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

one of bad situations, and he found himself repeatedly—indeed, placed himself—at their junctions. Often painted as a hundred years of revolution, war, and genocide, the twentieth century ended with the general consensus that humanity did not dignify itself but rather displayed an ability to perform vast horrors. It is for this reason that Eric Hobsbawm once depicted the long history of the short century as an “age of extremes.” The extremes had their intellectuals.Many intellectuals. And many of these intellectuals worked in the service of the extremes. Just as we are accustomed to see the twentieth century as the age of extremes, we have tended to be more interested in its extremist apostles, from the revolutionaries to the reactionaries.
    But between revolution and counterrevolution, empire and nationalism, communism and capitalism, there was also another domain, that of reform. Often beleaguered, beaten, and overshadowed by utopian Titans, this was a realm of purposive and often nonconsensual, and therefore conflictive, change whose pursuit aimed not to perfect humanity, but only to improve it. The pursuit of flawless perfection all too often led to some horrific outcomes—Hirschman would lose family and friends to the century’s butchery at the hands of ideologues of the immaculate. What if humans had dared to dream less of humans as perfectible beings than as improvable ones? To Hirschman, it was a shame that the imagination gave so much allure to the former and treated the latter as second-best or simply—and disparagingly—as “acceptable.” How boring and undesirable! This was materiel for his struggle with utopians and fatalists from Berkeley to Berlin, who preferred all-or-nothing arguments that invariably left societies delirious with impossible expectations or despondent about their failures.
    This book is about someone who thought hard about and dwelled in the neglected, ravaged space between the romance of revolution and the firmament of reaction. It is a personal and intellectual story of a middle ground seen through the eyes of someone firmly committed to its place in the world, partly as a counterpoint to the great ideas that gave rise to grand utopian experiments. But he was not just responding to the charisma of grand schemes; his life was a twisting and gradually developing search for concepts to understand social change with their own integrity, complexity, and one might even say “theory,” though this word caused deep ambivalence for Hirschman. Hirschman’s life was a personal history of the twentieth century, its epic told through the life of one man who coursed through its most terrible and hopeful moments but never gave up on the ability to imagine life differently, better. Indeed, he would often tell his readers that asolution to the world’s problems lay not so much in some technical discovery as in the power of the imagination.
    The ensuing story charts a personal history of the world and a global history of an intellectual life.
    As we consider the life of Albert O. Hirschman, we might reflect on this place of reform as something more than a residual, a mere afterthought to the loftier utopias that dominate the pages of his century’s other thinkers. After all, Hirschman was an intellectual. His lifework represented a commitment to reform, which ranged from rebuilding war-torn Europe, to development in the Third World, and to defending a capitalism made humane by accepting the necessity of being reformable.
    Nowadays, we think of reform as fixing, mending what has been broken, but to Hirschman, it was more than a technical exercise in remediation. It was not what we do when we can’t imagine doing our best. Perhaps in retracing his life we can begin to piece together a biography of reform itself: the story of Albert O. Hirschman might be read as a collective memory in the form of a personal tale, a reencounter with a social science that finds hope in disappointment, solutions