Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

The life and times of one of the most provocative thinkers of the twentieth century

Worldly Philosopher chronicles the times and writings of Albert O. Hirschman, one of the twentieth century's most original and provocative thinkers. In this gripping biography, Jeremy Adelman tells the story of a man shaped by modern horrors and hopes, a worldly intellectual who fought for and wrote in defense of the values of tolerance and change. This is the first major account of Hirschman’s remarkable life, and a tale of the twentieth century as seen through the story of an astute and passionate observer. Adelman’s riveting narrative traces how Hirschman’s personal experiences shaped his unique intellectual perspective, and how his enduring legacy is one of hope, open-mindedness, and practical idealism.

Genres: Biography, Economics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, History, Politics, Biography Memoir

760 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Jan Rice]

This is what makes me want to read it: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics...

Also: http://prospect.org/article/rediscove...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/boo...

[Laurent Franckx · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admit that until I read this biography, my knowledge of Hirschman's contributions to economics was limited to the eponymous index of industrial concentration, and to Paul Krugman's article on "The fall and rise of development economics" http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/dishpa..., in which Krugman explains the fundamental tragedy of Hirshman's work: even though his insights on the process of economic development were profound and essentially correct, they got lost in the wilderness because, in the 1950s, he didn't know how to translate those insights in the formal mathematics that mainstream economics was increasingly adopting.
But I am jumping ahead.
Hirschman's life belies the idea that prominent thinkers are usually dreadful or uninteresting human beings. He was born in a family of assimilated German Jews during the first World War. His father, a surgeon, died in the year Hitler came to power, and the teenage Hirschman choose exile in France.
It is in this period that some of his fundamental attitudes were developed.
Whenever you think we are living difficult times, try to imagine what it must have been like to live in the 1930s, without knowing how it would end (especially as German Jew). On top of that, take it from the perspective of someone like Hirschman, who was perspicacious enough to understand that doctrinaire Marxism did not offer an attractive alternative to Nazism, but who had also seen German democracy collapse, almost without a fight. What was left for a politically conscious young person in those times?
Although he was himself firmly left of centre, and knew quite a bit of Marxists personally, he strongly resisted "big ideas" which he associated with the "claim to complete cognition of the world" or attempts "to explain multicausal social processes from a single principle". The alternative was "the attempt to come to an understanding of reality in portions, admitting that the angle may be subjective".
A second key element in the development of his personality was the determination "proving Hamlet wrong" and demonstrating that one can have doubts and still be a man/woman of action.
His life was indeed that a determined anti-Hamlet.
He interrupted his studies to fight on the Republican side during the Spanish civil war, and then went on to gain a PhD in economics at the University of Trieste. When the Second World War broke out, he joined the French army, but without seeing action. After the ignominious defeat in 1940, Hirschman participated in the escape route Varian Fry set up for European Jews. People that Hirschman helped to escape from France in the winter of 1940 include: Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Alma Mahler, Heinrich Mann... This is badassery of the highest level, even when you don't take into account that Hirschman was himself in very great danger. Economics is slightly less exciting nowadays. Hirschman eventually escaped himself to the US, took a position at Berkeley and got married to a Russian exile. When the US joined the war at last, Hirschman volunteered to serve. After being turned down several times, he finally was accepted to work as a translator in the Italy campaign and would eventually serve during the trial of the first German general to be executed for war crimes.
After the war, Hirschman played an important role in the setup of the Marshall plan, but soon realized his career in the US was coming to a dead end: as a European exile with Marxist acquaintances and who had served in other conflicts, he was considered suspect in the days of McCarty. He therefore moved to Colombia, where he served as an economic expert in the first World Bank projects outside Europe. The field experience he gained there was crucial in the development of his own thinking about development theory, which culminated in "The Strategy of Economic Development." which was published in 1958.
In a changed political climate, he eventually moved back to the US, to take up academic appointments at Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton etc.
In the mid 1960s, Hirschman was called upon to undertake an ex post evaluation of World Bank projects. This involved field work in three continents. Not surprisingly with 5 decades of additional hindsight, most projects were considered failures by the engineers on the ground interviewed by Hirschman. What is interesting, is that Hirschman often came to a more nuanced conclusion. For instance, sometimes, projects had failed according to their own objectives, but only because they had inspired local people to set up competing projects (obviously reducing the benefits of the initial project). Also, Hirschman found that some projects involved unanticipated side benefits. E.g, irrigation projects often taught people the art of political negotiation and compromise, which brought the additional benefit of teaching people about bottom up democracy.
Over the years, Hirschman's work increasingly moved away from mainstream economics, and sought a dialogue with the other social sciences.
For instance in “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” (1970), he tried to understand why some people remain loyal to an unsatisfactory institution (political or economic) and voice their opposition from within while other people opt to walk away. The link with his own life story is obvious (although it wasn't to him until someone pointed it out); he had chosen exit from Nazi Germany and McCarthyist America, while others had chosen to stay and to oppose (not very successfully in the case of Germany of course). However, the source of inspiration was his field work in Nigeria, where he observed that the inefficient railway company preferred customers to 'exit' (and transport goods by trucks) rather than using their 'voice' and complain about poor service.
Later work discussed the intellectual and philosophical foundations of capitalism; which, following Montesquieu, he saw as a way to canalize the pursuit of "passions" into the pursuit of "interests".
Throughout his later life stages, he remained actively involved in the world of economic development, and looked with increasing concern at the disappointments of the 1970s and became a fierce critic of the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Happily, he lived to see his old friend Cardoso become president of Brazil.
In 1991, a prescient Albert Hirschman worried about the "systematic lack of communication between groups of citizens, such as liberals and conservatives". According to his biographer, he believed that 'loosening the encased certainties... would help restore communication": "Hirschman had in mind all positions that react to the idea of reform by discounting it's logical impossibility. That is why... Hirschman chose to write a chapter about progressive intransigencies. This allowed him to stand above extremes to defend the space of reform as also a disposition about forms of arguing. Intransigents of all stripes only served a dialogue of the deaf"
Hirschman died in 2012, a few months after his wife.

This fascinating biography is indeed the story of an odyssey, not only in the literal sense, but also intellectually. It is a story of a man of extraordinary courage and convictions, who despite all the horrors and disappointments he went through, never gave up his quest to find ways to improve other people's lives, always giving priority to pragmatic improvement than to dogmatic "grand ideas" that in practice have ended with mass murder and famine. He is an example and inspiration.

