Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman Read Free

penumbral space as the insider-outsider—between the establishment and the dissident—to author works that crisscrossed the line separating manifestos from monographs. Uprooting and delocalization placed him outside any single cultural tradition, intellectual genre, or national place—a figure we might consider an antecedent to our more “globalized” intellectual type. Some readersmight regard him as the first truly global intellectual, a term that would probably make him wince. Certainly,
his
version of being a global intellectual never cut him off from the multiple roots of his imagination; he was global not because he stood above them but because he could so artfully combine them.
    Choice or chance … chance with choice … At times, I have often felt that making sense of the mixture of forces that compose a life history, especially one so replete with breaks and ruptures, leaves too much to the author. A tempting solution to the problem is to treat them in the subject’s own vocabulary; as it turns out, the role of choosing and chance translate into terms familiar to the republican topoi in which Hirschman was steeped and with which he closely identified,
virtù
and
fortuna
. He would recount how Fortune must have smiled upon him when he made his getaway from the police in Marseilles at the end of 1940 or when a surprise letter invited him to Yale in 1957. But he was never lured into believing that there was anything providential at work; he did, after all, have a hand in his own fate—even if it was not always a visible one. Either way, virtù and fortuna entwined to yield one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable intellectuals, one who devoted a lifetime to thinking about the role of choice and making the best of chance in human affairs.
    The key was to be open to possibilities. More than that, it meant creating them. This is why his exile was not experienced as being severed from home, separating a self from one’s past, as Edward Said famously put it. 1 Separation created possibilities for new combinations. Indeed, Hirschman coined a term,
possibilism
, or, perhaps more accurately, adapted it from Søren Kierkegaard’s famous aphorism “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never!” to evoke Hirschman’s disposition. For someone growing up in the shadow of fascism, war, and intolerance, this upbeat was not an expected point of arrival. In fact, most intellectuals of his generation—and Hannah Arendt, his elder by a few years, comes most readily to mind—worried more than they hoped, saw catastrophe instead of opportunity. But possibilism was more than just a personal disposition; it was also an intellectual stance for his brand of social science. The more familiar search for probabilistic laws based on a list of preconditionsfor events or outcomes all too often led to the dismaying conclusion that most societies would be unable to solve their problems and break out of vicious cycles on their own. This didn’t, in the end, leave much to the imagination and left Hirschman pondering what the point was—ethically as well as intellectually—to being a scholar. He yearned for a social science that reset the imagination of the intellectual to consider combinations that might take anomalous, deviant, or inverted sequences and make them a potential course; to explore combinations that might lay the tracks for different histories of the future.
    One way to prevent a life of trouble from becoming one of tragedy was through ironic, humor-laced detachment, a stance that never got in the way of empathy or commitment. Varian Fry, with whom Hirschman worked to get refugees (including Hannah Arendt) out of Marseilles as the Nazis swept across Europe, once recalled how the police finally caught up with Hirschman not because he
had
false papers but because he had
too many good ones
, which made him suspicious. Included in these bogus documents was the certificate that “M. Albert Hermant” was a Frenchman born in