Albert Hirschman’s Legacy – serie

This volume brings together select texts representative of the full range of intellectual output of one of the greatest and most eclectic economists of our time, Albert O. Hirschman. Covering a time span of over forty years, they recall his most prominent books and include many additional themes taken from essays of wide-ranging origin and content. The title How Economics Should Be Complicated has the dual sense of an endpoint and a central and recurrent theme in the author’s experience, which unfolds in his critical—but constructive—relationship with economic theory, his openness to other social sciences and his democratic and "possibilist" political inspiration. This stands as the basis of an important lesson in intellectual rebirth.

Well-known as a pioneer of economic development, Albert O. Hirschman has been the flag-bearer of possibilism and reform-mongering in political science. How Reforms Should Be Passed is an anthology of texts chosen personally by Hirschman on the latter production line—as he was to call it informally—that is rooted in his long and quasi-exclusive concern for development and Latin America. Key essays on the formation and the evolution of Hirschman’s point of view on the subject are collected: from "Ideologies of Economic Development in Latin America" to Journeys (and later "A Return Journey") on policy-making; from "Obstacles to the Perception of Change" to "The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding." They show an extraordinary turn of the mind in the making that will be very useful for the United States and the developed world as well—as the final texts of the book on democracy and Europe (Italy, Germany and France) bear out. This book represents a unique opportunity for becoming familiar with many original and perceptive lenses provided by Hirschman to look at the world we live in, and especially to favor social change—focusing (first of all) on the cultural and political side of the matter.

With an astonishing unity of inspiration that serves as a counterbalance to the richness and variety of his themes and positions, Albert O. Hirschman, great political economist of our time, introduces us to the study of Western Europe, the United States and Latin America. From his own memories of the fascist period retold on the occasion of his honorary degree to two previously unpublished writings on the origins of European integration, from a group of illuminating essays on the contemporary economic and political realities of developed Western countries to a selection of texts on South America containing the provisional balance sheet of long experience, this is an intellectual lesson in the truest sense. Through his original way of penetrating the realities of our time, the author unveils a series of concrete issues and new and unlikely ways forward, constructing a tenacious and possibilist scientific pathway aimed at the unstinting encouragement of mutual understanding, economic and civic growth, and the democratic development of three continents.

Albert Hirschman affirmed that "Judith Tendler’s fine insights into the differential characteristics and side-effects of thermal and hydropower, and of generation and distribution, contributed in many ways to the formation of my views." Judith Tendler, in turn, wrote that Hirschman had taught her "to look where I never would have looked before for insight into a country’s development," and that in Albert’s work a researcher who was "patient enough" would find "a rich complexity of both success and failure, efficiency alongside incompetence, order cohabiting with disorder."Reconstructing the theoretical roots of interpretive social science, this text shows how Hirschman’s possibilism lies at the base of the original way Tendler practiced evaluation and anticipated many current developments. The continuing vitality of their thought enables us to trace the outlines of possibilist evaluation.

Born in Berlin in 1915, Albert O. Hirschman emigrated to Paris after the rise of Hitler. He studied at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales (France), the London School of Economics (U.K.) and the Trieste University (Italy). Shortly afterwards, he took part in the Spanish Civil War; collaborated actively with his brother-inlaw, the socialist, federalist philosopher Eugenio Colorni, and a group of Italian antifascists in Trieste; joined the French Army at the beginning of the World War; helped Varian Fry in Marseilles to rescue European intellectuals and artist in hundreds; and then sailed off to the US. His 1937-1939 papers in the present exhaustive collection were written for private and public purposes (including a meeting of the Société des Nations) and have been mostly unpublished so far. They reflect the gradual blossom and the early professional exploits of one of the greatest economists and social scientists of our time. They encompass a considerable spectrum of themes – demographic statistics; French monetary and budgetary policy; Italian economy; monetary, fiscal and foreign trade policies under Italian fascism and bilateralism in international trade.

Late Hirschman: Theoretical exercises in "Self-Subversion" draws from the Colorni-Hirschman intellectual tradition the author has developed with close colleagues: recalls and rationalizes personal memoires that come from the long collaboration of the author with Albert Hirschman; learns – once again – in depth from his work; desires, if possible, to make progress on some vexed questions; and breaks away from all forms of ritualism. Hirschman, homme libre, did not like orthodoxies or intellectual boundaries and the like. He certainly would not have liked to be now pigeon-holed by a part of the Academia. Gradually exploring alternative directions, Meldolesi proposes, therefore, in this book a group of exercises. They have been suggested by the late Hirschman’s self-subverting phase of intellectual elaboration that, starting from the "interpretive social science" point of view elaborated in the late ‘70s of last century together with Clifford Geertz and other leading intellectuals at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton N.J.), touched later on numerous aspects of the long experience of Hirschman developed in three continents, and mirrored cautiously in his extraordinary work. The ambition of these exercises lies in helping the "triggering off" the cultural, economic and political potential that might be stemmed from late Hirschman: for understanding some key aspects of the past, exploring hand in glove the world we live in, and acting accordingly.

This book contains a selection of chapters coming from For a Better World (First Conference on Hirschman Legacy - Boston 2017), A Bias for Hope (Second Conference on Hirschman Legacy- Washington-WB 2018), and A Passion for the Possible (Third Conference on Hirschman Legacy - Berlin 2019). The three Conferences have been organized by A Colorni-Hirschman International Institute, Rome, Italy.Animated by a large group of well-known scholars and operatives coming from United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Middle East, these Conferences provided a large spectrum of contributions on Albert Hirschman life and work, and on the wide range influence that this protagonist of the cultural scene of our time has had on managers and entrepreneurs and on public and private development around the world – from the local level, up to the UN-WB one.Sifting through the material of these Conferences, and repositioning the chosen contributions according to a general line of reasoning, however tenuous, the present collection shows the flexibility and applicability of Hirschman’s methods, concepts and proposals to the most diverse situations; and vice versa – that is it shows how those variegated realities often lend themselves to be interpreted à la Hirschman.