[Ajj · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adelman does a good job with what at times can be quite a dry topic. Unfortunately it was not quite good enough to get me to finish the last quarter of Albert Hirschman's life.

I found Hirschman's early life in Weimar Germany and then in the 2nd World War to be very compelling. Later when he forges a middle ground of political economy it is still interesting but my attraction started to flag. Finally I was just pushing to get the pages read and the book done, which is a sad state of affairs.

I cannot tell if it is my lack a detailed understanding of political economy or my small knowledge of the political and economic forces at play in the life of a professional academic but I know I did not bring all that was needed to enjoy this book.

It would have made the book more accessible to me if Adelman had used some of his many pages to explore the questions at play more fundamentally. What is being expounded by the Chicago School that Hirschman is against? Why are mathmatics seen as so essential to economic research that Hirschman's brilliant ideas are tossed aside again and again? How are economics being misapplied in American foreign relations?
etc.

The book is not a bad biography over all. I do feel like I understand the man Hirschman was and the profound problems he encountered bringing his genius to the world. I also feel like I got a taste of the struggles of a 'renaissance man' working in a discipline of slide rules and fixed theories. Even the contrasts between a field worker and stay at home academics were artfully illustrated. I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who knows what they are getting into.

I think my major issue with this book is that it was recommended to me by someone who last pointed me to a great work of historical fiction and couched it as a discussion of an intellectual jew in Weimar Germany dealing with the rise of Nazism. While this is true, it is only a small fraction of the book, hence my overall disappointment.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

In absolute terms, despite his renown and esteem in his field, the honorary degrees and constant talk of a Nobel - Albert Hirschman was not a very good economist. In a field then and since increasingly mathematical, he wasn't much for maths; he had little to say about most of the topics considered today as part of the dismal science; and he seemed most at home wandering off into philosophy, political science, and sociology. (No surprise that in his happiest academic post, at the Institute for Advanced Study, he was involved in founding the school for interdisciplinary social science.)

As the title of this lengthy and thorough biography implies - in addition to being a wink at Heilbroner's classic The Worldly Philosophers - Hirschman was first of all a philosopher, an absent-minded man of letters and lover of French and German literature. He sought ways to improve the world, but was also a worldly, practical thinker, able to constantly reassess his beliefs and modify them based on changes in the facts. (One of his last books was titled A Propensity to Self-Subversion.) After an early job on a World Bank development programme wasn't renewed, he chose to stay on as an independent business consultant, getting to meet locals and hear from them what obstacles they faced, rather than the parochial top-down approach then favoured in Washington.

Hirschman had a fascinating life, covered by Adelman in depth. As a left-leaning high-schooler in the wane of the Weimar republic, he participated in street brawls with Nazis and debates with Communists. Fleeing to Paris for university, he fought fascists in three separate uniforms (Spanish Republic, French and later American) and for a time helped the American journalist Varian Fry smuggle leading intellectuals out of Nazi clutches, working out of sleazy Marseille flophouses and brothels. Ending up in the US, he rose through the academic ranks (Berkeley, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, IAS...) to find intellectual companionship and acclaim. Though Adelman is reverent of his subject, the book does give a glimpse of a certain hubris in the way Hirschman lapped up honorary degrees and reacted tetchily to critical reviews, but these are common failings.

After his early repudiation of Communism, Hirschman grew into a philosophy which one might summarise as "grassroots change" (a sophisticated prose stylist in multiple languages, he probably would have had a more felicitous term.) He found development economists with complex models of how countries must develop as wrong as Communists with their stages of late capitalist collapse. Societies are too complex and variant to fit any one model, and it is best to help them along by seeding multiple small efforts and seeing how people respond to them. Sometimes ostensible failures have surprising positive effects. Sometimes, too, it is the opposite. But Hirschman always had a bias for optimism, and his last book attacked the pessimism of "intransigents" - neoconservative who claim that since interventions can have unintended negative effects, it is better to stand back and let the free market work, as well as leftists who say that piecemeal reform is worse than nothing.

I came into this book without much interest in development economics, but Adelman, a history professor at Princeton, has written a book about big ideas (as well as, in Hirschman's phrase, petites idées). Each chapter bears an epigraph from Kafka! It is a book that will make you think, whichever background you come from. Economics today is much more opaque and specialised, and one might argue about whether its predictive powers are stronger for it. (On this see last year's The Economists' Hour) Hirschman, the philosopher with his feet in Flaubert and Goethe and an ever-questioning mind, wanted to anchor it in the farmer's soil and the blacksmith's bench.

[Howard Cincotta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adapted from upcoming review in americandiplomacy.org:

Albert Hirschman (1915-2012) is probably the greatest economist you’ve never heard of, and Jeremy Adelman of Princeton University has given him a well-deserved and exhaustive biography that spans a remarkable life from Weimar and Nazi Germany to the post-Cold War era.

Hirschman was that rarity, an economist who wrote with grace and clarity, striving for Flaubertian mot justes to express what he called his petites idées, which actually contained very large and provocative concepts.

There are two reasons for Hirschman’s relative obscurity outside the profession. He began his career in the unforgiving waters of development economics and Latin America, where many bold economic models -- and economists -- have foundered. Second, Hirschman was, at bottom, an essayist whose literary models were Flaubert and Montesquieu; his work ranged far beyond conventional economics to encompass sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy.

Yet within the field, Hirschman remains a revered figure who many feel long deserved the Nobel Prize for his insights and analyses of the complexities of international trade and national economic development.

Hirschman’s life can be divided into two great adventures, with the first containing enough drama and intrigue for a Hollywood movie, complete with a true love to whom he remained happily married for a lifetime.

He was born into an affluent assimilated Jewish family in Berlin who had the foresight and resources to escape following the Nazi takeover. After continuing his studies in France, Hirschman fought briefly in the Spanish Civil War, a scarring episode that he never shared with anyone, even his wife.

Hirschman was serving in the French Army, but saw no combat, when France fell in 1940. He found his way to Marseilles where, working with the Emergency Rescue Committee, he employed his charm, facility with languages, and multiple-passport identities to help hundreds of refugees – many of them among Europe’s best-known artists and intellectuals – to escape occupied Europe. Hirschman then joined them and served as a U.S. Army interpreter during the war, later translating for an indicted Nazi war criminal at the Nuremburg trials.

