Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (76 page)

As with any effort to give Hirschman’s life history a shape, the story is invariably more complex and not always forward-moving. For one, the books that influenced him as a young man did not retire to the bookshelf. His dog-eared books were worn; the copy of
The Wealth of Nations
had long since lost its binding, though his Pléiade edition of Montaigne’s
Essais
remained remarkably intact. Just as he was taken to rethinking his own work, he reread his formative influences, forever finding new meaning in the subtle folds of their prose. During a meeting in São Paulo in 1971, Harley Browning, a sociologist from the University of Texas, turned to Albert and asked him how he came up with such captivating titles. “I always read Flaubert,” Hirschman replied.
¹

Flaubert, Montaigne, Smith, Marx … and Machiavelli. Reading Machiavelli began when he was twenty years old (“a good time to read M,” he once told an audience), living in Paris and making his first steps into exiled Italian antifascist circles “reading Machiavelli and Leopardi.”
²
He
read M. again in Trieste, with Eugenio. When he got to Berkeley (with Montaigne’s
Essays
under his arm), he went to the library and signed out a copy of M.’s correspondences. This was how he started his first book, with Machiavelli’s confession to Francesco Vettori that he knew little about the “art” of the economy, which resigned him “to reason about the state.”
The Prince
travelled with him as a member of the OSS during the Italian campaign. Hirschman always kept Machiavelli close at hand, not just for
what
he thought about the mysteries of power, but for
how
he thought, how a writer portrayed man—including himself—as a stage upon which competing drives played out their drama.
³
This is one of the reasons why Machiavelli’s epistles to Vettori became a refrain. Seven months after confiding his feeble command over trades to the Tuscan diplomat, friend, and hoped-for patron, Machiavelli shared an embellished account of his exile from Florence as a wanderer, hunting for thrushes and gathering firewood, playing cards and backgammon with the local “lice [to] ease my brain from its rot,” he would return home in the evenings, cast off his dirty clothes and boots and “put on the garments of court and palace.” Properly attired, he went to his study to dine in “the courts of the ancients.” There, “I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.” From these conversations with the ancients, Machiavelli explained, he wrote what he learned, a “short study,
De principatibus
, in which I delve as deeply as I can into the ideas concerning this topic, debating what a princedom is, of what kinds they are, how they are gained, how they are kept, and why they are lost.”
⁴

This was one of Hirschman’s favorite passages and he treated it as a dreamscape for himself, an allusion to an idyll where one could meet the ancients; a place free of shame or fear; a place where after a day’s hard work in the fields of Third World development one might contemplate princedoms with ancient philosophers. Machiavelli’s ritualized encounters with the ghosts of classicism were, in a sense, Hirschman’s; he too treated the dialogue with the deceased—through their books—with the
proper reverence, down to the sartorial preparations associated with Renaissance custom. In the halls in Princeton, people singled out Hirschman as dapper as he was learned, his garments carefully chosen from a clothier in Paris’s sixth arrondissement so that his vestments befit the honor with which he prepared to greet Machiavelli in the sanctuary of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Life with Machiavelli surfaced again in October 1976. Hirschman was rereading
The Prince
and
Discourses
after a long and saddening trip to South America that summer, where the abuse of power was on open display, “and the impact is extraordinary,” he told Katia.
⁵
When it comes to Machiavelli, he said effacingly, “I consider myself a dilettante.” But the excitement was back, not least because he found proof that M. had embarked “on a new route, which has not been followed by any one.” Like M., Hirschman was wading into the “experience of what it is to think
dangerous
thoughts,” to disturb “fearlessness in facing the truth that may be terrible.” These are Hirschman’s words, not M.’s, but they are premised on his understanding of “Machiavelli as the first big unmasker of [the] Modern Age—[to show] how things
really
happen in politics.” But he also recalled that at the age of twenty he had been most impressed by M.’s “search for
regola generale
= generalizations,” which he likened to “Marx’s law of motion.” Almost half a century later, a grown-up Hirschman encountered in M. a skeptic trying to unmask the ironies of “historical
regola
.” “Not only is man a rather contemptible creature,” Hirschman explained, “but the world is rather poorly (or maliciously) arranged.” Repeatedly he found in
The Prince
examples of situations “where for success to be assured one needs simultaneously two ingredients, but only one is usually to be had at one time … never both together.” So we can find kingly people without kingdoms and kings deprived of kingly qualities. Seldom do they coincide. This is why it was necessary for good men to usurp power (and behave badly) in order to restore liberties (which is good)—the alignment of an “exceptional man” and fortune to “overcome basic conspiracies against success.” Here we have Hirschman already pondering how Fortuna might turn her back on reform and force the social scientist—is he referring to himself, one might ask?—to take a different
tack: “It struck me that M argues like an economist trying to make the best of scarce resources—you just can’t be a paragon of virtue and maintain the state at the same time—so you must maximize morality under constraint of state-maintenance just as a consumer maximizes satisfaction under budget constraint.”
⁶

One reason why Machiavelli’s dream appealed to Hirschman was because he felt increasingly drawn into a dialogue with his intellectual ancestors, forever trying to explain to them the events around him and enlisting their wisdom. A dialogue for the most part conducted in his head, it is manifest in his ramblings, in the file of “favorite quotes,” and in his occasional letters. His personal diary reveals him meditating on “two classic paradoxes.” They are

1. For things to function or to be worthwhile, for life to change to be possible or to prosper, there is need for two contradictory requirements to be fulfilled: e.g. in a state there must be both power and participation, in a marriage similarity and diversity.

2. The various states of the world are often arranged in a circle, not along a straight line, with the best and worst states close together: that is, maximum participation and mass indoctrination as in a police state touch each other with demobilized, bureaucratic elitist regimes (democratic and otherwise) at opposite sides of [a] circle; or in father-daughter relative closeness is close to incest and both are equally far from coldness-indifference.

