Worldly Philosopher - The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

摘要

In this biography, Jeremy Adelman has successfully shouldered the herculean task of exploring and linking the extraordinarily ingenious methodology and exceptionally rich, heroic and global life of one of the greatest political economists of the twentieth century. The title captures the intricate amalgamation of Hirschman's ideas and life very well. In total opposition to the platonic, deductive techniques employed by most economists, Hirschman's methods are mainly inductive, i.e. real world oriented. This different approach to making sense of the social, political and economic world is based on, and intertwined with, his very diverse international life experience as a young socialist activist in the Berlin of the short lived Weimar Republic, student of commerce in Paris and economics at the London School of Economics, refugee and resistance fighter in Italy, Spain and France, soldier and intelligence officer of the US army during World War II, and professor at Columbia and Harvard universities in the USA and development policy consultant in South America and elsewhere in the developing world. Hirschman was fluent in several European languages. And he played a key role in Varian Fry's rescue mission in Vichy France helping to save the lives of a large number of Jewish and left wing European intellectuals persecuted by the Nazis before he had to flee to the USA himself.