ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN

The first critical study of the thought of Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012), “one of the most important and influential social scientists of the twentieth century.”

As Alacevich, a professor of economic history, points out, it’s difficult to categorize Hirschman’s thought and to trace his influence. He created no school and had few students. Yet this activist émigré from Nazi Germany, who early in life aided Varian Fry in his efforts to assist those fleeing Europe, went on to serve in the Office of Strategic Services, the Federal Reserve, and the World Bank, eventually becoming one of the world’s leading international and developmental economists. He then broadened his interests to history, sociology, and politics to create an “interdisciplinary social science” in works that brought together all of the distinct social sciences and infused them with moral urgency. Hirschman introduced such important concepts as “the hiding hand,” “backward and forward linkages,” and “the centrality of side effects.” His characteristic optimism and his “bias for hope” (one of his book’s titles) shine through in what he called “possibilism.” Like his most widely known work, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which examined responses to the deterioration of institutions and political organizations, many of his books, accessible to a broad audience, assured “the vastness of his legacy.” One of the many virtues in this book is Alacevich’s evenhandedness. He fairly examines criticisms of Hirschman’s thinking as well as the wide respect in which it is held, and while he’s deeply admiring of his subject, he makes clear his own reservations about some of Hirschman’s arguments. Ultimately, writes the author, Hirschman ended up “in a league of his own.” Read in conjunction with Jeremy Adelman’s Worldly Philosopher, this fine book makes it possible to take the full measure of a distinctive and keenly political intellectual.

A superb examination of the vast legacy of a major 20th-century thinker.