Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (56 page)

Albert and Ed Lindblom in Colombia, 1960.

A “wrong-way-around” style drew the two together. One can see Hirschman, from 1958 onward, complementing his insights about disequilibrium and imbalance with an understanding of the role of perceptions and policies. It helped that Lindblom was as detached an observer as one could find; he had never been to the Third World and he didn’t speak a word of Spanish. Inquisitive to a fault, he came to the partnership bereft of preconceptions and eager to soak up what he could—from the profound to the banal. Throughout their trips, Lindblom pushed and prodded Hirschman to step back, to be more analytical, to develop and test hypotheses. Often, on the heels of an interview, Albert would
be greeted by an extensive memorandum of analytical insights. Midway through the project, Ed wrote up seventeen “miscellaneous hypotheses” about problem solving in Latin America, bits and pieces of which one can see developed in the book that would emerge from the flow between the two social scientists—one the careful observer, the seeker of surprises; the other endowed with a sharp and restless conceptual mind.
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What came of all this was not the once-envisioned book. Lindblom’s notes reveal the limits of the partnership. “In my last afternoon and evening here in Rio, we may or may not get around to talking about the overall plan of the book,” Lindblom noted, “so let me put down for what it is worth the feeling I now have that five narratives and a concluding chapter, such as you have been proposing, seems to me to underplay the analytical material that would go into the final chapter.” What Ed wanted was less storytelling for each case—which had been Albert’s preference—and rather a strong opening set of conceptual chapters, with subsequent short portrait chapters, followed again by systematic comparison and analysis. During the Chilean leg, he dictated a running commentary and had his tapes typed up and sent to Albert, urging a theoretical treatment that “free [the chapters] from the charge of being journalistic, how they can engage a social scientist’s interest rather than ask him to defer his scientific interest until the concluding chapter.”
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The two eventually parted ways, but not before Lindblom helped Hirschman to think hard on the delusions, illusions, and ironies that riddle the policy maker.

While the pair sorted things out, Hirschman had his own concerns to labor on. One was the on-going effort to convert the principles embedded in
Strategy
into mathematical equations, something he had tried when he first arrived at Yale but suspended. Evidently, he still felt the need to prove some bona fides to his profession. Hirschman’s arithmetic was good, but not advanced, as measured by the standards of increasing numbers of his peers, and certainly compared to the way the RAND mathematicians and economists were formalizing propositions about the world in complex formulae. In fact, going to the RAND brought him even more face-to-face with the quantitative turn in the social sciences and revealed this gap. Hirschman consulted his new colleagues for months and experimented
but could never satisfy himself that he could capture nuances better in numbers than he could with words. Once again, he abandoned the challenge.
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The RAND also wanted Hirschman to contribute more directly to their security concerns in Latin America. Nixon’s 1958 “goodwill tour” of the region was an embarrassing fiasco, and the vice president skulked home from Caracas after nearly being lynched. Massive railway workers’ strikes paralyzed Mexico. Civilian unrest toppled military regimes in Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela, giving way to populist and increasingly nationalist governments. Finally, the triumphs of the Cuban revolutionaries over the course of 1958 prompted Wolf to ask Hirschman to return to an old concern: how international trade affected political loyalties, specifically evaluating Soviet trading interests in the region and the implications for US policy. Hirschman submitted his report in September 1959, by which time relations between Havana and Washington were spiraling downward and Khrushchev had opened trade negotiations with Castro. Hirschman urged American policy makers to take the long view: consider the potentially beneficial effects of what looked like setbacks. Why not let Latin Americans trade with whomever they wished and the region’s new generation of leaders develop voluntary ties with Washington? Otherwise, Americans would be seen as meddlers. Noninterference would also allow Latin Americans to see Soviet promises and rhetoric for what they were firsthand—inflated. The bottom line was not just antialarmist: gains from trade to Latin America from commerce with the Soviet bloc would promote development, and development would raise incomes and therefore imports from other countries, including the United States.

What looked like a simple loss could be a complex gain. Examine the meaning of
influence
very carefully, urged Hirschman, and see that even an increment of Soviet sway might have the paradoxical effect of augmenting US influence.
Fortuna est servitus
, he concluded.
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Seeing his prophesies ignored did little to endear him to American policy makers oozing with bravado. When Kennedy advisors tried to enlist Hirschman to the Alliance for Progress, he greeted them with interested skepticism. After a day at the White House with Richard Goodwin,
the man in charge of US relations with Latin America who made the pitch for an Operation Latin America, Hirschman said no; he was wary of its “simplistic optimism.” Washington’s grand schemes brought back unpleasant memories. “It must be admitted,” he told his brother-in-law Altiero Spinelli, “that it is not easy to escape from the Establishment in this country; for example, after my rather critical article on Latin America last year I was flooded with offers to take on this or that job in connection with the Alliance for Progress.”
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Two weeks later, the CIA uncorked a misbegotten plan to overthrow Castro with a barely clandestine invasion botched at the Bay of Pigs. Hirschman was horrified that the Kennedy administration would offer aid with one hand and covert operations with the other. Worse, the Cuban debacle could not help but make efforts to refurbish US-sponsored reform even more difficult. He sat down to pen his criticisms of the Alliance for Progress for the
Reporter
, edited by an old friend, Max Ascoli. He argued that the alliance improved on the mindless interventionism of previous years, but it still represented another case of the “misreading of the mood of Latin America.” Just as Soviet cozying to Latin America was bound to reveal some truths about Moscow’s peddled illusions, so too Washington’s lofty rhetoric stood a better chance at tarnishing itself. Do not be surprised, Hirschman warned readers, if Latin Americans are less pleased with a promised “alliance” (whose military overtones did not escape him) than its architects supposed. Faced with a wave of nationalist governments in many Latin American capitals, “we may well have to choose between
alianza
and
progreso
,” he concluded.
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Before all this, Hirschman’s worries about his personal future began to mount. His leads at Rockefeller and Yale were running out. He had worked hard to get
Strategy
into the hands of influential readers, but the book would not appear until the fall of 1958. Now the RAND holding operation was ending. As far as North American universities were concerned, he was still a little-known author of a few suggestive essays with an unpublished PhD from an obscure Italian university. With two daughters facing high school and finally acclimated to the United States, he faced the prospect of dashing more than his own hopes.
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Behind the scenes, Yale moved slowly to turn his fellowship into an appointment in the Department of Economics. Meanwhile, a prospect opened up at Columbia University. The economist Ragnar Nurkse went on leave from Columbia for the academic year 1958–59. In May, he accepted a position at Princeton, only to die suddenly of a heart attack. In desperation, Columbia approached Hirschman to teach international economics in September. With no other option, he accepted. Never having taught a class, he prepared to take up his first academic appointment with but a few weeks’ notice. That fall,
Strategy
appeared, followed by the volley of attention. Without much ado, Columbia rushed to convert his sessional appointment into a permanent one.

