Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (91 page)

In contrast to all his other work, the social bottom did the talking in Hirschman’s slim volume, which would appear as a special supplement to the journal
World Development
in 1984. Only in a final chapter where Hirschman dealt with intermediaries, the welter of
promoción social
agents, did he move a notch up the social ladder. He avoided ministers, intellectuals, senior bureaucrats; gone are the policy makers that dominated his attention for three decades. Now, Hirschman did not avoid
intellectuals; indeed, he met with them throughout the trip. In Peru he happened upon Hernando de Soto, who would later make himself famous as the champion of the informal economy and would become an influential policy maker in the 1990s. That evening, Hirschman noted, “self-made social scientist, interesting, leaning to Hayek?” He also had dinner with Mario and Patricia Vargas Llosa on the Malecón in Lima, and the night before that with Richard Webb, and the night before that with José Matos Mar. In Buenos Aires, Sarah and Albert spent a Sunday with Jorge Balan and Elizabeth Jelin wandering the parks and sculpture gardens and lunching on the shore of the River Plate. Albert devoured a
parrillada
of chorizo, morcilla, and beef while Jelin confided to Sarah some of her personal troubles. There were also the customary visits to the academic think tanks. But none of these are present in the work—despite the fact that as Hirschman travelled through the region he was witness to a raging debate over social movements and the agitation of poor folk.

Part of the explanation is that still in 1983, most policy makers worked for authoritarian regimes or governments with troublesome, if not horrific, human rights records. If anything, the “state” played the role of “aggressor”—bulldozing shantytowns in Argentina or dividing and selling common Mapuche land in Chile—to which civilians responded collectively. Indeed, violence shadowed the two researchers. Some of it came from obvious quarters, the militaries of Argentina and Chile. But persecution transcended the conventional image of state terror. As Sarah and Albert were escorted in a Jeep through the hills of Monte Azul in Colombia, someone pointed out a farm run by a recently widowed woman: “There are many widows around here,” one of their guides told them.
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The trip to Peru brushed Hirschman with the rising Maoist insurgent movement in Ayacucho. He got into Tingo Maria, the high jungle zone to which the expanding coca frontier had reached; the IAF had funded a peasant co-op, but it was wracked by struggles between landed interests, incumbent families, and the landless newcomers, refugees from the very social and political struggles that were sweeping across Ayacucho. What was once a “gem” of a project was now plagued by missing funds, and as Hirschman noted, pleas for more money from the IAF; early success
had given way to failure. And, judging from what would come, the coca frontier was a bonanza for some, but not for self-helping collectivism or peace.
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One might think that the general sense of upheaval in Latin America would overwhelm the travelogue: the recent explosion of the debt crisis, the growing crescendo of pressures to restore civilian rule, the “big” news that dominated the headlines. These were not absent. Indeed, it was the cold monster of the state that created the gap between the rights of Latin American citizens and policies, into which civic organizations poured their energies to create “safeguarding operations” for the people. But Hirschman’s eye was not on the macro. There was another reason for the simple style and close-to-the-ground content. The decision was
not
to write an academic treatise. Even though Elizabeth Jelin (on one side) and Hernando de Soto (on the other) represented emerging poles of what would become a vast scholarly field, and Hirschman was well aware of their research and positions, it was not with them that he wanted to engage in this work. In a sense, he preferred to close the gap between the reader and the subject, thus preferring the genre of the travelogue of development in action. One undoubted influence was Sarah, whose own organization devoted to collective reading and talking about short stories, Gente y Cuentos, was spreading its wings. This effort to talk about literature among groups traditionally marginal from high culture, to bridge literacy and orality and witness what happens, suggested a model for Hirschman’s own effort to connect subject and reader.

