Albert Otto Hirschman

"Why does society oscillate between intense interest in public issues and almost total concentration on private goals? In this classic work, Albert O. Hirschman offers a stimulating social, political, and economic analysis dealing with how and why frustrations of private concerns lead to public involvement and public participation that eventually lead back to those private concerns. Emerging from this study is a wide range of insights, from a critique of conventional consumption theory to a new understanding of collective action and of universal suffrage."--BOOK JACKET.

Albert O. Hirschman is renowned worldwide for theories that have been at the forefront of political economics during the last half century. In these twenty essays he casts his sharp analytical eye on his own ideas, questioning and qualifying some of his major propositions on social change and economic development. Hirschman's self-subversion, as well as the self-affirmation that is also present here, reveal the workings of a distinguished mind. They also bring us fresh perspective on the material in his twelve previous books and countless essays.In the substantial essays that open this collection, Hirschman reappraises points he made in such books as Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, The Strategy of Economic Development, and The Rhetoric of Reaction. Subsequent essays fruitfully reexplore the themes of Latin American development and market society that have occupied him throughout his career. Hirschman also forays into new puzzles, such as the likely impact, negative or otherwise, of the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 on the Third World, the on-and-off connections between political and economic progress, and the role of conflict in enhancing community spirit in a liberal democracy. In a rare and particularly welcome section of the book, Hirschman presents autobiographical fragments that reflect his deep involvement in some of the important events of this century. He recollects his flight from Hitler's Germany in 1933, his studies in Paris, his work with the antifascist underground in Italy in 1937-38, and his role in helping Varian Fry in Marseilles, in 1940, to rescue political and intellectual refugees from Vichy France. Such accounts deepen our understanding of how Hirschman's penetrating insights took shape

'This collection of essays provides an overview of the scholarship of one of America's leading political economists. Some of the essays deal with the area in which Albert Hirschman has made his best-known contributions - economic development and its political repercussions - and they provide a new perspective on some fundamental questions. The rest consider political participation, 'rational choice' theory, and the history of economic thought. The essays ignore any narrow disciplinary bounds, and instead 'trespass' from one social science to another, providing expert analysis and insights which will interest particularly those concerned with comparative politics, economic development, or Latin America.' from publisher's description.

In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests --so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice --was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasizes the continuities between old and new, in contrast to the assumption of a sharp break that is a common feature of both Marxian and Weberian thinking. Among the insights presented here is the ironical finding that capitalism was originally supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon denounced as its worst feature: the repression of the passions in favor of the "harmless," if one-dimensional, interests of commercial life. To portray this lengthy ideological change as an endogenous process, Hirschman draws on the writings of a large number of thinkers, including Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith.

An innovator in contemporary thought on economic and political development looks here at decline rather than growth. Albert O. Hirschman makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organizations: one, "exit," is for the member to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing product, and the other, "voice," is for members or customers to agitate and exert influence for change "from within." The efficiency of the competitive mechanism, with its total reliance on exit, is questioned for certain important situations. As exit often undercuts voice while being unable to counteract decline, loyalty is seen in the function of retarding exit and of permitting voice to play its proper role. The interplay of the three concepts turns out to illuminate a wide range of economic, social, and political phenomena.