Michele Alacevich, Albert O. Hirschman: An Intellectual Biography

Excerpt

Before Albert O. Hirschman died at the age of ninety-seven, he would have been safe in the prediction that interest in his life and work would persist after his death. Just one year later, in 2012, a breathtaking and detailed biography was published by Princeton University Press. Its author, Jeremy Adelman, narrates the “odyssey” of Hirschman, whom he calls a “worldly philosopher” (the reverse of the title and subtitle of the book here). The description was well chosen since there were not many scholars of the twentieth century with a comparable multifaceted biography as Hirschman’s. And given his status in the social sciences, paraphrasing Robert Heilbroner’s portraits of leading economic thinkers from Adam Smith down to Joseph A. Schumpeter, there was no mistaking the descendant who shared the desire of the older heroes to intervene directly in the course of events rather than purely observe and document them. If Adelman can be criticized at all, it is for having treated the context of economic thoughts in less detail. …