Late Hirschman

PREFACE

“It is absolutely necessary for Europe to continue on its path toward greater unity and keep Germany on board (addossée). What is regrettable is that a sufficiently strong cultural feeling has not developed among the citizens of Europe. Too much emphasis has been placed on the economic aspect, thinking that the rest would come by itself.” “Do you agree [then] with Robert Schuman’s declaration,” asks the interviewer, “that ‘if we could start over I would begin with culture?’” “Yes, absolutely.”

Albert Hirschman “Evenement du jeudi,” May 25, 1995¹

(1) Begun as a simple intellectual exercise, the present work has picked up along the way some additional reasons to justify the “wear and tear” involved in its construction. Perhaps initially a certain weight was given to the aspiration to keep alive a Colornian-Hirschmanian work experience of many years duration. Then the wish took over to (once again) honor Albert Hirschman, now deceased—the desire to avoid losing the many small memories that bind me to him, to better understand his views, to (possibly) make progress on some of the vexed questions that had “intrigued” me in the past—and also to break away, in this regard, from any sort of ritualism. Albert did not like “orthodoxies.” At a conference in his honor in Buenos Aires in 1989 he said this explicitly.² Nevertheless, since his departure some different (and conflicting) ways of encapsulating (and perhaps “canonizing”) his work have emerged, from which it is well to shy away.³

As a reasonable alternative, partial as it may be, it seems to me possible to turn to the careful exploration of an example. We can in fact embark on the in-depth reconstruction of some specific themes that show the richness and importance of his cognitive contribution (undertaken from my own approach, inevitably⁴—that of “an Italian” as Albert used to call me, with a hint of irony, superiority and maybe even envy—he the German-American, of course, but “without a country”). And which consequently give a genuine idea, urbi et orbi, of what and how much can be learned from him by normally educated people from different social science disciplines (who are of course sufficiently motivated and willing to make the effort).

In other words, through small ad hoc exercises in “triggering” the cultural and political potential of Albert’s work, it is possible, in my view, to combat current attempts to “homogenize” his unmistakable point of view. For it is indeed one which, springing from the insights of Eugenio Colorni and from his own youthful experiences, the author invented and diligently pursued throughout his life. It is this that we must take in and apply (in the most diverse fields and situations), and also, to the best of our ability, creatively and innovatively repurpose—so that we can continue the journey.

(2) Before moving forward it is important that we establish a starting point. It is well-known that after the success of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), Hirschman increasingly followed the interdisciplinary (or trans-disciplinary) leanings that he later called “trespassing,” and mapped out The Passions and the Interests (written essentially in 1972–1973, a sabbatical year at the Institute for Advanced Study). Moreover, he gave up his teaching position at Harvard⁵ and moved to the Institute at Princeton, where he was asked to set up the School of Social Science together with Clifford Geertz, the great American anthropologist, with whom he became friends.⁶ Together with Bill Sewell and Quintin Skinner, Hirschman and Geertz then wrote, in 1977, a brief programmatic text that we can take as the “overture” to our line of thinking.⁷

It concerns the proposal, put forward together with the Institute’s School of Historical Studies, of a three-year program of study on “the ways in which a society’s perception or analysis of itself influences the responses of that society to the challenges or problems which confront it. While much work has been done,” the text continues, “on the perception which societies have of themselves, and also on social or political action pursued in response to perceived challenges, much less attention has been devoted to the way in which the perception or the self-analysis helps to define those challenges and the responses to them. It is this interplay between self-interpretation and action, as a generating force in history, which seems to us to deserve special study as part of a collaborative enterprise between historians and social scientists.”⁸

The text then offers a fascinating exemplification of various areas of research on which such a collaborative effort might concentrate—such as decline, underdevelopment and “loss,” success and defeat, revolution, a review of the idea of “influence,” along with East-West and North-South mutual perceptions. And it indicates that “the scholars concerned would be drawn from a wide range of disciplines—anthropology, political, social and cultural history including the history of art, political science, and economics.”