After the war, Hirschman embarked on a peripatetic academic career, traveling and working extensively in Latin America and teaching institutions from Berkeley to Harvard. But his second, and greatest adventure was an intellectual one, especially after he landed a permanent position at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and no longer had to teach (which he was terrible at, even if still widely admired by many of his students).

Hirschman’s early encounters with fascism and communism left him allergic to grandiose central plans and intellectual topologies of any kind. He was, instead. a contrarian who reveled in complexity and contradiction, the telling detail – at a time when most economists tended to lectured the third world on how to follow the Western industrial path. Where mainstream economists preached balanced growth, for example, Hirschman suggested unbalanced growth, with its tensions and conflicts as a much more plausible and sustainable path.

Hirschman was skeptical of the hyped-up claims for Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, but he also rejected the revolutionary dreams of Fidel Castro and other leftists. As someone who coined the term “possiblism,” he wrote that his purpose was “to break down the rigid dichotomy between reform and revolution and to show that the changes that occur in the real world are often something wholly outside these two stereotypes.” He was equally contemptuous of the triumphalism and arrogance of 1950s and ‘60s economic and social planning for Latin America, and in subsequent decades, of the shift to defeatism and extremism when waves of inflation, repression, and murderous coups swept the region.

It was equally naïve and simplistic to say that “all good things go together,” such as democracy and prosperity, he argued, or the inverse, that all bad things, such as economic decline and human rights abuses connect to each other. Why do social scientists persist, he asked, “in thinking of having only thing happen, and everything will coalesce around it, and we’ll come out all right?” Why do “we have one ‘new key at a time’?”

By the 1970s, Hirschman began moving away from international economics to engage in what he called his “dialogue with the ancients.” It is no accident that his best-known book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States is a slim elegantly written volume that more closely resembles Montesquieu or Machiavelli than any contemporary equation-laden economic tome. The book didn’t simply lay out a three-part formula (leave a dying organization, protest, or stick it out), but looked at the complexities of these human choices, always choosing to celebrate paradoxes and the unintended side effects. He pointed out, for example, that the enticements of the exit option – and don’t we all wish for the grand declarative exit! – might “atrophy the development of the art of voice.”

Hirschman’s deep readings in the classic texts of economics and political philosophy – Hegel, Marx, Hobbes, Adam Smith, among others – led to another major work, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph, which examined questions of how human beings function as both political and economic entities, as figures of self-interest who are able to act in the common good as well, a balance crucial to sustaining any free and prosperous society.

In conclusion, Adelman writes:

What he stood for, fought for, and wrote for was a proposition that humans are improvable creatures. Armed with an admixture of daring humility, they could act while being uncertain and embrace alternatives without losing sight of reality. But for much of Hirschman’s century, this was heresy …. What he wanted was not so much a theory with predictive powers, but a way to think about societies and economies, beginning with the premise that living in the world means we cannot step out of time to divine universal laws of human motion severed from the day-to-day banalities and mysteries of existence.

[Martin]

Invigorating. An account of "an idealist without a utopia". The first half of the book is a narrowly, esoterically scoped history of interwar, and postwar europe as well as europe in media res -- following the footsteps of young 'Otto'. The second half tracks an intellectual history of latter half 20th century through the same man. Truly a man of the 20th century.

[Erik Bloom · Rating 5 out of 5]

(simultaneously submitted on Amazon)....

Albert Hirschman (1915-2012) was one of the most important and influential development economists of our times. This book, by Princeton history professor Jeremy Aldeman, is the definitive biography of Hirschman, his life and his thought. Hirschman had a very interesting life-- growing up watching the Nazis destroy Germany, serving in three different armies, and traveling through out the world first as refugee and then as an economist. I would highly recommend this book to a serious reader interested in Hirschman and the history of development economics.

I first encountered Hirschman when I was an undergraduate student starting the development economics series, through the book Pioneers in Development. Hirschman was immediately my favorite pioneer, both due to his Colombian connections and his approach as a "rebel" (as he put it in his autobiography). After reading Adelman's book, I would say that Hirschman could be better described as a "optimistic doubter" than as a rebel. His doubting messages are often uncomfortable to authority despite his underlying optimism.

Hirschman was born in Berlin to an "assimilated," well-to-do Jewish family. After the Nazis took power in 1933, Hirschman moved to France, Italy, England, Spain, and the United States. He also managed to serve in the Spanish Republican Army, the French Army (during the German invasion), and the American Army. He also played a major role in the Varian Fry's group that smuggled many leading intellectuals to the United States as well as serving as the the translator for the first war crimes trial after World War Two. Not bad for a thirty year old.

As an economist, Hirschman was forced by circumstance to go to Colombia as a high level economic advisor, where he lived from 1952 to 1956. This was a life-changing experience that sparked a life-long interest in Latin America and development economics as well as thrusting him in the academic and policy limelight. From there, he moved among the Ivy League Universities (he variously associated with Yale, Columbia and Harvard), before ending up in Princeton.

The biography mixes discussion about Hirschman family and personal life with the evolution of his thinking. One theme running through the book is how early Hirschman starting thinking about big themes with his "little ideas" (as he called them). While he was definitely a believer in big development projects (and consequently, foreign aid), he was always expecting the unexpected. This, he argued, was at the center of the development process. While today it is common to consider (at least after the a fact!) "unexpected benefits" or "externalities" in development, at the time this was a novel and even revolutionary approach. Development was largely focused on strategies to accumulate capital, overcome constraints, and fill gaps. He also played an important role in encouraging the evaluation of the World Bank and its projects as way to learn from what has worked and what has not worked.

The book itself is long (650 pages of text, plus almost fifty in notes) and readable. Since the discussion shifts back from the personal to the technical, it remains engaging. I found the discussion of social science ideas quite accessible and not overwhelmed by jargon, perhaps an homage to Hirschman himself who wrote more in words than in numbers and formulae. On the other hand, the book is not treaties of Hirschman's development thinking or a review of the development of economic thought. It is a biography of an important and interesting man and the reader should be prepared from some challenging reading. I personally found the stories about Hirschman in France during the German invasion and occupation as well as his adventures in Colombia (1950s) to be quite compelling and "page turning." The notes and the index are comprehensive and provide a good reference to Hirschman's life. I have never met Hirschman but now I which of my friends and colleagues have (at least two bosses, it turns out). If you are primarily interested is his thinking on development, try the chapter in the Pioneers in Development. The New Yorker (June 2013) and the New York Review of Book (May 2013) have detailed reviews of the book that are worth looking at and the New York Times (Dec. 2012) and American Interest (Jan. 2013 by Francis Fukuyama) provide detailed obituaries.

