Albert O. Hirschman, Economist and Resistance Figure, Dies at 97

His death was confirmed by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where Mr. Hirschman spent the latter part of his career.

Mr. Hirschman pieced together his graduate work in economics in the 1930s while serving as a soldier and something of an insurgent. Born in Germany, he fought with reformers in the Spanish Civil War and later joined the French Army in its Resistance to the Nazis.

When France fell in 1940, he became an integral part of a rescue operation led by the journalist Varian Fry that helped more than 2,000 people escape to Spain, among them the artists Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp and the political theorist Hannah Arendt.

Mr. Hirschman found routes through the Pyrenees Mountains for those who were fleeing and smuggled messages in toothpaste tubes.

By the early 1940s, he had moved to the United States and enlisted in the Army, which sent him to North Africa and to Italy as part of its Office of Strategic Services. One of his duties was to translate for a German general in an early war crimes trial. Later, he worked with the Federal Reserve Board, focusing on European reconstruction under the Marshall Plan.

In 1952, he moved to Colombia to be an economic adviser to that impoverished but rapidly developing country. A few years later, he was back in the United States, beginning a 30-year academic career in which he blended economics, politics and culture and held posts at Yale, Columbia and Harvard. He rarely invoked the experiences of his youth in his academic work, but certain themes persisted in both periods of his life.

Mr. Hirschman argued that social setbacks were essentially an ingredient of progress, that good things eventually come from what he viewed as constructive tensions between private interest and civic mindedness, between quiet compliance and loud protest.

He ranged widely in his writings, which include geographically specific studies on economic development, like “Journeys Toward Progress: Studies of Economic Policy-Making in Latin America.” A broader work was “Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States,” published in 1970.

That book outlined different ways that people deal with disagreeable rules or situations politically, culturally and professionally. Some might suffer silently out of loyalty, while others raise questions and still others decide to abandon a situation. The theory has been applied to how politically oppressed people might flee a nation as well as why shoppers stop buying a certain product — a retail variation of what Mr. Hirschman called the “exit option.”

In 2003, William Safire, the columnist for The New York Times who also wrote the On Language column for The New York Times Magazine, led an informal search for the roots of the phrase “exit strategy.” The search led to economists, who pointed to Mr. Hirschman, who denied culpability, sort of.

“Did he coin the phrase?” Mr. Safire wrote after interviewing Mr. Hirschman. “No; it’s nowhere in his book. He used exit option. ‘It was a somewhat new concept then,’ Hirschman recalls. ‘I used exit to indicate a possibility, a strategy. When you are dissatisfied, you can use your voice option or your exit option. It is not so different from the political use today. Speak up or get out.’ ”

While many economists were increasingly immersed in statistics, Mr. Hirschman often wrote with a storyteller’s sweep about the behavior of nations, institutions and individuals. At a time when top-down models for stabilizing economies were popular, particularly in developing countries, Mr. Hirschman was inclined toward a kind of chaotic capitalism called disequilibria.

Mr. Hirschman “thought disequilibria creates problems that you have to solve — and that’s a good thing,” said Jeremy Adelman, a professor of history at Princeton and the author of a biography, “Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman,” to be published next year.

Otto Albert Hirschmann was born on April 7, 1915, in Berlin. (He later changed the order of his given names and dropped one of the n’s from his last name.) His father was a surgeon. His survivors include a daughter, Katia Salomon; four grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. His wife of 70 years, the former Sarah Chapiro, died in January.

Mr. Hirschman was an ardent optimist. He believed, as Mr. Adelman put it, “that even the most seemingly immutable, impossible situations could be solved, that you could change things that seemed unchangeable.”

But he also said that things sometimes had to get harder before they got better.

“Somehow we always try to think in terms of having only one thing happen; everything else will coalesce around it, and we’ll come out all right,” Mr. Hirschman said in a transcribed conversation with an anthropologist in 1976.

He added: “Generally we only have one lever at a time. We only have one ‘new key’ at a time. To try to counteract this sort of thinking is very important. This kind of faddishness has marred all thinking about economic development.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/business/albert-o-hirschman-economist-and-resistance-figure-dies-at-97.html?partner=rss&emc=rss