Read Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman for Free Online

dialectical escalation from spirit to consciousness to self-consciousness so much could be explained—and yet it was not easy; OA’s friend, Helmut Mühsam—the nephew of a famous anarchist—quipped: “I understand every word, but not their connection!” 2
    Still, Hirschmann was determined to show his mettle and fathom the ties between Reason and History—and their surprising turns. He did so bytackling a passage of
Phenomenology
dealing with Hegel’s concept of ethics and consciousness and how the two are grounded in the nation and in the family—and from which an “ethical order” for human reason emerges. As happens so often in analyses of Hegel’s work, the young Hirschmann’s prose is as dense as that he tried to decipher; indeed, it does not differ very much from the subject. One might suspect that he grappled with Hegel’s opacity by being opaque himself, an inclination that would change dramatically and yield to his trademark clairvoyance. But for a seventeen-year-old making his first steps into philosophy, not to mention Hegel, distance might be too much to ask. This exercise was already something of a tall order. But Hirschmann does offer some sense that he not only understood but also sought to lend an original reading to the great text when he dealt with Hegel’s understanding of the family. What was the “ethical” bedrock of the family? Not the husband and wife relationship, “which is clearly natural.” Nor was it the tie between parents and children, because “it does not display that identity between subject and object requisite for an ethical relationship.” The condition of an ethical relationship rested upon the exercise of free will, which required an exchange of “free individuality unto each other.” Accordingly, the ties that most conform to a “truly ethical relationship” are those between brothers and sisters, bound by blood but divided by sex. Hirschmann went on to explain how Hegel viewed brothers (for whom “spirit becomes individualized” as they move through the world, passing from subjects of divine law to human law) and sisters (who become wives and preservers of the home, and thus the preservers of the realm of divine law). It was the braided relationship between siblings that caught his eye and called for reflection. Sticking close to the Hegel text, he surmised that “in this way both sexes overcome their merely natural being, and become ethically significant, as diverse forms dividing between them the different aspects which the ethical substance assumes.” How much Hirschmann truly absorbed of this is hard to say. “At the time,” he recalled, “everything seemed very opaque to me.” Yet, one has a sense that his reference was not just
Phenomenology
, but also his dialectic with Ursula, with whom he was reconstituting a close bond (now as young adults) forged in the heat of the Weimar Republic’s decomposition. 3
    He was enormously proud—of both the exercise in writing
and
of having tackled Hegel! That he had “something worthwhile” to say added to the sense of achievement. While it is tempting to identify in this writing on Hegel the seeds of something that would later grow—a sense that humans carried with them larger, logical, and ethical purposes inscribed in Reason and its manifestation in History—this impulse should be resisted. It is true that at the time he imagined himself as the heir of a German idealist tradition, but there is no sense that philosophy was capturing his imagination. Beyond this essay, Hirschmann would steer clear of Hegel until the 1970s, when he would stumble back to
Philosophy of Right
to wonder whether Marx had really revealed the cunning of capitalism’s history. In that subtle dig at the certainties of the social sciences, he used Hegel to turn excessively abstract theorizing on its head. Hegel, in fact, was a touchstone in his lifelong reservations about “the characteristic tardiness of theoretical understanding