Jeremy Adelman’s recent biography of Albert O. Hirschman takes its title from Robert Heilbroner’s book, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, which introduced readers to the work of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes, among others. (Heilbroner’s book was first published in 1953 and is still in print, with the seventh revised edition dated 1999.) Adelman explains that he adapted Heilbroner’s title “to denote a worldly figure” (xiv): Hirschman lived and worked in Europe, Latin America, and the United States; he worked on practical problems both inside and outside of academic institutions; and his research was always engaged in—and intended to help solve—genuine social problems. But, in choosing that title, Adelman’s (unstated) claim is that Hirschman should be added to Heilbroner’s list of worldly philosophers. The biography makes a compelling case for Hirschman.

Otto Albert Hirchmann was born in Berlin on April 7, 1915, during the First World War. (He later changed the order of his names and dropped an ‘n’ from his last name; I use the latter spelling throughout this review.) His parents were assimilated Jews, his father a successful surgeon; Hirschman was baptized as a Lutheran and self-identified as German. He received a classical education in a “vibrantly cosmopolitan, civil, bourgeois—republican—[Berlin]” (19). In 1932 he entered the University of Berlin (renamed Humboldt University of Berlin after the Second World War) to study economics, but at the same time he was swept up into politics, “devoting himself to full-time militancy and left-wing study” (77). After Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933, Hirschman fled to Paris, where he studied economics at Ecole des hautes etudes commerciales (known as HEC Paris) because, as a refugee, he likely could not have been admitted to study economics at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, which trained diplomats and civil servants.

Then, as Adelman puts it in a wonderful understatement, “over the course of the next three years, Hirschman shuffled between three countries [including England, where he spent a year studying at the London School of Economics], enlisted to fight in a civil war, joined an underground resistance, and got a doctoral degree” (119). Adelman: “The Spanish Civil War provided an important immediate cause for German socialists, and Hitler’s backing for Franco made Spain an opportunity to resist fascism on another front” (129). There are no records of what, exactly, Hirschman did as a soldier, though Adelman thinks it likely that he fought in one particular, early battle. But, when Spanish resistance came under Russian communist control, Hirschman left Spain; the Russian involvement frightened him; and he then moved to Trieste, Italy where he lived with his sister and her husband, Eugenio Colorni, a philosopher and socialist political activist who very much shaped Hirschman’s thinking. In Italy, Hirschman worked with a group of statisticians at the University of Trieste, where he pursued his interests in economics and trade, producing a number of short papers and his doctoral dissertation, receiving his doctorate in June 1938. Adelman writes that Hirschman

During this period, Hirschman smuggled letters and documents between his brother-in-law’s underground resistance movement and underground socialist groups in Paris (in a specially designed suitcase).

Italian policies directed at Jews became increasingly hostile, so Hirschman returned to France in 1938. He joined the French army in 1939 but, when the French defenses collapsed, Hirschman fled to Marseilles. There Hirschman became Albert Hermant, and there he worked for Varian Fry, whose Emergency Rescue Committee provided visas for over 2000 European refugees to enter the United States. They saved artists and intellectuals known to be in danger, including Hannah Arendt, Andre Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. Hermant proved to be “a font of devious ingenuity and seasoned wisdom” (177): he secured false documents and passports, smuggled refugees across the French border into Spain (from there they could secure transportation to Portugal and then to the United States), and exchanged currency on the black market to provide funds for the refugees (working with local gangsters). Fry’s work has been widely praised but Hirschman’s role in the Emergency Rescue Committee’s work was not widely known.

Hirschman himself secured a visa to enter the United States through a different path, relying on contacts, supportive colleagues, and some luck: while in Paris, Hirschman had worked for the Institute de recherches économiques et sociales, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and that foundation provided Hirschman with an academic fellowship to conduct research for two years at the University of California at Berkeley—at the urging of Hirschman’s American cousin and one of Hirschman’s academic colleagues.