This left some obvious subjects out. Ministers and intellectuals were absent. But so too was the larger setting. Foreign debt, military dictatorship, and deindustrialization may have been the context, but they were not what captured Hirschman’s literary attention because private initiatives for social promotion and welfare came not from elites and educated classes—as was the case for Western Europe and North American before the advent of the welfare state. They came from the grassroots, excluded by definition from the commanding heights that made the big news. Hirschman delighted in the little news. When talking to dairy farmers in Uruguay who, thanks to IAF-financing, had created a cooperative replete
with a collection truck, he wrote euphorically, “now a truck from the new plant would collect the milk at the farmer’s doorstep thereby saving him 1 to 5 hours every single day of the year!”

This did not mean he was starry-eyed, as if the people he observed happily embraced communal solutions to their problems. His was not a romantic defense of getting ahead collectively. The field notes on Chile captured the degree of infighting among Mapuche parents, some wanting Spanish teaching, others (fathers in particular) hostile to girls’ schooling. But the disagreement, he concluded, was good for the community. “A lot of fighting in Parents is healthy,” he scribbled, “ ‘Parents’ sometimes people who do not have children—Let kids go to school—Boys and girls together. Boys sewing & cooking. Girls castrate animals. Girls’ fathers against it—Finally worked.” Indeed, across many of the projects Sarah and Albert noted widespread tension between men and women, of latent conflict brought to the fore by the ways in which the hardships of capitalism in the early 1980s sowed quarrels within households.
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Many movements were far from “successes” and hung on by threads, surviving only because governments abandoned social services. Many were plagued with problems of staffing. Griping about managers was rampant; sometimes members of cooperatives complained that they didn’t enjoy enough “voice” or were afraid of criticizing their friends and neighbors who had become their superiors. After a day of visiting cobblers and carpenters in the Dominican Republic, Sarah wrote: “Problem: one becomes manager-boss the others workers—diff to accept coop.”
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Attrition was commonplace. Albert went hunting for
tricicleros
who did not join the association, only to find one that echoed Oscar Wilde’s quip about socialism absorbing too many evenings: “He does not want to spend so much time in group meetings, he does not want to file papers etc.” recorded Sarah. Indeed, the
tricicleros’
association had rampant problems collecting dues from members, and not a few let their payments on their vehicles slide into arrears—vindicating Mancur Olson’s argument about free-riders.
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Some successful groups were vulnerable to government predation. An effective and popular soup kitchen in Santiago run by a mother’s club got seized by Pinochet’s wife, anxious to shore up an image of a caring dictatorship. In this case, the IAF was unhappy but went along with the arrangement until mismanagement by the state drove the effort into bankruptcy.
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Albert and Sarah at a jewelry workshop, Dominican Republic, 1983.

Cooperatives were not panaceas; more is not always better; what works and doesn’t work defied any single measure. Between the simple narrative bereft of formal diagrams or social science claims, and the shortage of obvious take-away points for do-gooders and naysayers alike, it is no wonder the book got lost in the shuffle.

