Albert O. Hirschman: An Intellectual Biography.

• Author: Boettke, Peter J.

* Albert O. Hirschman: An Intellectual Biography

By Michele Alacevich

New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

Pp. xvi, 332. $35 hardcover.

Albert Hirschman (1915-2012) was the noneconomists' favorite economist. That title might have gone to John Kenneth Galbraith for intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s, but since the 1970s Hirschman has worn the crown. He was the establishment intelligentsia's sort of hero. He spent his formative years as an empirically grounded observer and adviser in the field of development economics. He had a left-wing youth of activism and courage fighting fascism in Europe--a left-wing youth that he never renounced but did quietly abandon once he was in the United States. His work was filled with wide-ranging reflections and sprinkled with philosophy and literature in multiple languages. Thus, it always appeared to be civilized, polite, and passionate yet checked. He was erudite and urbane. The perfect mix to stand in opposition to the free-market counterrevolution of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman as well as to the methodological revolution of microfoundations and economic imperialism. Hirschman was the economist that historians, philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists could trust.

It must be admitted that Hirschman had uncommon talents--reflected in the felicity of his pen and his ability to credibly address in a sophisticated and nuanced way complicated questions in easily digestible books of less than two hundred pages. It is his books, more than his essays, let alone his research papers, that influenced. According to Google Scholar, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), for example, has been cited close to thirty thousand times, whereas his top journal articles, such as "Rival Interpretations of Market Society" (1982) and "The Political Economy of Import-Substituting Industrialization" (1968) are cited slightly more than one thousand times. The Passions and the Interests (1977) is his second-most-cited work at more than six thousand citations.

Hirschman's uncommon talents were matched with uncommon experiences. Born in 1915 to an affluent Jewish family, Hirschman started his studies in Germany and was part of the antifascist resistance. He migrated to Paris, studied at the Sorbonne, and then visited the London School of Economics to study with Hayek and Lionel Robbins while also learning about the revolutionary ideas of the Keynesians and the market socialism of Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner. He then went to Italy, where he finished his graduate studies at the University of Trieste. He fought in the Spanish Civil War and then worked to help European artists and intellectuals escape Nazi capture. He was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and then joined the U.S. Army in the Office of Strategic Services. After World War II, he worked as an adviser to the National Planning Board of Colombia and then worked as a private consultant in Bogota. He traveled the world as an economic-development expert. He was an eyewitness to and in fact lived an extraordinary life of political, economic, and cultural turmoil all before the age of forty. These experiences enabled him to have a treasure trove of on-the-ground observations to draw on to illustrate his points.

But Hirschman was also the benefactor of uncommon opportunity. Starting in 1956, his academic appointments were at Yale, Columbia, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). He also spent a year at the Center for...