Finally, as Alderman concludes his book, I would like to say "Thank you, Albert."

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very good biography of an inspiring figure.

Albert Hirschman, the book's subject, was a World War II hero and a development economist, and he lived a fascinating and admirable life. He grew up in Berlin, fled to Paris in 1933, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and then with the French against Germany, then worked in the resistance to smuggle Jews out of Marseilles, landed in the U.S. and became a prominent development economist and then historian of intellectual thought. I admire a lot of his intellectual convictions, particularly his commitment to skepticism, and also his belief in action even in the face of doubt.

Adelman captures this life well, although there were times when I felt that I didn't understand Hirschman's influence within development economics. When Hirschman began receiving acclaim late in the book, it came as somewhat of a surprise to me, since I didn't fully understand what his contribution had been to the field. But that's nitpicky. This was an eminently readable biography, legitimately exciting at points, and I felt like I understood the subject's emotions and motivations.

[Fran]

it was good, but I got bogged down in the various bureacracies involved and have not finished the book.

[Brittany McLaughlin]

Insight Tracker:

p5 His last major work, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), tackled the way intransigent arguments threatened to weaken democracy precisely because they narrowed options and alternatives.

p9 As the cursus of his life slowly closed with the century, he made of his style a kind of rampart from which to warn us, without giving up on humor, of the perils of overspecialization, of narrowing of vision, and of the temptation to fall in love with the image of one's own technical prowess and vocabulary and lose sight of the vitality of moving back and forth between proving and preaching.

p11 At the core of his possibilism was the idea that people had a right to what he called a "non-projected future". & " it was not an accident that one of Hirschman's favored words was debrouillard, from the Old French root, brouiller (to mix up), which alludes to artful ways to wiggle out of a convoluted, intractable, or bad situation.

p19 "Investigations of a Dog", one of Kafka's posthumously published stories, was one of the favorites of both father and son. the tale of a dog's pseudorational method to arrive at incongruous explanations for his existence was not just absurd, it also pointed to some of the foibles that accompany closed certainties, a style that would yield a lifelong imprint.

p75 The decision to study economics was not greeted with much enthusiasm. They explained that it was "a breadless art" - to which their son replied, with hes tongue already in cheek, that it was precisely the power to explain shortages and abundances of bread that made it such an important discipline.

p119: Franz Kafka: "From the true antagonist boundless courage flows from you"

p141 "he consequences was an ironic finding that warmed Hirschmann's heart: fascist pronatalist policies, which rewarded women for reproducing, could lead to higher fertility rates and higher child mortality rates...Knibb's massive 'Mathematical Theory of Population' was Hirschmann's guide in developing a more nuanced model for Italian demographers, and one can detect already at this stage a fondness for paradoxes produced by human behavior.

p145 a mantra from Montaigne; 'observe, observe perpetually.'

p188 Hirschman did not dwell on the traumas he left behind- and was determinedly tight-lipped about it with others. Rather, he sought out new opportunities. In America, he could become the intellectual he'd dream of being in Europe.

p323 Hirschman did not disavow the economist; he simply cautioned against the allure of overaggregated analysis and the siren calls of 'over-all, integrated development programs' of the type that brought him to Colombia in the first place. They might do better with a commitment to reality content based on observation from the ground up, precise understandings and models instead of a blind faith in general statistics."... "Instead of a 'propensity to plan,' Hirschman advocated a 'propensity to experiment and to improvise'.

p337 Hirschman told his sister, after one of his chats with Schelling, that he found his friend 'one of the most intelligent people hat I know (almost scary)- he turned away from economics and is now more interested in questions of foreign policy and peace strategy.' What helped was a distinction between human strategies, a key word for both thinkers, and not theories, as motors of social processes. Moreover, they shared an affinity in dealing with the relationship between case studies and general insights. Neither bothered too much that a single case of multiple strategies would constrain conceptual innovation; Hirschman noted that Karl Marx wrote Capital based on observations of industrialization in one country without having to add '-A Case Study of England.'

p340 To Hirschman, the great malefactor was impatience. He transcribed Kafka's words: 'all human error is impatience.' It was the source of the cardinal sin. 'Because of impatience,' wrote Kafka, underscored by Hirschman, 'we were driven out, because of impatience we cannot return.'

p342 In the case of individual: is there such a thing as in economies 'optimal tension.

p347 By the end of Strategy, the core of Hirschman's thinking about what was scarce in traditional societies becomes clear. It was not capital. It was not a middle class. It was not 'entrepreneurship' or the right kind of cultural bedrock of striving individualism. It was altogether more original: the capacity to problem solve in ca capitalist world, the 'ability to make development decisions.'

p406 ...Aristotle who said that virtue lies often between the vices (cowardice-courage-foolhardiness).

p421 "What keeps me from suicide are, besides cowardice, two matters: 1) the idea that it would be considered a refutation of my own theories of creative imbalances etc. 2) the fact that I always seem to have still one idea to write up - the dangerous moment will come when I'll have my best petite idée all worked out."

p450 What emerged was probably his most elegant essay, "Political Economics and Possibilism," which brought his aphoristic style to full bloom and subtly introduced himself, perhaps with Schelling in mind, as an exhibit character called the possibilist.

p487 The divide between hope and hopelessness, between optimism and pessimism, was a false one, Hirschman believed. It was not a matter of how it was told, for the epic passage of social change was riddled with chance and choice, and understanding this required humility and a concession to the limits of Reason. From his Hegelian taproots he found the current 'correlation' between economics and 'the development of torture' as 'puzzling' as it was 'appalling'. He wanted to get at social scientists' mindsets, why they persist 'in thinking of having only one thing happen, and everything else will coalesce around it, and we'll come out all right.' We do 'we only have one 'new key' at a time?'

p539 While philosophers had long been arguing about the prospects for 'a real science of society,' it was Max Weber, a touchstone for Geertz and Hirschman alike, who argued that social science's mission was to account for the actions to which social meanings were attributed by the actors themselves. Motives, ambitions, and memories, not to mention passions and interests, had to be freed, as Geertz once put it, from 'systems of closed causality.' It meant less interest in analyzing how structures determined behavior than how people made sense and understood the world around them-and how they argued about it-as a condition for their actions.