Hirschman arrived in the United States on January 13, 1941. His subsequent career remained itinerant, and each move depended on connections of the sort that brought him to the United States. After his fellowship at Berkeley ended, he enlisted in the US Army (serving as a translator in northern Africa and Italy). He then worked as an economist in the US government, providing research that helped shape the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe. But, an FBI file cast doubt on his background and his loyalty to the United States (because of his possible affiliation with communist organizations in Europe); this file effectively forced Hirschman out of US government work, and in effect it forced him to pursue another path: in 1952 Hirschman moved to Colombia, where he served as an economic advisor to the Colombian National Planning Council (as part of a World Bank-sponsored development project). After two years, Hirschman set up his own consulting company in Colombia, evaluating investment proposals and providing economic research for private businesses, banks, and government agencies. He returned to the United States in the fall of 1956 to take a position as visiting research professor in the Yale University Department of Economics; Hirschman then held academic positions at Columbia University and Harvard before finally settling at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Over the course of his time in the US he made regular and extensive research trips, mostly to South America, to study development on the ground, sponsored by private foundations and the World Bank. He wrote fourteen books, including Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) and The Passions and the Interests (1977), along with scores of papers.

Hirschman’s rich life makes for a very interesting (and surprising) biography. Across the biography, Adelman traces the lines of thought running through Hirschman’s published work, making the biography an essential companion for anyone studying Hirschman—including those in business ethics. For example, Hirschman’s best known book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, is an essential work for understanding the interaction of businesses with governments and consumers; Adelman explains how the book fits with Hirschman’s own experience in development economics. The Passions and the Interests provides a very useful historical background for Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. And Adelman discusses a number of other, lesser known works that will also be of interest, such as Hirschman’s (1984) critique of economic theory—which challenges economists’ “simplistic and contradictory propositions” about human nature along unexpected lines.

Adelman’s account emphasizes Hirschman’s method, even though Hirschman himself felt that he had no method to impart. According to Adelman, “as [Hirschman] became more famous, he was downright hostile to the idea that he might be the leader of a Hirschman ‘approach,’ much less a school of thought inspired by his ideas” (365). Indeed, Hirschman was consistently wary of (and consistently argued against) ideological formulae, general theories, and economic patterns or laws that supposedly held across time and across social contexts. He was consistently skeptical (and critical) of the experts’ supposed authority—especially of the idea that experts could, for example, go to Colombia and tell the government how to pursue economic development on the basis of economic theories and economic laws. Instead, “Hayek’s vision of spontaneous, unguided, hidden forces at work presumed an inscrutability about life that Hirschman shared, in which its ironies, paradoxes, and the possibilities of unintended consequences provided the underlying engines of change” (238). So Hirschman observed; he collected (and kept files of) petites idées that provided starting points for his work and often provided the basis for challenging theories. He modeled this approach after Montaigne, who (as Adelman notes) “questioned absolute forms of knowledge by submitting everything to the interrogating eye of the observer” (145). Moreover,

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is the result of this sort of investigation. Exit doesn’t present a theory of development or a theory of social change; instead, it offers an interdisciplinary framework that can be used to interpret and understand different situations, one that locates human decisions as the determining force. Faced with declining institutions (or products), one response is to withdraw in favor of some other institution (or product), to exit; another response is protest—to use voice. At the core of social change, then, are persons negotiating courses of action; social scientific theories that put disorder and disequilibrium outside of theorizing misunderstand and misrepresent social systems and social change. This is a different way to do social science: “Rejecting the prevailing concern to catalogue preconditions for successful outcomes or doomed fates, [Hirschman] wanted attention focused instead on possible paths, oddities, anomalies, unexpected and unintended effects” (451); applied to his work in South America, economic development was therefore a matter of “radical incrementalism” (456).

Adelman, then, doesn’t suggest adding Hirschman to Heilbroner’s list (again, on this reviewer’s reading) because of a theoretical insight; Hirschman isn’t contributing a theory of exit, voice, and loyalty, or a theory of economic development, or any other theory. Instead, Hirschman belongs with Heilbroner’s worldly philosophers because he changed what it means to do social science.

The only problem with Adelman’s biography, if this is indeed a problem, is the book’s size: almost three inches thick, over seven-hundred pages, longer and heavier than this reviewer’s hardcover copy of John Rawls’s Political Liberalism; and too big to fit in his briefcase. But the book fits nicely in a new backpack, purchased to carry the book over a winter break trip. Hirschman would have approved: he always traveled with books, even carrying his copy of Montaigne’s Essais into war as a French soldier. It’s a luxury to carry and read Adelman’s biography on an airplane.