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This paper discusses the role of Albert O. Hirschman as a founder of development economics in the postwar years. Although Hirschman maintained a strong interest in development matters throughout his entire professional career, his major contributions to development economics took place between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s. The paper examines Hirschman’s innovative contributions to the new discipline. When, in the 1950s, development economics gravitated around the concept of “balanced growth,” Hirschman opened new vistas with a theory of “unbalanced growth.” In the early 1960s, Hirschman focused on reformist political approaches to development, against the opposed extremisms of reaction and revolution. Finally, in the late 1960s, Hirschman opened new perspectives on the importance of detailed analysis of development projects, against the theoretical drift of early development economics.

The discussion of Hirschman’s development career is also an opportunity to observe the gap between theoretical debates and development policies. Whereas development economists often clashed on theoretical issues, their views were remarkably closer on practical questions.

As a pioneer of development economics, Hirschman sought to establish it as a discipline theoretically distinct from mainstream economics. By the 1980s, this project had collapsed, and the development question was reabsorbed by the economic mainstream. This article, however, argues that current development debates remain deeply indebted to Hirschman’s contribution. His reformist vision, rejection of one-size-fits-all solutions, his insistence on the ineluctable role of uncertainty, and his search for country-specific, incremental, and evolutionary policies make his approach central to current development discourse.

This paper analyzes the standpoint of Albert O. Hirschman in the structuralist–monetarist debate that took place in Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s. It claims that Hirschman had many affinities with the structuralist approach, in virtue of his methodological stance and of his view of the role to be performed by economic advisers in foreign countries. Similar to the structuralists, Hirschman did not make the control of inflation a central tenet of his development theory; also like them, he dissented from the orthodox approach. However, Hirschman did not take a clear-cut side on the debate, choosing, instead, to act as a go-between.

This paper looks at the origins of Albert O. Hirschman’s distinctive approach to economic development. It argues that Hirschman’s style was the result of several, sequenced, influences. One was the impact of his brother-in-law, the Italian philosopher, Eugenio Colorni, who raised the curtain on a Renaissance approach to knowledge that privileged the importance of close observation. The second was an aversion to abstract theorizing, based in part on Hirschman’s distaste for what “theory” produced in the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, the paper suggests that the experience of looking at development experiences from the ground up while living and working on Colombia in the 1950s was pivotal. Thus, it was set of conceptual, political, and empirical influences that molded the classic work, The Strategy of Economic Development (1958).

As Hirschman wrote of himself in an essay of 1984, he was a dissenter. The paper focuses on three dimensions of this dissent. Dissent from orthodoxy, in the first place, even if his stance rarely assumed the feature of a frontal opposition. His distance from mainstream economics clearly emerges in the contrast between growth and development, here exemplified through a comparison of Solow’s and Hirschman’s conceptions. Second, dissent from heterodoxy: from Nurkse, Rosenstein Rodan and the balanced growth theory, but also a distance from the kind of economic theorizing recently exemplified by Krugman’s critical appraisal of Hirschman’s contribution. Third, a dissent from Hirschman himself. He developed a practice defined as “self-subversion” to convey the meaning of a self-critical dialogue with his own positions. In this context, two examples will be discussed, namely his critical reappraisal of the dependency theory, to which Hirschman as a young man contributed indirectly, and his after-thoughts on the choice between sequential or simultaneous strategies. Hirschman’s reflections on the last theme appear relevant to address the problems of current Eurozone crisis: its roots may be traced back to the faulty construction of the Monetary Union, which in turn largely stemmed from the misplaced confidence in the “automatism” of the sequence Monetary Union-Fiscal Union-Political Union.

The paper’s contention is that Hirschman’s “possibilism,” often mentioned, is not the result of a generic psychological propensity to optimism but stems from analytical observations and penetrating critical analysis of received ideas or categories, of other authors or of Hirschman himself.

This paper introduces a hitherto unpublished 1970 paper written by Lauchlin Currie (1902–1993) on Paul Rosenstein Rodan’s famous 1943 paper on the “Big Push” which led to the balanced-unbalanced growth debate to which Albert Hirschman (1915–2012) was an important contributor. Both Currie and Hirschman had been key economic advisers to the Colombian government, and their respective views on development planning are contrasted. In particular, it is shown how Currie’s 1970 paper illuminates the theory behind the 1971–1974 national plan for Colombia that he prepared and helped deliver; and how the related institutional innovations have had an enduring impact on Colombia’s recent economic history.

Albert Hirschman always distinguished himself by his unique approach in tackling economic problems, an approach that moved easily from literature and philosophy to political economy and social psychology, without ever losing sight of the real workings of social and political life.

The papers collected here stemmed from a desire to know more closely this rare economist who used the tools and features of one discipline to throw light upon those of another.

