Albert O. Hirschman

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Hirschman (left) as translator for Wehrmacht General Anton Dostler (1945)

Albert Otto Hirschman (* 7. April 1915 in Berlin as Otto Albert Hirschmann , † 10 December 2012 in Ewing Township, New Jersey ) was an American economist and social scientist German origin.

Life

Hirschmann - coming from a Jewish family - grew up in Berlin in the secularized, educated middle class . After graduating from the French Gymnasium in Berlin , he began studying economics at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in 1932 . During the Weimar Republic , Hirschmann was a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth . In April 1933, shortly after the seizure of power by the National Socialists Hirschman fled from Germany. He first moved to Paris , where he continued his studies at the Sorbonne and the École des hautes études commerciales de Paris . With his Paris diploma he continued his studies at the London School of Economics .

During the Spanish civil war , Hirschman fought for three months in the revolutionary Marxist party Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) against the right-wing putschists under General Francisco Franco . Here Hirschmann got into heavy fighting. In 1938 he received his doctorate from the University of Trieste with a thesis on foreign trade policy and then joined an underground anti-fascist group in Trieste , but soon moved back to France because Benito Mussolini had passed the first anti-Semitic laws . In 1939 he enlisted in a foreign unit in the French army to avoid internment as a German. During Hirschman's training, he surrendered in 1940 and after demobilization he went to Lisbon , where he made contact with the American Emergency Rescue Committee and acted as Varian Fry's “right hand man” in Marseille . In 1941, Hirschman had to move to the USA himself.

After initially continuing his studies in Berkeley , he enlisted again in 1943 for service in the US Army and participated in the Second World War in North Africa and Italy for the Office of Strategic Services . During this time he got to know the work of Albert Camus , whose humanism had a great influence on his thinking. He acted as a translator at the war crimes trial against Wehrmacht General Anton Dostler . Back in the US, he was hired by the Federal Reserve Board of Directors . Dissatisfied with the tasks, he moved to the office of the Marshall Plan of W. Averell Harriman , where the Western Europe Department was subordinate to him. Under his influence, the OEEC , an OECD forerunner, was founded.

He left the Marshall Plan office in 1952 on a spontaneous decision and went to the Development Policy Department at the World Bank , for which he worked for four years in Bogotá , Colombia . In 1956 he returned to the USA and taught at Yale , Columbia and Harvard . He completed his academic career at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton . From 1990 to 1995 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin .

Hirschman was married to Sarah Chapiro since 1941. His sister Ursula Hirschmann was the wife of Eugenio Colorni and later of Altiero Spinelli . In addition to his mother tongue, German , he spoke English , Italian , Spanish and French .

Hirschman died on December 10, 2012 at the age of 97.

Act

Hirschman's work was devoted to a wide variety of topics, so that it can hardly be assigned to a specific social science. He dealt with " political science , social psychology , philosophy , the history of ideas and [the] classical literature - and almost always in creative contrast to the prevailing opinions."

Hirschman is regarded as a possibilist who wrote against the traditional views in economics and especially development economics. Possibilism is to be understood as the search for possibilities. In Commitment and Disappointment, for example, he asks himself how the cyclical interest in politics and then the withdrawal into private life take place. He comes to the conclusion that consumer deception leads to a change in meta-preferences, and this leads to an interest in political activities. There it can lead to addiction or to another disappointment that leads to retreat into privacy.

In his most famous book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1972; German migration and contradiction ) he dealt with the reactions of consumers to the decline in performance in the state and companies. He indicated that people not only used the opportunity to exit - to migrate to the competition - but also, especially in relation to public goods, to use the voice , of collective protest. Another possibility is loyalty , the tolerance over longer periods of time. All three options are in a tense relationship with one another, although there are also cases in which exit and voice intensified, which Hirschman later admitted with regard to the collapse of the GDR .

He was of the opinion that problems and incorrect expectations are an essential factor for the development of creativity and therefore innovation. He compared the challenges that the struggle against Indians in North America posed for European immigrants with the situation in largely deserted Brazil. Under the pressure of the Indians, according to his thesis, the United States had built stable institutions and a national infrastructure, while in Brazil the colonialists could claim huge areas without having to expand them in close cooperation with one another. He applied this comparison to development policy and refused to make infrastructure and capital available to developing countries from outside. Instead, he took an approach of helping people directly, whom he wanted to teach how to solve their specific problems on the ground.

Together with the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal , he is considered a founder of the spatial polarization theory in economics , which criticizes the equilibrium models of neoclassical theory and offers a counter-model.

It was characteristic of Hirschman that he often revised and criticized his own theories after a while. That was the name of his last collection of essays Propensity to Self-Subversion (Eng. Tendency towards self-subversion ).

