave “brilliant lectures” in economic geography, enlivened—rare for an HEC professor—with large, colorful maps. A specialist in the study of how economic sectors were located in particular places and the role of natural resources in industrial development, Demangeon introduced Hirschmann to the notion of interregional commerce and trade between geographic zones as precepts of global traffic. A lecture on the competition between Antwerp and Rotterdam provided a dramatic illustration of how underlying structural forces shaped economic rivalries. Another of Demangeon’s lectures dealt with Russia’s dependence on foreign trade before the First World War: the “black soil” of the Ukraine was a breadbasket for the rest of Europe and a source of hard exchange for the tsar. As Moscow joined the war, Russia’s minister of foreign trade was fond of exclaiming, “Let’s die of hunger,” though adding, “but let’s be sure to export!” Demangeon included his own addendum: “And the minister was the more ready to say that
he
was not the one about to die of hunger!” Hirschmann was rapt. Demangeon was not just making fun of a tsarist official, but also making a point about the dilemma that some countries
really
faced. For the first time, Hirschmann, the progeny of a political economy hinged on the labor theory of value, began to think about conflict in terms beyond the prism of social classes, about sources of world disequilibrium lying outside the tension between bosses and workers. Demangeon laid some
very preliminary grounds for Hirschmann’s thinking about trade and economic development. It was also a very pragmatic, empirical sensibility that liberated Hirschmann from the abstract Marxism of the 1930s—or for that matter, planners and Keynesians in the 1950s whose elegant but grandiose mechanisms never appealed to Hirschmann’s real-worldliness.
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The Académie pour étudiants étrangers, where he was required to enroll as the portal to HEC, seems to have taxed his stamina. He had no friends. The courses consisted mainly of accounting, which could not have been more distant from his readings of Otto Bauer or Hegel the year before. At the end of the year, Hirschmann took the comprehensive examinations, which would determine his eligibility to enter the main école. He sailed through and passed into the mainstream of the HEC curriculum, only to discover that it was only a notch above his first year’s studies. The courses were old-fashioned, dictated recitations of accounting, business, and legal matters that students were then expected to memorize for exams. There were no discussions, no readings beyond the basic manuals. Most students “were very nationalistic.” “We noted what the professor said, and that must be committed to memory. That was really horrible.” For all intents and purposes, there was no teaching of economics. “Today the HEC started again,” he wrote to his mother in April 1934, trying to strike an up-beat tone, “and it’s all about Statistics without interruption (with only 3 days for Pentecost) until July.” He managed to find some silver on the lining: “I work now more often in the—cute, small—library of the current National Statistics Office and spoke recently with the director there, who, in a very friendly manner gave me information about the exam and about a few things I didn’t understand from his lectures.”
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Hirschman’s life can be tracked by the ways in which he handled disappointment and idleness: the first was bearable, the second he loathed. Faced with HEC drudgery, he turned to what, for lack of anyone to tell him otherwise, he considered to be real economics, like that of Rosa Luxembourg and Rudolf Hilferding. Unfortunately for Hirschmann, these Marxist works were losing their appeal. But there was no one to instruct him on what he might read instead. Solace was found in long novels by Russian and French writers, thus inaugurating a habit of tacking between
the masterworks of fiction and hard-nosed political economy, and as so many of his readers have noted, finding the relations between the two. As his final exams at HEC approached, disheartened by the routine of memorization, he rediscovered Dostoevsky. He had asked his mother to send him his copies of
Crime and Punishment
(“and I repeat my request for more volumes,” he pleaded more than once). He had to study, “but now I must get to know more Dostoevsky.” He buried himself in
The Brothers Karamazov
. Instead of preparing for exams, he got lost in the epic drama about family, betrayal, religious doubt, and madness. This would cost him the top spot in his graduating class; Hirschmann blamed the brooding, Russian novelist. “I then received the diploma. That was the only thing that had any value, a diploma from the École des Hautes Études Commerciales.”
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There is a question of how he supported himself while he was a student. In the first few months, he was clearly dependent on remittances from Mutti. His letters to her in that first year acknowledge the receipt of transfers. What happened thereafter, especially as the Nazis plundered Mutti’s resources, is less clear. But among the few clues is a document in Hirschman’s personal papers from the Comité français de l’Entraide universitaire internationale that gave scholarships to students from around the world to attend French universities. This typed letter of glowing reference from R. Arasse, secretary of the Comité français, noted how O. A. Hirschmann “immediately called attention to us, for the titles that he possesses and the
notes élogieuses
that he has received in his examinations.” Clearly, the performance at the Collège in Berlin, a credential that would have called attention on its own, paid off. The letter, however, continued. It noted the baccalauréat, the fact that Monsieur Hirschmann was the “author” of a work on Hegel’s philosophy, with some sense that the Comité had received some kind of endorsement from one of his tutors, his
maître
(possibly Bernd Knoop), as well as his preliminary course work in political economy at the Institute of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Berlin. The letter refers to his two reports on classical political economy. The result: “We have therefore decided to help M. Hirschmann for the duration of his studies in France. He has not disappointed
us. After having successfully passed a certificate at the Institute for Statistics, he was accepted at” HEC. This letter is undated but appears to have been written prior to his having completed his studies at HEC, for it notes that Hirschman was currently ranked fifth in his class of 220 students, with reference to grades from two previous years of studies and preliminary results for his Easter examinations. There is an indication that he also made some money “by giving numerous lessons” and that he earned “each time,
des cerificats élogieux
.” Was this a letter recommending him for further scholarship—for instance to go to London? The timing might suggest so. But what it does imply is that the scholarship and part-time teaching covered his living.
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