One might have thought that this stroke of good fortune would have led to exaltation. It was Montaigne who noted that some of life’s greatest pleasures are those for which one is least prepared. Certainly, landing a position at Columbia finally enabled this peripatetic thinker, laboring at the edges of being an intellectual, finally to combine a career and a passion and aim them both in the same direction. Hirschman was delighted. And yet, from the start of his passage into academe, we face evidence that he was not altogether resolved to equate being an academic with being an intellectual. Hirschman greeted his first faculty appointment with deep ambivalence about being the “professor.” At best, it was a job. When he got the news he would be going to Columbia for a year, he told Ursula that “I [will be] a visiting professor, but this time I will have to teach—international economics, international capital movements, seminars etc.—at Columbia University. I don’t know how that will be. I have never done that before, and I am currently preparing my lectures (Just started with it and think it’s utterly boring!).” A few months later, his mood had changed a bit: “I myself am quite excited about life here,” he said, confessing to being “still quite worried about my ability to give a lecture every week.”
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Hirschman made few friends at Columbia, in part because his sojourn there was brief and interrupted by frequent trips. One was Dankwart Rustow, a Middle East specialist interested in democracy. At the time, Samuel Huntington was also at Columbia, and the two of them organized seminars
together. Another friend was James Tobin, in the economics department, who, after he learned that smoking cigarettes was cancerous, convinced Hirschman to join him in quitting. Hirschman, not much more than a social smoker, took another decade to kick the habit completely. On the whole, however, Hirschman was marginal to Columbia; there was a miss-match between the institution and their new star. He was hardly mainstream to the discipline, so Hirschman opted out of the economics department’s activities; his closest colleagues were in other social sciences units. He did not even like his office; Albert switched styles and began to write at home, setting up a small study in the bedroom of their flat in 350 Central Park West. Though the seventh-floor, two-bedroom apartment was small, it was uncramped because the family had left so much behind in Colombia. But it was bright, cozy, and adjacent to Central Park, perfect for long walks. A photo of Albert taken in the fall of 1961 has him at a cluttered desk with his bibliographic necessities on shelves behind him, a scene of solitary comfort in the nest of a master bedroom.
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This marginality was tightly bound to Hirschman’s attitude to teaching. It was a necessary but almost entirely aversive task. From the day he took the position, he fretted, “How to do this?” One of his first steps was to find an empty classroom. He locked the door and essayed a dry-run lecture to vacant seats. The result made him groan. Practice makes perfect for some, but not for Hirschman. Teaching was a source of anxiety he would never dispel. There was something insufferable about the sermonic style that dominated the pedagogy of the American academy. The capsule of a one-hour lecture in which one was expected to bundle truths on a topic, leave the hall, and repeat the performance later in the week on some other topic violated his inclination to present students with enigmas, paradoxes, and ironies and to mull them as he did his petites idées. As a largely self-taught intellectual, the very idea of “teaching” was utterly foreign. Try as he might, he never got the knack. And he tried mightily, often rushing to a bathroom before a lecture to vomit his anxiety into a toilet. To students, the angst came across as distraction. He rambled. He mumbled. Mid-sentence he would pause, his right hand supporting his chin, his eyes drifting upward to fasten on a spot on the ceiling. Students
would shuffle uncomfortably in their seats for what felt like an eternity. Sarah, meanwhile, knowing of his misery, would wait at home in a gloom she kept to herself.

His lecture scripts provide some insight into what was going on. He would type out long phrases and paragraphs, possibly in the hope that writing out the lecture longhand would spare him the agony of having to improvise—that handy technique of the cocky professor. But then he could not resist the temptation to revise; he filled the double-spacing with scribbled edits, relentlessly striking out words and clauses and wedging his revisions between the lines. If the editing got too heavy, there would be supplemental passages on separate sheets—themselves full of strikeouts and revisions, which would condemn him to flipping back and forth between pages of scrawl. A paragraph of a lecture could be an interminable, winding affair. One of his favorite development examples was coffee as an export crop. After so many years in Colombia he should have been able to explain the case effortlessly. But no, a simple example consumed ten technical lines without a pause, embellished with multiple insertions and modifications. Then came a digression, as if Hirschman were engaged in a private conversation with himself. “True, but: …” he continued.
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All this with an old world accent did not help.