Books by Albert O. Hirschman

How Economics Should Be Complicated is an anthology of texts personally authorized by the Author and edited by Luca Meldolesi, that appeared in Italian in the series of the "Great Contemporary Economists" at Il Mulino, Bologna, in 1988.

The experience accumulated in the wake of more than two decades of sustained effort to promote growth and change in the low-income countries presents a rich field for scholarly inquiry and new insights into the development process.

In these 20 essays Hirschman casts his sharp analytical eye on his own ideas, questioning and qualifying some of his major propositions on social change and economic development. Hirschman's self-subversion, as well as the self-affirmation also present here, bring us fresh perspective on the material in his 12 previous books and countless essays.

With engaging wit and subtle irony, Albert Hirschman maps the diffuse and treacherous world of reactionary rhetoric in which conservative public figures, thinkers, and polemicists have been arguing against progressive agendas and reforms for the past two hundred years. He draws his examples from three successive waves of reactive thought that arose in response to the liberal ideas of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to democratization and the drive toward universal suffrage in the nineteenth century, and to the welfare state in our own century. In each case he identifies three principal arguments invariably used--the theses of perversity, futility, and jeopardy. He illustrates these propositions by citing writers across the centuries from Alexis de Tocqueville to George Stigler, Herbert Spencer to Jay Forrester, Edmund Burke to Charles Murray. Finally, in a lightning turnabout, he shows that progressives are frequently apt to employ closely related rhetorical postures, which are as biased as their reactionary counterparts.

Some of the finest essays in the social sciences, written by one of the twentieth century's most influential and provocative thinkers The Essential Hirschman brings together some of the finest essays in the social sciences, written by one of the twentieth century's most influential and provocative thinkers. Albert O. Hirschman was a master essayist, one who possessed the rare ability to blend the precision of economics with the elegance of literary imagination. In an age in which our academic disciplines require ever-greater specialization and narrowness, it is rare to encounter an intellectual who can transform how we think about inequality by writing about traffic, or who can slip in a quote from Flaubert to reveal something surprising about taxes. The essays gathered here span an astonishing range of topics and perspectives, including industrialization in Latin America, imagining reform as more than repair, the relationship between imagination and leadership, routine thinking and the marketplace, and the ways our arguments affect democratic life. Throughout, we find humor, unforgettable metaphors, brilliant analysis, and elegance of style that give Hirschman such a singular voice.Featuring an introduction by Jeremy Adelman that places each of these essays in context as well as an insightful afterword by Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, The Essential Hirschman is the ideal introduction to Hirschman for a new generation of readers and a must-have collection for anyone seeking his most important writings in one book.

This book brings together fourteen articles and papers written by Albert O. Hirschman. Three of the papers have not been published previously and a number of introductory notes have been especially drafted for the present volume to evoke the intellectual-political climate in which certain groups of essays were written.