We’re coming up, in two years, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Some of you may know of Hirschman as one of the main characters in that not-so-good, pulpy Netflix series Transatlantic, which depicts the efforts of Hirschman and others to rescue European Jewish intellectuals from the Nazis in France. If you’re a political scientist or sociologist, you may know of Hirschman for his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. If you’re a theorist, you may know his Rhetoric of Reaction. If you’re an economist or a Latin Americanist, you might know of his work in development economics.
But, for me, Hirschman will always be the author of The Passions and the Interests. Its main thesis is that early-modern writers, from Machiavelli to David Hume, saw in the idea of interests — initially understood as a reasoned form of passion, later as a strictly economic pursuit of money and material well-being — as a counter to dangerous forms of political passion: glory, heroism, virtue, excessive civic-mindedness. It’s a wonderful little book, which in many ways has inspired some of the counterarguments that I am making in my book King Capital.
But there’s a little-noticed element in Hirschman’s book, which I only just stumbled upon in a recent rereading. Given when the book was written, in 1977, and given Hirschman’s extensive involvement in Latin American politics and economics and his many efforts to save Latin American Marxists and leftists who were being threatened by right-wing goons and governments in the 1970s, that subplot seems worth mentioning.
While the overall thrust of the book is about the pacifying and productively anti-political dimensions of market activity, Hirschman mentions, briefly, that both the Physiocrats and Adam Ferguson had a darker intuition about the uptick of market societies and commercial pursuits. From a supportive…
Auteur: Corey Robin