p565 When Hirschman presented Man as 'a blundering idealist, someone with interests and passions,' it sounded to them as a moral observation. Either-or commonplaces made Hirschman's kinds of stories appear muddled and confused. Really, what, Hirschman wanted was a human actor 'as a more lovable character, somewhat pitiable, but also a bit frightening-hence tragic.'

p569 Machiavelli had wanted to study politics from the premise of amn as he really is, not what he ought to be. Montesquieu had warned how useless it was to go on about how much political practice conflicts with morality and justice ('this sort of discourse makes everybody nod in agreement, but changes nobody'). And of course Smith had severed the self-interested 'head' fro the emoting 'heart' with breathtaking effectiveness. Even Marx wanted 'cool science' to guide his motion of capitalism. But Marx was a cue to a deeper current in the genealogy of the social sciences, for while he wanted neutral, objective laws to dictate his analysis, he was no less inclined to hot tempered 'moral outrage'.

583 When Albert stepped up to the front of the small meeting hall, he explained that one of the problems with economists 'is that they economize on love.
When the flutter subsided, Hirschman observed that one of the staff's frustration was the feeling that they had to gauge the success of projects in terms that were easily quantified, which had often led them to overlook other variables, like love, civic purpose, and what in Hirschman's childhood would have been called Bildung, improvement and self-cultivation for their own sake, development to harmonize the mind and the heart, self and society.

584 All the reports that pointed to the shortfalls of each project - shortfalls compared to the grantees' lofty aspirations- had missed the larger point. It had been a point driven home in Development Projects Observed (look at side effects!) and again in Shifting Involvements (let disappointments produce alternatives!)

Hirschman offered them a simple principle- 'social energy'-to help illuminate how modest grants could help people create, direct, and expand communities' and associations' efforts to change the world around them. [pple will work if only for the love and attention of those they esteem]

even if they did not finally solve the problem they set out to lick, they had acquired skills, created movements, and marshaled social energy that they could apply to other problems.

585 In the face of a grinding debt crisis, there was still scope fro improvement. What was true of social processes applied to himself as well; even a mature scholar of global repute could rediscover himself and the range of his own possibilities.

586 And the range of issues that concerned the deliverymen varied from traffic laws to taxes and police enforcement. So, a risk-spreading org mutated into a 'pressure group'.

587 indictment of fracasomania, for lack of success could, ironically, help motivate a desire for even more success.

598 Naming the tension was the first step to acknowledging its existence. By identifying its existence, perhaps the social scientist might not feel so compelled to resolve, transcend, or overcome it without losing something precious and important. The social scientist's dilemma could not be cast off like outgrown clothes. Better to admit it than to take refuge in false certainties.

612 This 'democratic' approach to economic thought deprived any single argument of certainty nurtured by isolation. In staging this conversation among rival views of the market, however, Hirschman had to concede that over the course of the 20th cen the prospect of such a dialogue was getting more difficult. In fact, it could only be resurrected through his kind of historical reenactment.

615 Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which is generally recognized as a work riddled with formulae waiting to be quarried.

621 He had always thought that loud exits were akin to the use of voice- like 'banging the door upon leaving,' 'But it turns out that silent exit,' of the type he heard testimony and witnessed in those heady weeks in Germany, 'carries its own powerful message, just because of its silence, the inability to communication: with voice you can argue, with those silent AusriBern [runaways] no discussion is possible.'

625 Hirschman: I think he [Carl Schmitt] was right in looking toward more exceptional situations and toward the capacity to seize them via 'decisionism' as the avenue to escape from 'the laws of motion' of both Marxist and non-Marxist (Weberian) social scientists...For I have long talked of exceptional constellations that make possible the escape from vicious circles and forbidding 'prerequisites' for development or democracy...of course the use I make and the hopes I connect with these exceptional situations are totally different from his.

633 "Everything backfires"

654 What he stood for, fought for, and wrote for was a proposition that humans are improvable creatures. Armed with an admixture of daring humility, they could act while being uncertain and embrace alternatives without losing sight of reality.

655 What he wanted was not so much a theory with predictive powers, but a way to think about societies and economies, beginning with the premise that living in the world means we cannot step out of time to divine universal laws of human motion severed from the day-to-day banalities and mysteries of existence.

656 Underneath it all, Hirschman had a sense that human actions and choices were the engine of social possibilities and that any history of possible futures- is this not the script for grand theory?- starts its life as an observation of the human by another human. All categories that flowed therefrom had to be flexible and adaptive, open to the cunning of unintended consequences and side effects that were often more momentous than the original purpose. Such was the personal and moral stuff of his vision made, bold enough for him to dream of a unified social science. There was no shortage of ambition here. One only has to consider the concepts and keywords that he juxtaposed: the individual and the collective, priavte and public, markets and politics, wealth and virtue, equilibrium and disequilibrium, choice and constraint, simplicity and complexity. Fertile oppositions were not just for fun- though if there were possibilities for wordplay, Hirschman did not resist. They were meant to show how each side required the other. In this sense, the art of sailing into the wind was all about gaining speed from an oppositional force and turning it to one's advantage.

Entelechy-the actualization; rather than a mere possibility

Prolegemenon-preliminary discussion

read-> Kenneth Arrow's work on the role of professional codes of ethics and Robert Solow's recent presidential address to the AEA, which had explained why labor markets wee not so smoothly 'clearing' as theory would predict because workers paid attention to principles of appropriated behavior among them.

[V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun book, I think I didn't appreciate it as much initially because I hadn't heard of him before (this was CS's birthday present to me). Couple of rough thoughts and things I found interesting:

- 'Exit, Voice and Loyalty' is an elegant way of structuring the issue, and a useful lens to understand a lot about why institutions are the way they are - I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before. On Exit: I think it ties well with Gurcharan Das' India Grows at Night and his idea that Gurgaon is a city set up with public services developed by private entities - in effect, an 'Exit'. On Voice: For a very long time, I didn't believe in Voice; I didn't see the value of making "noise" about an issue. While I think your ability to influence change involves a certain level of not being perceived as a raging activist, I think activists play a powerful role in Society - they're the 5% that makes the other 95% listen and react to an issue. Assuming that is true, then the question is: on an individual level, do you want to be the activist or do you want to be the one politicking to create the change?

