Albert O. Hirschman

Albert Otto Hirschman (born Otto-Albert Hirschmann; April 7, 1915 – December 10, 2012) was a German economist and the author of several books on political economy and political ideology.

His first major contribution was in the area of development economics.

Here he emphasized the need for unbalanced growth.

He argued that disequilibria should be encouraged to stimulate growth and help mobilize resources, because developing countries are short of decision-making skills.

Key to this was encouraging industries with many linkages to other firms.

His later work was in political economy and there he advanced two schemata.

Otto Albert Hirschman was born in 1915 into an affluent Jewish family in Berlin, Germany, the son of Carl Hirschmann, a surgeon, and Hedwig Marcuse Hirschmann.

He had a sister, Ursula Hirschmann.

In 1932, he started studying at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, where he was active in the anti-fascist resistance.

He emigrated to Paris, where he continued his studies at HEC Paris and the Sorbonne.

However, he had taken one break in the summer of 1936 to spend three months as a volunteer fighting on behalf of the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War.

Then he was off to the London School of Economics and the University of Trieste, where he received his doctorate in economics in 1938.

This experience helped him when, after France’s 1940 surrender to the Nazis during World War II, he worked with Varian Fry from the Emergency Rescue Committee to help many of Europe's leading artists and intellectuals escape from occupied France to Spain through paths in the Pyrenees Mountains and then to Portugal, with their exodus to end in the United States.

Those rescued included Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, and Marcel Duchamp.

Hirschman's participation in these rescues are one aspect of the 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic, in which a fictionalized version of him is played by Lucas Englander.

From 1941 to 1943 he was a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

From 1943 to 1946 he was in the United States Army, where he worked in the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA).

Among his tasks was serving as the interpreter for German general Anton Dostler at an early Allied war crimes trial.

He was chief of the Western European and British Commonwealth Section of the Federal Reserve Board from 1946 to 1952.

In this role, he conducted and published analyses of postwar European reconstruction and newly created international economic institutions.

From 1952 to 1954 he was a financial advisor to the National Planning Board of Colombia; he stayed in Bogotá for another 2 years and worked as a private economic counselor.

Thereafter he held a succession of academic appointments in the economics departments of Yale University (1956–58), Columbia University (1958-64), and Harvard University (1964–74).

His first major contribution was in the area of development economics with the 1958 book The Strategy of Economic Development.

Here he emphasized the need for unbalanced growth.

He argued that disequilibria should be encouraged to stimulate growth and help mobilize resources, because developing countries are short of decision-making skills.

Key to this was encouraging industries with many linkages to other firms.

He argued against "Big Push" approaches to development, such as those advocated by Paul Rosenstein-Rodan.

In the 1960s, Hirschman praised the works of Peruvian intellectuals José Carlos Mariátegui and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, stating "paradoxically, the most ambitious attempt to theorize the revolution of Latin American society arose in a country that to date has experienced very little social change: I am talking about Peru and the writings of Haya de la Torre and Mariátegui".

He helped develop the hiding hand principle in his 1967 essay The principle of the hiding hand,.

His later work was in political economy, where he advanced two schemata.

The first describes the three basic possible responses to decline in firms or polities (quitting, speaking up, staying quiet) in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970).

In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) he described the three basic possible responses to decline in firms or polities (quitting, speaking up, staying quiet).

He was on the Faculty of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1974 to 2012 until his death.

The second describes the basic arguments made by conservatives (perversity, futility and jeopardy) in The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991).

In World War II, he played a key role in rescuing refugees in occupied France.

The second describes the basic arguments made by conservatives (perversity, futility and jeopardy) in The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991).

In The Passions and the Interests Hirschmann recounts a history of the ideas laying the intellectual groundwork for capitalism.

He describes how thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries embraced the sin of avarice as an important counterweight to humankind's destructive passions.

Capitalism was promoted by thinkers including Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith as repressing the passions for "harmless" commercial activities.

He died at the age of 97 on December 10, 2012, just months after the passing of his wife of over 70 years, Sarah Hirschman (née Chapiro).