There is in addition a second text, a simple note, perhaps contemporary, in which Sewell, Skinner, Geertz and Hirschman clarify the position of the nascent School of Social Science.⁹ “We do not normally attempt to engage in large-scale statistical or quantitative analysis […] nor do we see ourselves primarily as problem-solvers working to come up with prescriptions for the current ills of society (although some of our members have had active interests in policy questions)” [including Hirschman, of course]. “The main focus of our attention is more interpretative: we are mainly concerned, as we have always been, with investigating the meanings of social behavior and the determinants of social change, and continue to be resolutely multi-disciplinary, comparative and international in our approach.”¹⁰

Now, if we read these programmatic passages retrospectively, in light of the scientific output from Albert that followed, we realize that they accentuate a significant aspect of his overall work. What they do, in fact, relative at least to Hirschman’s inevitably scientific early training (i.e., oriented toward economics, mathematics, and statistics), sui generis as it was, and to his well-known “trilogy” on development and Latin America,¹¹ and also relative to Exit, is make more explicit an intellectual re-balancing on Albert’s part in the direction of the “humanities.”¹²

In addition, as we know, his first collection of Princeton essays—Essays in Trespassing. Economics to Politics and Beyond (1981)—organizes the texts “around” five monographs,¹³ as if to underscore (and accentuate) the “multi-disciplinary, comparative and international” aspects that indeed pervade his entire oeuvre. And again, in all probability Shifting Involvements (1982), at least in its initial inspiration, had the aim of responding to the dictates of this new phase.¹⁴ And even the texts of retrospective reflection, written for The New Palgrave, a Dictionary of Economic Theory and Doctrine (1987) and published in Rival Views of Market Society (1986), are undoubtedly essays by the Princeton Hirschman.

It just so happened, incidentally, that Nicoletta Stame and I got to know Albert precisely during this evolutionary period and then followed him step by step in his ongoing journey—which involved the need to curb the ultra-liberal [ultra-free-market] thinking then triumphant on the wings of the Reagan presidency (and would lead Albert, in the mid-1980s, down the path to The Rhetoric, 1991). This was the long season of honorary degrees and the translations of his work into many languages, European and Asian (which would significantly increase his overall cultural influence)—the season of reflection that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and would contribute to the suggestion of a new “fine-tuning” of his work.

It is these stages, still fresh in the memory of the present writer, that provide the backdrop for the pages that follow, and which make it possible to clarify, at least in part, the meaning of “late” Hirschman’s “re-entry” into German culture and politics.¹⁵ Beyond the obvious cultural and human significance of this re-entry after such an extended period—one is tempted to ask whether Albert’s new work mainly from within a unifying Germany also represented, at least in his implicit intentions, a way of contributing indirectly to the emergence of a new feeling and a new European culture in the making.

Look again at the epigraph that opens this preface. Actually, to someone like the writer, who knew and worked with Albert during that period, it seems a plausible hypothesis that according to the rationale of self-subversion he would have wished in a certain sense to “reposition himself,” not least mentally, between Princeton and Berlin in order to be able to move more nimbly on both chessboards—with a view of ultimately re-introducing, as regards Europe, his entire body of work as a contribution to initial efforts to bridge (at least in part) the deficit in European construction which, in the mid-1990s of the last century, he had so explicitly noted.¹⁶

(3) Thanks to the exceptional nature of the story it tells and the theoretical distinctions Hirschman drew from it, the exploration undertaken in the now-famous essay that opens A Propensity to Self-Subversion (1995)—“Exit, Voice, and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic”—lends itself surprisingly well to introducing the point of the present paper. That is to say, it makes the very useful suggestion that by rereading certain texts and making connections with others, it is possible to verify, “record,” and develop exit-voice theory, and to identify certain intellectual paths that will lead in the end to further concepts and clarifications useful for orienting ourselves in the world in which we live.