- 'Strategy' is interesting as well, I wonder if countries today model their development policies around some premise of planned and unplanned growth? i.e., planned growth through solving/fixing imbalances created by previous policies (e.g., urban infrastructure issues) and unplanned growth through promoting industries with strong linkages?

- Competition in Academia is curious. Seeing how Hirschman made decisions on moving between Harvard, Yale and Princeton and how these institutions wooed him, I wonder how big of a role "culture" plays, vis a vis private organisations. My decision to work for a corporation is largely dependent on its culture, while in academia it seems to be based on individuals (who the Dean is, who are potential collaborators) and other incentives (necessity to teach etc.). Not sure if this is true.

- Cambridge MA is such an exciting place. I wish I explored it more.

- I think there's something to be said of the strategy of unbalanced growth on a personal level too. Far too often, I've made decisions and I see people making decisions around me on the premise that there is a specific skill/knowledge/brand that they need to get from A to B in their careers. Listening to successful businesspeople and politicians at b-school, I realise how futile this is - so much of our careers are shaped by serendipitous meetings and events that it's impossible to plan. Maybe then the ideal strategy is to try and always make choices that have high "linkages", i.e., choose institutions/degrees/companies where you can meet the most diverse set of people, ideas and opportunities and then carve your path forward.

- Hirschman is yet another person operating at the intersection of different fields. A Walter Isaacson talk I attended last week had him talking about the same idea: the "geniuses" he profiles didn't always possess outrageous intellect, their uniqueness was derived from their ability to see pattersn and draw on ideas from a variety of disconnected fields. I'm reading his book on Da Vinci soon, I'm sure I'll see this again.

[Camila · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the book in Spanish and the translation is really bad. I definitively do not recommend to read the Spanish translation. In addition, I found that there are many unnecessary details, and the names and the "progression" of the chapters do not have much sense. All these things make the lecture boring and tedious.

However, the Hirschman's life was so interesting that his story outweights the problems mentioned above. Hirschman was fated to become "a universal thinker". He was raised when Germany changed from the Weimar Republic to the Nazy ecountry. This obligated Hirschman to look for other destinations in Europe. Before turning 23, Hirschman participated as soldier in two foreign wars (France and Spain) and he was in Mussolini's Italy. Later, he joined to the American army that fought the II WW, there, he served as translater of the first nazys commanders. In the mean time, he took courses in economy and accountancy in France, Italy, UK, and USA, where he was influenced by many leftist and socialist thinkers.
When Hirschman went back from the war to America, he was looking for a vacancy as economist. Then, the World Bank offered a position in a new project in Colombia. The experience in this contry inspired some of his most relevant ideas like "fracasomanía", or his oposition to the "foreign expert". I was particularly interested in his parallel experience with Lauchlin Currie in Colombia. Both of them were referents in development theory and policy, they coincided in the same place and in the same moment, but they had different positions. In fact, they were contradictors. According to Hirschman, Currie was the typical "foreing expert" who unsterstood reality through macro ideas and who did not recognize the particular dynamics of the region. In contrast, Hirchman was more interested in the "micro" projects and in understanding why and how are the local dynamics to extract learning.
After passing through Colombia, Hirschman started a new life as academic in som of the American top universities where he shared with some of the most recognized economists at the moment (like Tom Schelling). At the same time, he strenghtened his rebellious position within the developent theory. He kept looking for projects in Latin America which was going through a historica moment. In these continent, Hirschman got in touch with Cardoso and the first thinkers of ECLAC.
Later, Hirschman went back to the classic authors and he started his research about morality and social sciences influenced by Maquiavelo, Smith, Olson and Sen. In that point in time, Hirschman wrote one of my favorite text in economics: "passions and interest"

[Oliver Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worldly Philosopher is a model of intellectual biography—spryly written, carefully contextualized—helped by the extraordinary life of its subject, the economist Albert Hirschman.

The first third of the book reads like a prelude to Casablanca, or perhaps a wartime Forrest Gump. Young Hirschman invariably fought for the right side at the right place at the right time: he was by turns an anti-Nazi activist in Berlin; fighter for the Republican cause in Spain; consigliere for an underground network that rescued thousands of Jewish refugees from Occupied France; translator for the OSS in Italy; and later an economic advisor to the Marshall Plan.

By the time Hirschman finally settles into the intellectual work for which he is best known—this is around page 325—the wizened world of academia feels like a mild letdown. (The last third sags with insider gossip about the Institute of Advanced Study.) Still, as a development economist, I was fascinated by this thinker so resolutely out of step with his times. In the postwar era of Big Pushes and Five Year Plans, Hirschman was more interested in the unintended consequence and the plan gone awry—an attitude no doubt informed by his extensive fieldwork in Colombia. As economics became more mathematized and sequestered from the other social sciences, Hirschman (like his colleague, Alexander Gerschenkron) favored a humanist economics, one that conversed freely with literature, political science, philosophy, and psychology. He was the model intellectual fox, shunning the certainty of all-encompassing ideologies for a flexible set of petites idées that acknowledged the unexpected in human behavior. Yet his work was united by a basic optimism that reform was possible, and human beings could be improved.

Academic economics has largely forgotten Hirschman’s ideas—not one of my graduate syllabi assigned him—yet time has vindicated his approach. After dalliances with grand plans and sweeping models, development economists are again tramping through fields, searching for those Hirschman-like insights about human behavior.

Perhaps it’s time to dust off some of Hirschman’s ideas as well. Adelman has made an immense contribution with this biography, which marvelously integrates the excitement of Hirschman’s life with the evolution of his thought. Four of Hirschman’s books have hopped to the top of my to-read list—perhaps the highest praise for this sort of biography. What a wonderful book about a thoroughly admirable man.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some truly fantastic parts of this book that make it worthwhile, however this really is too long. There are many passages, and sometimes very long and winding stories that just really didn't need to be in there. I feel like the author was extremely excited with the personal notes and letters he had access to and felt he needed to share as much of it as possible. It is just too much.

Interestingly I found the parts that focused on economics to be more interesting than his personal life story that comprises the majority of the first few hundred pages. I noticed many other reviews have the opposite take.

All in all there should be a 2nd edition that cuts this book in half and directs those who really want to know every minute detail to this edition.