The methodological stance is the first element that emerges either explicitly or implicitly from this collection of papers: Hirschman’s suspicion of all-encompassing theories and their issue in encompassing plans – development plans in particular. His was a piecemeal approach targeting the scarcest of all factors, such as the ability to mobilize resources and to solve problems. This matched Hirschman’s own view that “petites idées,” to look at problems in the small, form the material for further observations and insights.

The second element that emerges from these papers is the richness of themes explored – from how to voice reasons for one’s disappointment and distrust to the role of countervailing passions in institutional development, from the “bias for hope” to the problem of inequality – but also the strong connections that exist among them. These connections revolve around the problem of economic change and its dynamics: how to explain it, how to promote it.

Yet, no matter which of Hirschman’s works we pick up for the first time or rediscover, we cannot avoid seeing that besides the scientist with his microscopic lenses, there is also the artist who looks at problems not for the final truth they might hide or the definite solution, but to make us aware of them, to open our eyes to curiosity and wonder. This is a difficult lesson, but not one Hirschman will let us forget.

The article reviews the contribution of Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty (EVL) to research in political science. The argument is the framework of exit and voice offers greater understanding of a range trade-offs that exist in politics, in particular over collective action and citizen responses to dissatisfaction, which have implications for institutional design as well as for the functioning of democratic processes. The paper summarizes the EVL model and discusses how it may be elaborated. The main part of the article reviews applications to research literatures on political participation, responses to oppressive regimes, political party and interest group membership, and reports a number of formal treatments. The applications have been useful and illuminated a number of research problems, but overall they are modest in their impact in political science. The article suggests that the potential range of impacts could be much greater as EVL can show how individual choices are made in politics and are constrained by its institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze Albert Hirschman’s landmark book Development Projects Observed, share its insights for managing big projects, discuss its theoretical implications and how it may contribute to the current understanding of project behavior, project management (PM), and in what way it may encourage the rethinking of PM.

The paper is based on an in-depth analysis of Hirschman’s book. The paper draws on the writings of Jeremy Adelman who authored Hirschman’s biography, Cass Sunstein and Michele Alacevich who, respectively, wrote the foreword and afterword of the Brookings Institution classic published in 2014. It also profits from the work of Robert Picciotto who first met Hirschman in 1964, and Bent Flyvbjerg who recently offered a test of validity for Hirschman’s “Hiding Hand” principle.

Albert Hirschman was an original thinker and, the authors argue in many ways, a father of PM scholarship. His ideas had profound implications for social sciences and lasting influence in academy, policy, and practice. Although, to a great extent based on studies of projects, his ideas have had surprisingly little impact on modern writings of PM. This paper contributes to amending this weakness in current literature on PM. The authors identify in Hirschman’s book a set of core ideas that possess analytical power for explaining problems in contemporary PM. They include the principle of the Hiding Hand, the power of context, the role of complexity and uncertainty, the unexpected project effects, project traits, and latitudes/disciplines. For all his work and way of research, the authors conclude that Hirschman is not only an early behavioral theorist in PM but equally an early rethinker of PM.

This is the first paper that offers a discussion of Hirschman’s ideas on contemporary projects, how to understand them, their behavior, including the principle of the Hiding Hand and other important nuggets of wisdom in his research such as the significance of project traits, latitudes, and disciplines. The authors discuss in what respects these ideas may enlighten PM practice and theory. This paper also conveys the novel idea that Hirschman is an early rethinker of PM.

Albert O. Hirschman famously wrote against parsimony. He wanted to complicate economics. The locus of these complications was often individual behavior. This paper makes three arguments about such complications. The first is that the growing experimental evidence on individual behavior broadly supports many of Hirschman’s proposed complications. In particular, there is evidence of preference change under “reflection.” Second, I argue that there is experimental evidence of both “good and bad” preference change in market society. The third is that the policy of “nudging” would not sit well with Hirschman. “Nudging” is a return to the “parsimonious” instinct in economics; and it misses the real implications for policy of the insights from behavioral economics, which, of course, are more complex.

In the 1950s, when development as a subject for study was as yet poorly defined, misunderstandings were not uncommon. The grounds were often methodological, but substantive analytical differences were also involved. I focus on an unusual context, the invitation given to one economist, Hollis B. Chenery, who promoted the neo-classical approach to growth, to review two works stemming from very different perspectives. One of these was The Design of Development by econometrician Jan Tinbergen; the other was The Strategy of Economic Development by the highly original thinker Albert O. Hirschman. Chenery found himself baffled by Hirschman’s stress on the capacity to make quick and strong decisions in favor of development, if backwardness was to be overcome. But he was equally drawn to Tinbergen’s advocacy of detailed development plans. I argue that Chenery was wrong on both counts. He failed to understand Hirschman’s argument, which admittedly was novel, and misperceived Tinbergen’s approach as of a piece with his own convictions. The episode is instructive chiefly in opening up to reconsideration the ideas and misperceptions of three pioneers of development economics.