Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012)

An Original Thinker of Our Time

Cass R. Sunstein

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman
by Jeremy Adelman
Princeton University Press, 740 pp., $39.95

In seeking to prove Hamlet wrong, Hirschman was suggesting that doubt could be a source not of paralysis and death but of creativity and self-renewal. One of his last books, published when he was about eighty, is called A Propensity to Self-Subversion. In the title essay, Hirschman celebrates skepticism about his own theories and ideas, and he captures not only the insight but also the pleasure, even the joy, that can come from learning that one had it wrong.
Mais