[amazon_link id=”0691159904″ target=”_blank” ]The Essential Hirschman[/amazon_link] edited by his prize-winning biographer Jeremy Adelman ([amazon_link id=”0691155674″ target=”_blank” ]Worldly Philosopher)[/amazon_link] is a collection of essays well worth reading by anbody who, like me, was not very familiar with Hirschman’s work. The book is divided into three sections covering Hirschman’s work on development economics, essays on market societies, and essays on democracy including his thinking on political rhetoric.

[amazon_image id=”0691159904″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Essential Hirschman[/amazon_image]

I particularly like the combination of economic analysis (rarely expressed mathematically, but nonetheless rigorous) with an awareness of the difficulties of implementation, of political constraints, and of the role of the emotions in people’s decisions. For example, the first essay, ‘Political Economics and Possibilism’, looks specifically at the role of optimism and political leadership in bringing about change, and the scope for the same economic policies to have vastly different outcomes depending on political characteristics of the society in which they are introduced. For example, trade-offs that are possible in a relatively homogeneous society may not be feasible in one divided on religious or ethnic grounds, of might even lead to civil war. As Adelman puts it in his excellent introduction, “It is rare to find a writer in our times so at ease with the modern tools of the social scientist and yet so concerned with the complexity of the human condition that he or she can bring to life the frictions and tensions that come from looking at our world at the junctions of political, economic and emotional life.”

Hirschman, it is evident from this book and Adelman’s superb biography, Worldly Philosopher, was increasingly out of tune with the economics of his times. The subject became increasingly abstract and generalised, and inclined to require mathematical rigour everywhere. Hirschman was focused on the specifics of each situation. In ‘Search for Paradigms’, he argues that the highly analytical, paradigm-seeking frame of mind led either to undue conservatism about the prospects for things to improve, or its opposite, a revolutionary bias. In the essay on possibilism, he wrote: “Most social scientists conceive it as their exclusive task to discover and stress regularities, stable relationships and uniform sequences. This is obviously an essential search, one in which no thinking person can refrain from participating. But in social sciences there is a special room for the opposite type of endeavour: to underline the multiplicity and creative disorder of the human adventure, to bring out the uniqueness of a certain occurrence, and to perceive a new way of turning a historical corner.” And it is this last that makes him such an optimistic, encouraging thinker too.

I least enjoyed, however, a couple of the essays on development, which may well be because I am entirely unfamiliar with his theory of linkages – these essays didn’t mean much to me out of context. Still, even in those, the emphasis on tensions and conflicts as motors of change, and the inevitable messiness of the process, is clear.

The book also has a nice evaluation of Hirschman by Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen as an afterword. They say his work cannot be neatly mapped onto any of the normal distinctions we tend to make, between orthodox and heterodox, between theoretical and empirical, between state and market – “he aspired to both and embraced the conflict between them,” they conclude. It is well worth reading some of Hirschman’s classic books such as [amazon_link id=”0674276604″ target=”_blank” ]Exit, Voice and Loyalty[/amazon_link] of course, but this book of essays is a terrific overview of his work.