[Kathrin Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive and well written biography of a hugely interesting man. Born in Germany in 1915 into a Jewish family, he escaped the Nazi tyranny to fight in Spain and later get involved in rescuing refugees in the South of France. He found his calling as an economist and developed an idiosyncratic style of analysis and policy recommendation which did not build on sophisticated (and often meaningless) models but relied on close observation of the actions of human beings in different and changing circumstances.

[Joachim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great biography. I would have wished for a more detailed discussion of Hirschman's work, but I assume that the author has written for an audience familiar with Hirschmann's work. Otherwise a great book

[Eric Bottorff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and sensitive treatment of one the 20th centuries’ great social scientists.

[Andreas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good reading, wasn't familiar with Hirschman's ideas (which I will try to remedy the coming months). Fascinating life story (especially the first part of his life).

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour de force. Well worth the read learning about AOH and development economics. His life and writings are beyond anyone’s dreams.

[Susan O]

world perspective of 20th century, illuminating how we got here

[Cyrus Samii · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hirschman’s incredible life runs parallel to historical twists and turns of the 20th century, and by this book’s account, his work always contended with the hopes and disappointments of the times. That makes it interesting for those interesting in broader historical currents.

But really, this is an “inside baseball” account that uses Hirschman’s point of view to track the evolution of social science in the 20th c. For a professional social scientist like myself it was very illuminating, albeit at times slow, and at times I found the reading of debates in economics and political science as puzzling and superficial (eg, the account of Hirschman’s intellectual disputes with Olson lacked meaningful engagement with the Olson’s ideas).

The book works as a wonderful accompaniment to Hirschman’s writings. That is, you get lots of context and attempts to get at what was going on in Hirschman’s mind. What do don’t get, and something I missed, are any extended analyses of Hirschman’s texts themselves. That is, few block quotes or close readings of the actual texts.

[Peter Gelfan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I confess that I don’t remember ever having heard of Hirschman before I read this biography. When he escaped Nazi Germany as a child and then, as a young freedom fighter, had to contend with Stalinist elements in the French, Italian, and Spanish resistance forces, he learned a lifelong lesson: beware of utopian extremists of any stripe in any line of work, not only politics, but also in economics, political science, philosophy, and even science.

Perhaps because of the development of chaos theory and studies of emergent systems, these days, uncertainty and indeterminacy are more and more becoming factors to acknowledge and deal with in serious research. But in the mid-twentieth century, everyone in whatever field was still looking for THE answer, THE system, THE formula that would solve all our problems in a predictable, controllable, deterministic way. For millennia that has been our habit with religious, political, and scientific isms and dogma, and seems to be at the heart of our current legislative gridlock; getting one’s God-blessed way is more important than solving concrete problems and improving life on earth.

Everyone but Hirschman. His field studies as an academic and government economist confirmed his suspicion of orthodoxy in any field, but also fostered great hope. In implementing development programs in third-world countries in South America, Africa, and Asia, he found that planned actions—especially large, long-terms ones—often brought about unpredicted outcomes. While some of these errant results derailed the program altogether or even worsened things, many revealed new opportunities. His genius was to exploit and build on the unplanned openings rather than insist upon or abandon the original plan. Comprehensive top-down aid programs imposed on a society, which were the style of those days, were often too cumbersome and one-size-fits-all, while modest, play-it-by-ear programs—which bolstered existing assets, worked with local people who could get things done, and kept an eye out for surprise opportunities—made steady grass-roots progress.

On the other hand, exaggerated hopes are a necessary myth for progressives. Hirschman conjures up an image of a caravan trying to cross a great desert but now out of water and expecting to die. Then a mirage appears of a huge glittering oasis. They gather up their last scraps of energy and struggle onwards. When they get there, it’s really only a crummy little waterhole, but they have now come this much farther, and the few sips of water they find will prepare them for the next leg of their journey.

The biography is generally quite readable. Hirschman comes across as smart, brave, honorable, and very human. Adelman does pretty well trying to navigate between two parallel organizing schemes, chronology and subject matter, but the book occasionally falls prey to the lurking danger of such an attempt, repetition. A definitive biography is obligated to be quite detailed, and sometimes this one became more granular than I like, but that’s me, not the author.

I was disappointed and annoyed that the publisher, Princeton University Press, didn’t do a thorough job of proofreading. I spotted quite a few typos and just plain spelling errors. Why skimp on such necessary production details, especially when Hirschman was faculty at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, which Adelman presents in a favorable light?

Hirschman’s life story, his view of his era—the large middle chunk of the 20th century—the evolution of his thought, and the author’s thorough and affectionate account of them make the book a very worthwhile read.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Hirschman coined a term, possibilism, or, perhaps more accurately, adapted it from Soren Kierkegaard's famous aphorism 'Pleasure disappoints, possibility never!' to evoke Hirschman's disposition." (3)

"Hirschman would become one of the greatest authors in the social sciences, a division of intellectual life admittedly short on writerly credentials. Many have delighted in his vivid metaphors, memorable images, and poetic turns. But the great prose was in service of a disposition that urged wariness about big claims, grand theories, and encompassing plans and the certainties that were required to scaffold them -- required because social scientists increasingly sought to quarry in models, theories, and laws that were meant to be true across time, and thus outside History." (12)

"But these were tough years [1930s]. The staple of his diet was a baguette with butter. He would later jokingly claim that he had eaten so many he deserved some fame for having discovered this unique culinary combination which he baptized 'un sandwich au pain.'" (94)

"These petits idees really stuck for Hirschman, who for the rest of his life would jot down observations on scraps of paper or notebooks hoping they might evolve from insights to ideas. 'They are like aphorisms,' he explained, 'very astonishing remarks, perhaps of a paradoxical nature, but which are perhaps true because of it.' Since these little ideas lay all around like leaves, the skill was in figuring out how to 'gather them up' and make them into 'a great idea.' It was not for an abstract system to define the significance of daily experiences and choices, but the other way around." (115)

"He began with the premise, confirmed over his managerial testimonies, that World Bankers would have nixed projects had they known in advance all the difficulties they would encounter. But they didn't, and many projects turned out to yield their share of benefits, many of which were not intended. To capture this dynamic, the first chapter [of Development Projects Observed] coined a term, the Hiding Hand, to convey the elusive dynamics behind the process of 'stumbling into achievement' that so fascinated him." (400)

