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

Philadelphia and cards testifying that he belonged to a number of associations, including a Club for People without Clubs. His seamless French helped cover his German origins and antifascist tracks. The German sociologist Wolf Lepenies once mused about Hirschman, “We have here a criminal with too many alibis.” 2 After an unplanned vascular operation while he was visiting Berlin around the time of the fall of the Wall, Hirschman came out of the fog of the anesthetic, turned to his doctor, and asked in German, “Why are bananas bent?” The doctor smiled and shrugged. Hirschman replied, “Because nobody went to the jungle to adjust it and make it straight.” 3
    This was not the only banana joke. In the 1950s, while the Hirschmans were living in Bogotá, Colombia, they made a habit of sending Christmas cards to their friends around the world. In 1952, a friend of theirs, Peter Aldor, a Hungarian cartoonist who had moved to Colombia to become one of that country’s great political satirists, drew a card for them. It featured Albert the economist perched in a banana plant clutching a sheet of graphs and figures. Below are his wife and daughters harvesting the fruit, whose production Albert is supposedly planning. The caption reads: “An excellent food is the banana. Let’s eat it today and plan it mañana.” The joke is layered with meanings, one of which was a dig at colleagues who believed in the lofty promises of economic planning.

    A holiday card from the Hirschman family, drawn by Peter Aldor, c. 1955.
    Humor was central to a literary personality; the form of the argument could not be so easily unraveled from its substance; indeed, late in life he would focus his attention on how people in modern society argue about public affairs. 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. At the core of his argument was an observation about how social scientists played with words that had political and economic consequences.
    He should know—he was a master player in his own right. Hirschman amused himself with words, their sounds, and their meanings. Adept as he was at double entendres in German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English, his play with words meant careful attention; language and words were to his craft what the scalpel was to his father, the surgeon. Play with words was often a reminder that in the freedom of language one could find light even in dark times. In June 1932, as National Socialists were broadcasting their bile, Hirschman wrote his elder sister to warn her that a long-delayed letter was still being composed. “Do you know why you haven’t received this one yet?” he asked her. “Because it is awaiting transportation! Oh the poor one, sometimes at night I can hear it whining, awaiting [
harren
] its transportation.” 4
    It was in words that his play came to full fruition. He loved a well-turned phrase, especially when twisting the familiar into the self-mocking. “The dead end that justifies the means! But does the end justify the meanness?” and “I am anxious for criticism as long as you find me seminole” can be found among his jottings. One can find “Metaphors in search of a reality,” a formulation he instantly doubted and then swapped for “metaphors in search referent,” folded into his notes on the problem of freight rates on Nigerian railways.
    Word play was not idle play. The paradoxical, backward, inverted developments one finds in his favorite images and aphorisms mirror the style he brought to bear in his outlook on the world. Like baguettes (with which he became a self-proclaimed world-expert sandwich-maker) that get soft, not hard, as they go stale, Hirschman enjoyed finding meaning from the way History defied “universal laws.” Out of the inversions and “wrong-way-around” sequences, came possibilities for things to be