Gotham Diary:
Restless
24 June 2013

Our weekend was so peaceful and quiet that, instead of feeling refreshed, I’m unnerved, and would prefer things to go on being peaceful and quiet. That’s because the peace and quiet were external. I spent most of the time in the life of a remarkable man, a man whose political and cultural outlook seemed to resemble my own more closely than that of anyone else I’ve ever read about, but whose life was altogether unlike mine. A heroic life, really, and an extraordinarily active one, for a worldly philosopher.

Worldly Philosopher is the title of Jeremy Adelman’s biography of Albert Hirschman, and it happens to be the mot juste to describe Hirschman’s interdisciplinary career. It is impossible to think of him as economist, so stunted have economists become in our time. He was almost everything but an economist. He boasted no overarching theories about anything, except for his conviction that theories and economies don’t mix. His slim books were well-received — outside the bubble in which economists talk to each other. Hirschman prized the specific and the actual, not the abstract or the probable. He called himself a social scientist, but he railed against “scientistic” thinking — Physics Envy.

But: what a life! Born in Berlin in 1915, he fled the city on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, after Hitler’s consolidation of power. He continued his education in Paris, London, and Trieste, and he took time out to take part in the Spanish Civil War on the eve of Franco’s sweep into Catalonia. When it was time to think about getting out of Europe, he headed for Marseille and hooked up with Varian Fry, the agent of the Emergency Rescue Committee that smuggled dozens of intellectual and artistic Jews across the Pyrenees — Hannah Arendt and Marcel Duchamp among the best-known. When he himself reached the United States, he settled into a program at Berkeley, where he met his wife, Sarah. In 1943, he enlisted in the Army and was soon seconded to the OSS, as a translator, in North Africa and Italy. He wondered why he wasn’t given more interesting intelligence work, as he would wonder, back in Washington after the war, why he had so much trouble getting a government job. He never did find out what the problem was; by the time that Adelman obtained his FBI file, with its flimsily-based “concern” about a social-democratic youth group to which Hirschman belonged as a teenager, Hirschman had declined into dementia. (He died only last December, aged 97.) Through better-established refugees, he eventually got a job at the Federal Reserve Bank, where he did the “thinking behind the thinking” for the Marshall Plan, but this hardly burnished his reputation as the political climate in Washington deteriorated. In desperation, Hirschman accepted a job offer from the World Bank, to participate in a massive developmental planning scheme for the government of Colombia.

Which, as you can imagine, was hardly the gateway to a settled life. Shuttling between various Latin American projects and three elite universities in the States, Hirschman lived a restless-looking life. At Columbia University, he also discovered that he hated teaching. It made him throw up,  and he wasn’t very good at it. Relief came in 1975, when he was asked to join the faculty at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, which has everything a scholar could want, including no students.

By this time, the field of “developmental economics” was in decline, if not disgrace; Latin America and the Third World were dotted with egregiously failed projects and defeated ambitions. Hirschman did not regret this: he was one of the first to understand that treating “developing” economies according to rules not in general use was a big mistake. (So many times did Hirschman’s observations, as quoted by Adelman, remind me of Jane Jacobs that I was sure that she must have been some kind of student of his, but his name does not appear in the indexes of her books. The two thinkers appear to have worked in true parallel, never meeting on any level.) So, Hirschman turned himself into an intellectual historian. with three remarkable little books about passions and interests. The Passions and the Interests was the first of these, but the other two, Shifting Involvements and The Rhetoric of Reaction pursue the same train of thought, which is that economists and political scientists ruin their work by insisting on gross oversimplifications. You might say that Hirschman embraced the messiness of life, but it would be better to say that he didn’t see the mess, only the life.

***

Hirschman wanted to change his last book’s title to The Rhetoric of Intransigence, because as he demonstrated in the book’s bracing last chapter, people on the Left could be as obstinately optimistic as conservatives were the other thing. “Intransigents of all stripes only serviced a dialogue of the deaf,” writes Adelman,

and thus ensured that the failure of reform was sealed from the start. The ability of a society to sustain open conversations among rivals that admitted the possibility of being wrong was a gauge of its democratic life and its ability to promote nonprojected futures for its citizens.

In the terms that I’ve been developing in the wake of reading George Packer’s The Unwinding, the health of a democracy depends upon the system of loyal opposition. I should rather say, the convention of loyal opposition. I’m not sure that loyal opposition has ever been quite conventional in the United States, but it is the bulwark of the parliamentary system, and multi-party legislatures cannot function without it. As we see in these hard times. The convention of loyal opposition would prohibit such remarks as George H W Bush’s insinuation that Michael Dukakis was a “card-carrying member of the ACLU” (Adelman’s book recalls this). In the convention of loyal opposition, it is impermissible to charge an opponent with disloyalty to the nation. Opponents can be wrong-headed, deluded, misguided, or even deranged, but they are not to be attacked with innuendos of treason.

My thinking on the convention of loyal opposition, as an intramural code for legislators and other politicians, has developed out of an earlier, vaguer application of the term, to the lesson that I learned from the Jeff Connaughton story in The Unwinding: there is no “loyal opposition” to the embedding of almost all of our governmental apparatus within the shell of “organized money.” I have yet to be clear about the meaning of “organized money,” but I’m sure of one thing: it’s the money that is organized, not the people with the money. In Washington, money finds its way into the pockets of those who generate money, almost hydrostatically. There are no conspiracies of billionaires. By putting money first, the people with the money are kept at some remove, regardless of occasional cooperation.

Organized money is generally felt to have a tighter grip on Washington than it used to do. (Indeed, I believe that it has simply swallowed government whole.) But is this the case? People with money have always been influential in government. Somehow, though, “influence” doesn’t seem to be the right word anymore.