On the whole, this was no catalogue of corruptions, no inventory of development disasters. This was progress on the march, thanks to the collective efforts of poor people who marshaled their “social energy.” Hirschman’s field notes were sprinkled with phrases like “remarkable survival,” “fascinating to watch,” “local group knows what it wants.” Out of the little news emerged a thickening network of activists who made social relations “
more caring
and
less private
” in a broader political setting in
which governments preferred privatization and immobilization. These grassroots stirrings, he speculated in the conclusion, “were an important underlying factor in preventing the social quiescence and introversion that are required for an authoritarian regime to take hold.”
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In the quest to make the work even more accessible, the IAF program officer coordinating from Washington, Sheldon Annis, approached Hirschman about having the book illustrated to enhance its appeal by making the human dimension literally more visible. Annis contracted a photographer to trail the Hirschmans during their interviews. To follow up, he then dispatched a Guatemalan-based photographer, Mitchell Denburg, to retrace the steps and take more photos to illustrate the grassroots working,
tricicleros
loaded with bananas, a sewing class in Peru’s Academy for Women, and farmers milking their cows in Uruguay. Denburg carried the manuscript with him: “It was like a living story as I went along,” he recalled. He was struck, like Ternes, at the effect that Hirschman had had on his subjects. “He clearly left an impression with people in Latin America; he had respect for people and their achievements.” Some of the photos captured the scenes of research. One example was of San Bernardo del Viento, where the sons of dispossessed Colombian farmers performed the process by which a land-swindler stole their father’s property. The impression from the photos was of work and cooperation in action, advancement, and forward motion—to redouble the
aheadness
of the study as an alternative account to the perception of crisis, impossibility, and retrogression, especially for the poor.
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With
Getting Ahead Collectively
, Hirschman came up with a partial answer to the problem posed by
Shifting Involvements
. He had gone to the field and there, not among the disenchanted consumers of the fatigued rich countries, he found his public-minded, active citizens. More than finding them, he sought them out. Hirschman’s dissatisfaction with his answer to Mancur Olson and the turn of “public” economics was very much on his mind as he travelled through Latin America. After visiting an IAF-supported school in the Dominican Republic, he returned to “the public and the private.” “There is a much greater intermingling of these two spheres than in the ‘advanced’ countries,” he noted, “at all levels
of society: on top one finds lots of businessmen who are public figures and take positions on public issues, give much time to public causes & agencies.… We tend to see only the ugly side of this confusion of public & private, not the way in which it enriches the lives of these people, nor the way in which it is needed to achieve any progress at all.”
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Publicness was not just a solution to market failures. Hirschman saw more; for just as his lovable, pitiable, and tragic human was a combination of reasoned and passionate, so too the functioning of the economy blended the private with the public. Here, Hirschman was stepping away from the mechanical, pendular movement he claimed was at work in society in
Shifting Involvements
and which had elicited so many frowning reviews.
Getting Ahead
was thus more than an empirical counterpoint, a “retreat” back to the field. It helped him resolve his own unease.

The book was, however, more than a self-expiating exercise. It radiated hope at a time in which it was very hard to find sources for any in Latin America. Indeed, it soon became a weapon in a larger struggle over the foundation’s very existence, a struggle that would end in defeat—though it would bring Hirschman back into the public eye in its defense. As the Republicans took control of the federal government after the triumph of Ronald Reagan in 1980, they set their sights on agencies like the Inter-American Foundation to have them serve their Cold War foreign policy agenda. One by one they picked off the members of the board of directors (four of whom were picked by the White House), until they mustered the strength to demand Peter Bell’s resignation as president of the IAF. In the meantime, they called for a commission to review the agency, chaired by the seasoned diplomat Sidney Weintraub. One day, after a series of meetings at the foundation offices, Hakim suggested that Weintraub come to dinner at his home. “Oh, and Albert Hirschman will be there, too,” Hakim added. Hakim knew he was playing a heavy political card, and it worked. Weintraub accepted, and that night they chatted away about the work of the organization, leaving the commissioner duly impressed. The commission’s report, submitted in early January 1983, was glowing.
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The Republicans were not about to let evidence and evaluation get in their way. The new Reaganite chairman of the board, Victor Blanco,
a right-wing Cuban-American businessman, engineered Bell’s ouster. Hakim was demoted. Hirschman rushed to Bell’s defense and urged that the agency be spared ideological turf wars. He launched a somewhat chimerical campaign to get the IAF nominated for a Nobel Prize in economics—using
Getting Ahead
as a testimony to the revolutionary thinking and practice going on under the roof of its staff. The
New Republic
ran an article by Hirschman that charged Republican ideologues with threatening one of the few good signs of US–Latin American relations—support for “pragmatic,” problem-solving initiatives to promote nothing less than capitalism from below. Hirschman’s title was thus “Self-Inflicted Wounds.” Nor was the budget excessive—at $24 million in loans the previous years, it was miniscule compared to other agencies’. It was, he said, “a precious capital of good will that we have slowly accumulated in Latin America,” with important contacts not just with the poor—but, more important for Hirschman, middle-class professionals involved in the basic business of development, school teachers, architects, doctors, and so forth, the constituency that the United States sorely needed in its efforts to improve ties. The Reagan administration “does not need to look for outside enemies,” he concluded, “it displays an uncanny knack for self-inflicted wounds.”
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