"Cases of disorder and disequilibrium were explained as the result of a malfunction inspired from outside -- and exogenous to -- the core principles. Uniqueness, exceptions, and anomalies were waved away from the basic conceptual settings. Hirschman wanted to turn this way of framing problems on its head, to look at the ways in which instability, disorder, and disequilibrium lay at the heart of the matter, how understanding their operation might provide keys to an endogenous approach." (444)

"'To conquer death -- how? To die smiling. Practice smiling during orgasm. Smile and laughter as the essential prologue and epilogue to having sex. Making a woman laugh = making her open up, first her mouth -- the rest follows. But why is laughter also the epilogue? Do we laugh about each other or about the fact that we were precisely tiersch erns (full of animal-like seriousness) just now?'" (quoting Hirschman, 640)

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first Hirschman I read was a short extract from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in an undergrad class. It was great: simple, insightful, and easily applicable to many things in life. I've thought about it often since then. A few years later during the Obamacare debates I encountered his arguments in The Rhetoric of Reaction that felt the same way to me. I never sought out any of his other work after that, but this biography makes me want to both revisit those two works as well as dip further into his oeuvre. Adelman illuminates Hirschman's incredibly eventful life in a lot of detail, including his constant peregrinations (multiple trips to Germany, France, Italy, Spain, America, Venezuela, Brazil....), his extensive personal friendships, and his works with enough detail to make you want to read them but without getting bogged down too much.

The only thing I didn't like about the book was Adelman's occasionally excessive sycophancy and pro-Hirschman tendentiousness; at times Adelman paints this picture of Hirschman as the only economist on the planet without personal blind spots or an ideology. In all fairness some of this might be due to Hirchman's tendency to revel in the inscrutable and paradoxical, and in many of those cases it's probably Hirschman himself who was stumbling or unclear. But, fittingly, those moments are also where Adelman really shines. Hirschman was a big fan of Michel de Montaigne, the guy who invented the essay, and many of Montaigne's trademark mental digressions and inversions show up in the economist's work. What looks like a frustrating contradiction turns out to be merely a smart guy grappling with tough problems, delighting in surprises and unexpected subtleties. Hirchman's lifelong quest was to "prove Hamlet wrong" - to use the natural human urge to doubt oneself as a tool of liberation instead of paralysis, and Adelman does a mostly fantastic job at showing the fruits of Hirschman's labors.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a biography of Albert O. Hirschman, who became famous for his work in development economics and political economy. Hirschman was best known as a combination economist and essayist who spanned multiple disciplines stood out for his crossing most of the harsh dichotomies that are normally used to stereotype academics. He was an economist who was not highly mathematical. He was an economist who could work with anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and journalists. While an amazing intellectual, he was also a pragmatist who did much of his initial work studying actual development projects for the World Bank and the Ford Foundation. His most famous work, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, is one of the easiest to read social science classics that one can find anywhere. In looking at his career, one gets the idea of a "radical moderate" who is averse to being characterized at the extremes that characterize most academic disputes. Hirschman was also different in being an optimist during a time when so many of his colleagues were negative.

It is hard to write a biography of someone who spent his life writing very deep and thoughtful works. Adelman does as much as he can in telling the story of the private person and the book is well written and moving. To his credit, Adelman has also compiled a collection of Hirschman's critical essays ("The Essential Hirschman") that will help in going through some of the chapters when some of Hirschman's less well known materials are covered. The book also has a nice bibliographic essay for those who wish to read further.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman / Jeremy Adelman. Hirschman, a German Jew, fled Germany in 1933, studied in France, London, and Italy, fought (and conspired) against the fascists in Spain and France, and then emigrated to the U.S., where he attended Berkeley and enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve in North Africa and Europe. He was an economist who embraced many disciplines of intellectual value, who believed in action in spite of doubt, who planned for and praised unintended consequences and tensions. He preached ambiguity over certainty or ideological thinking. He is associated with economic development in Latin America and elsewhere, but his theories were often disputed by academics and governments. He wrote often in opposition to the Milton Friedmans of the conservative economic wing, but he also was dismayed by the extreme left. He was for both public and private ventures. Ultimately, he was honored many times over around the globe. There were a few rough patches for me in the discussions of economic analysis and policy, but it was a very, very fine biography.

[Dominik Leusder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely extraordinary. I get a lot of reading done, but it will take a while to digest this book, which is a serious contender for the best book I've come across this year.

I knew from 'Passions and the Interests' that Hirschman was an intriguing economist. Unusual for economists nowadays, however, who are indistinguishable from robots, we are presented with a fascinating, many faceted personality. With great flourish and detail, Adelman lays out Hirschman's journey of personal and intellectual self-discovery: fleeing Germany, fighting for the Spanish Republic, his self-reinvention in Italy, his exile in Berkeley, his involvement in the early days of development economics, his guilt —with each setting he is displaced to he accumulates new intellectual and social resources. An exemplary life.

Hirschman died one of the most famous social scientists in the world, a sage, a scientist who told human stories — and yet now is largely forgotten. Rarely has a man been so travestied. Young undergrads should chuck their Foucault and read Hirschman.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the history of a truly unusual academic -- a man who in the current state of academia would have never attained the position he did. He engaged in the world and was a serious academic.

The first part of the book moves quickly and is an interesting social history of mid-century Europe and the non-academic role Albert Hirschman played.

The second half of the books gets a bit bogged down in many of the minutia (often not so interesting) of Hirschman's academic life. I found this part of the book less interesting and less rewarding.

I would actually like to give this book 3.5 stars.

[Scott Schneider · Rating 4 out of 5]

Albert Hirschman was one of the giants of the social sciences in the 20th Century. He was known for his work on "development economics" but focused in latter life on social change and railed against the conservatives who used excuses to argue against progressive change (He particularly hated Reagan). I learned a lot from this biography and may want to go and read some of his important works like Exit, Voice, Loyalty. It was sad that during his career he so many failed attempts at development, often undermined by politics, like the Chilean coup. He never won the Nobel prize though many thought he deserved it. Maybe this book will help get him more of the recognition he deserved.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Hirschman's odyssey can be read as a journey with no particular end, the life of an idealist with no utopia because he believed that the voyage of life itself yielded enough lessons to change who we are and what we aspire to be; to require and stay on course toward an abstract destination threatened to deprive the journey of its richest possibilities. Odysseus' quest was a homecoming to Ithica; by contrast, Hirschman's course had no destination."