Oracle’s Odyssey

Albert O. Hirschman lived a dramatic twentieth-century life and sought to use it to create a more humane social science.

It is an interesting oddity of Albert O. Hirschman’s life, a life that spanned and was directly touched by the twentieth century’s most momentous events, that his most important insight struck him while he was contemplating, of all things, the trains of Nigeria. He traveled there in the mid-1960s and, during a ghastly journey on the state-operated railway system, started thinking about why the railways performed so poorly in the face of competition from trucks, even for the transport of peanuts grown some 800 hundred miles away from the ports. Competition, according to most economists, is supposed to improve performance in such cases. But Hirschman made the counterintuitive observation that in this case, competition from trucks meant that the weaknesses of the railroad system led many simply to abandon the rails rather than fight to improve them.

This insight led Hirschman, by 1970, to publish his best-known work, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. “Exit” means that individuals abandon a product, firm, brand, organization, or association when they are no longer satisfied and see no chance for improvement. “Voice,” by contrast, suggests that they seek improvement and want to make their preferences heard and see their choices respected. “Loyalty” characterizes one’s commitment to associations such as the family, the nation, the ethnic group, or religious congregation that are based on formative and deeply held values.

In the Nigerian case, Hirschman observed that instead of exercising “voice” by protesting the railway’s inefficiencies, the population practiced “exit,” and state managers tolerated inefficiencies in the rail system that they may have been less inclined to accept had they been subject to loud protests. These options held true, he wrote, not only in the economic world but in social life at large: Reflecting on the worldwide youth protest movements of the late 1960s and the anti-war movement in the United States, Hirschman mused that since young people did not feel their voices heard by traditional political institutions, they chose instead to “exit” established representative political systems via street protests and demonstrations.

While Exit, Voice, and Loyalty may have been Hirschman’s most striking contribution, it was hardly his only one. He was interested in social science as a form of moral inquiry and not as the building of models or the manipulation of large data sets. He dreamed of a “social science for our grandchildren.” Over an illustrious career that spanned nearly half a century he contributed not only to economic theory but to the sociology and economy of development, the history of ideas, political psychology, and political philosophy.

Yet it is thanks only to this remarkable biography by Jeremy Adelman, a professor of Spanish civilization and culture at Princeton University and a one-time colleague of Hirschman’s, that we now have the first comprehensive view of the man and his work. Adelman writes with affection and respect and chronicles Hirschman’s life through painstaking archival work, extensive interviews, and the examination of personal and professional papers. He brings the work alive by exploring the origins of Hirschman’s achievements in the twists and turns of his life—a life, Adelman notes, that “was a personal history of the twentieth century.” It was also a life of intense political commitment and activism that transmuted itself into a relentless reformism with the passage of time.

Otto Albert Hirschmann (yes, two n’s and Otto preceding Albert, at first), named after Otto von Bismarck, was born to a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin in 1915, when the nationalist euphoria over the German Reich’s military triumphs had not yet been extinguished in the trenches of World War I. His family thoroughly shared in the illusions of Germany’s assimilated Jewry that they were full citizens of the Kaiserreich, though some of his relatives converted to Christianity for social mobility and professional acceptance. They were yet to experience, in Amos Elon’s wrenching phrase, “the pity of it all.”

The young Albert refused Christian confirmation and became politicized as an adolescent through the influence of his older sister Ursula, who had already declared herself a socialist and through whom he met one of the greatest influences of his life, the Italian socialist Eugenio Colorni, to whom Ursula was married for a number of years.

Many of his teachers in Berlin’s distinguished Französisches Gymnasium, which he attended for nine years in the 1920s, were also dedicated socialists and communists, and they soon introduced Albert to the works of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. His immersion in the school’s French language and education program gave Hirschman an orientation quite different from that of other German-Jewish émigrés, such as Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Unlike Arendt, who defended her attachment to the German language with the phrase “Die Sprache ist ja nicht verrückt geworden” (“It wasn’t the German language that went crazy”), and as distinguished from Adorno and Horkheimer, whose unique philosophic idiom remained the German idealist vocabulary of Kant and Hegel, Hirschman felt that “the German language may have been his mother tongue (Muttersprache), but it was not his home (Heimat).” In April 1933, after his father’s death and after Berlin was rocked by anti-Semitic violence, the 18-year-old Hirschman left for France, not to return until decades later.

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