“I feel there is a connection between these two principles,” he concluded.

The search for insights into the ambiguities and contradictions of his age—heightened freedom coinciding with ruthless abuses, prosperity mixed with terrible want—suggested that these apparent incompatibilities were in fact siblings. It sent him backward to a founding moment in the making of the modern world. Were there currents of thought that could be recovered as historical lanterns for the future now that, as far as Hirschman was concerned, the quest for simplifying yet technically
awesome methods was yielding diminishing returns? He folded himself into the problem. In writing to Katia about his preface to a W. W. Norton edition of
Journeys
he felt it necessary to deal with “certain overoptimistic passages of the end of my stories.” Looking up “must be understood,” he felt, “as a fling to which every writer has a good right at the end of his effort.” Ending this way was “part exhortation, part incantation.” “After all,” he exhorted, “didn’t Machiavelli predict the imminent unification of Italy in the last chapter of
The Prince
?” He liked this self-defense: “I really enjoyed that not-so-subtle way of putting myself into Machiavelli’s class—one can do that by claiming the same weakness or foibles,” with the hope “that one also shares their other attributes.”
⁷

Moving to the Institute for Advanced Study may have been a dream come true, but for a man whose circuitous career was bereft of the normal professional rungs, it was not just another step. Rather, it was a setting for conversations with the ancients in the search for intellectual pathways, conversations he kept until then only in the precincts of his own mind. In the mid-1960s, the board of trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study began to consider its future when the long-time director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, came down with cancer in 1965. Since its creation in 1930, this shelter for European scholars, especially in the natural sciences and mathematics, had become famous for its string of Nobel Prizes. The goal was to spare great minds the tedium of real-world constraints, to let them mingle with one another, and thus propagate more great minds—and their ideas. So it was that the IAS rested on the precept that some minds teach best by not teaching at all. But thirty years later, it was coming under fire for being altogether too removed from the real world; some lampooned it as a pampered haven for pointy-headed academics freed from the grimy world of undergraduates. Felix Frankfurter, very much a man in the world, had warned the institute’s founder, Abraham Flexner, that a “paradise for scholars” need not imply they were angels; “we are dealing with humans.”
⁸
The Supreme Court jurist had a point, and it was one that echoed in the minds of the institute’s trustees. The board worried that what it needed was a new “School” alongside the Schools of Historical Studies, Mathematics, and Natural Sciences (Physics). This would be in
the social sciences, so that the activities of the institute would be more engaged with the problems of the world. To this end, they recruited Carl Kaysen, the chair of Harvard’s economics department and senior foreign affairs advisor to President Kennedy in 1966 to take over from the dying Oppenheimer and to undertake the modernization of the organization nestled in the woods of Princeton. This major departure was not altogether welcome by many permanent members of the other schools. They grumbled but did not get in the way.

Not long after Kaysen moved to Princeton, he began conversations with several of the United States’ leading social scientists, including former economics colleagues from Harvard and sociologists such as Robert Merton at Columbia and Edward Shils at Chicago. Merton and Shils urged Kaysen to reach out to the University of Chicago anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, a star in the field of symbolic anthropology, who laid stress on the construction of the social meaning of everyday rituals and symbols to move away from the rather wooly and excessive use of cultural “attitudes.” Noted for his pioneering field work in Indonesia, he had just published a study of Islam in Morocco when he got Kaysen’s call. Geertz took up the challenge and moved to Princeton in 1970. Geertz and Kaysen became the founders of the new, modest Program in Social Change, established with the notion that it would not seek to replicate university departments. It needed to have its own orientation to contemporary history and current affairs and skirt theoretical and analytic preoccupations of the academy.

Hirschman arrived in the second year of the Kaysen-Geertz experiment, vacating his Harvard office to Amartya Sen, who was spending the year in Cambridge—and who luxuriated in Albert’s assortment of literature and history on the bookshelves. Hirschman’s first go-around in 1972–73 at the institute was a mixed experience. If he thought he was escaping the turmoil at Harvard, he found himself in the midst of worse in Princeton. There were some upsides. The other visiting fellows, such as David Apter, who had been Geertz’s colleague at the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations at Chicago, and the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, became lasting acquaintances. Hirschman became
especially close to Geertz. The project also evolved. As he reported to Kaysen at the end of his visit, the reading and discussion with colleagues has “led me to expand considerably my original project.” In fact, he was a little misleading; the original project had long since fallen by the wayside. The real problem was a furor that had exploded over his head. The atmosphere, he wrote to Kaysen, “has been too antagonistic.”
⁹

What Hirschman was referring to was an upheaval over the expansion of the Program in Social Change. No sooner was Hirschman installed than Kaysen and Geertz submitted the nomination to the institute faculty for a third permanent social scientist: Robert Bellah, a prominent sociologist from Berkeley. Working on religion in the United States and Japan, and well-known for having coined the term “American civil religion” in an essay about the country’s moral values, Bellah had been educated at Harvard, along with Geertz, under the mentorship of Talcott Parsons; his coming to the institute would have represented a kind of rebirth of Harvard’s interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations, amalgamating sociology, anthropology, and psychology and thus stepping outside the prevailing trend in universities toward disciplinary and departmental structures. Geertz and Bellah did not aspire to transcend the chasm between positivist and hermeneutic traditions, as Parsons had, with a model of their own; they had seen firsthand how Parsons’ ambitions led to ornate schemes whose increasingly incomprehensible features were the price he paid for trying to integrate these two large traditions. Still, they shared misgivings about the drift of mainstream social science and agreed that the institute might provide an outpost for an alternative.