Jeremy Adelman

The first Hirschman I read was a short extract from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in an undergrad class. It was great: simple, insightful, and easily applicable to many things in life. I've thought about it often since then. A few years later during the Obamacare debates I encountered his arguments in The Rhetoric of Reaction that felt the same way to me. I never sought out any of his other work after that, but this biography makes me want to both revisit those two works as well as dip further into his oeuvre. Adelman illuminates Hirschman's incredibly eventful life in a lot of detail, including his constant peregrinations (multiple trips to Germany, France, Italy, Spain, America, Venezuela, Brazil....), his extensive personal friendships, and his works with enough detail to make you want to read them but without getting bogged down too much.

The only thing I didn't like about the book was Adelman's occasionally excessive sycophancy and pro-Hirschman tendentiousness; at times Adelman paints this picture of Hirschman as the only economist on the planet without personal blind spots or an ideology. In all fairness some of this might be due to Hirchman's tendency to revel in the inscrutable and paradoxical, and in many of those cases it's probably Hirschman himself who was stumbling or unclear. But, fittingly, those moments are also where Adelman really shines. Hirschman was a big fan of Michel de Montaigne, the guy who invented the essay, and many of Montaigne's trademark mental digressions and inversions show up in the economist's work. What looks like a frustrating contradiction turns out to be merely a smart guy grappling with tough problems, delighting in surprises and unexpected subtleties. Hirchman's lifelong quest was to "prove Hamlet wrong" - to use the natural human urge to doubt oneself as a tool of liberation instead of paralysis, and Adelman does a mostly fantastic job at showing the fruits of Hirschman's labors.… (mais)

Jeremy Adelman is an expert on South American economies, particularly as to developing countries. He has documented the deliberate efforts on the part of the latifundia and plutocrats to suppress the middle class. He now presents a brilliant biography of the great unreconstructed student of Adam Smith, Albert O. Hirschman, who among other work, is the author of "Exit, Voice, Loyalty."

"Exit" is economics, and "Voice" is politics. His biographer captures the polymath pith of his colorful subject in this brilliant biography. Adelman has the gift of recognizing greatness among the peerage and the decency to share it with the rest of us.

Hirschman is a "Worldly Philosopher" in the sense that he understood the insensate idiocy of "nationalism" at the beginning of the 19th century, traced it through the 20th and buried it in the 21st. Hirschman was fluent--with barely a trace of an accent--in six languages, and in every science.

We still lobby for his Nobel Prize in Economics.… (mais)