The Herfindahl-Hirschman index was named after him.

Awards

Publications

  • National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade. Berkeley 1945.
  • The Strategy of Economic Development. New Haven 1958.
    • German edition: The strategy of economic development. G. Fischer, Stuttgart 1967.
  • Exit, Voice, and Loyalty . Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge MA 1970.
    • German edition: Migration and contradiction. Reactions to decline in performance in companies, organizations and countries. Mohr, Tübingen 1974, ISBN 3-16-335251-0 .
  • The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton NJ 1977.
    • German edition: Passions and interests. Political justifications of capitalism before its victory. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-518-06418-5 .
  • Shifting involvements. Private Interest and Public Action. 1982.
    • German edition: Commitment and disappointment. About the fluctuation of citizens between private and common good. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-518-57691-7 .
  • Development, market and morals. Different considerations. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1989, ISBN 3-446-15253-9 .
  • The Rhetoric of Reaction. Cambridge MA 1991.
    • German edition: Thinking against the future. The rhetoric of the reaction. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-446-16529-0 .
  • A Propensity to Self-Subversion. Cambridge MA 1995.
    • German edition: self-questioning and knowledge. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-446-18753-7 .
  • Table community . Between the public and the private sphere. Passagen-Verlag, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-85165-267-3 .
  • Crossing boundaries. Selected Writings. New York 1998.

literature

  • Jeremy Adelman: Worldly Philosopher. The Odyssey of Albert O Hirschman . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2013.
  • Ulrich Arnswald: Hirschman's theory of exit, voice, and loyalty reconsidered. Europ. Inst. For Internat. Affairs, Heidelberg 1997, ISBN 3-933179-00-9 .
  • Alejandro Foxley et al. (Ed.): Development, Democracy, and the Art of Trespassing. Essays in Honor of Albert O. Hirschman. Notre Dame (Ind.) 1986.
  • Varian Fry: Surrender on Demand. 1945.
    • German edition: Wolfgang D. Elfe, Jan Hans (Hrsg.): Delivery on request. The rescue of German emigrants in Marseille in 1940/41. Translated from American English by Jan Hans and Anja Lazarowicz. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1986.
  • Albert O. Hirschman: Only doubt makes people strong. In: Martin Doerry (Ed.): Nowhere and everywhere at home. Conversations with survivors of the Holocaust. DVA, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-421-04207-1 , pp. 212-219.
  • Paul Krugman : Development, Geography, and Economic Theory. Cambridge MA 1995.
  • Claus Offe : Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. In: Dirk Kaesler , Ludgera Vogt (Hrsg.): Major works of sociology (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 396). 2nd, revised edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-520-39602-0 , pp. 197-200.
  • Lloyd Rodwin et al. (Ed.): Rethinking the Development Experience. Essays Provoked by the Work of Albert O. Hirschman. Washington 1994.
  • Christian Velder: 300 years of the French grammar school in Berlin. Nicolai, Berlin 1989 (portrait of Hirschmans pp. 523-528)
  • Patrick Eiden-Offe: A man, a plan, a canal: The economist and social scientist Albert O. Hirschman. In: Merkur 12 (2013), No. 775, pp. 1104–1115.
  • Manfred Nitsch, Britta Symma: Hirschman, Albert Otto. In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Adler – Lehmann. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 275-280.
  • Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 520

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Albert O. Hirschman 1915–2012. Obituary from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.
  2. ↑ a b Peter Vogt: Disaster is never certain. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. November 29, 2013, No. 276, p. 14.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Tilman Evers: Crossing and infiltrating - Albert O. Hirschman's Odyssey through the 20th century . In: Sheets for German and international politics . tape 10 , 2015, p. 101-110 .
  4. ↑ Albert O. Hirschman: Grenzgänger der Ökonomie. Obituary to: tagesspiegel.de , December 18, 2012.
  5. ↑ Malcolm Gladwell : The Gift of Doubt - Albert O. Hirschman and the power of failure. . In: The New Yorker . June 24, 2013.
  6. ↑ Member History: Albert Otto Hirschman. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 1, 2018 .
  7. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed June 10, 2020 .
  8. ↑ See The Sixtieth Anniversary of the Refoundation of Sciences Po - The Doctors Honoris Causa
  9. ↑ http://d-nb.info/952446073
  10. ^ Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. ase.tufts.edu, accessed October 12, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Table of contents, awards
personal data
SURNAME Hirschman, Albert O.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hirschmann, Otto Albert (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sociologist and economist
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 10, 2012
Place of death Ewing Township, New Jersey