Lessons from an Expert Reform-Monger
Lessons from an Expert Reform-Monger
Review: Albert Hirschman's Journeys Toward Progress
Journeys Toward Progress: Studies of Economic Policy-making in Latin America, by Albert Hirschman. 1968.
Journeys Toward Progress is the second book in Albert Hirschman's Development Trilogy, after the influential The Strategy of Economic Development and before Development Projects Observed. In Journeys, Hirschman looks at three major case studies in Latin America: the development of Brazil's drought-stricken Northeast region; the land reform question in Colombia; and the battle to curb inflation in Chile.
Hirschman takes an inductive approach: the first three chapters present the history of each case in great detail, and the last two synthesize common features, while studiously avoiding any hard-and-fast conclusions. This makes the book devilishly hard to summarize. The most I can do is tease out a recurring theme -- the relationship between reform and revolution, and how successive waves of reform (and disappointment) influence each other.
Most of the interesting analysis is in the penultimate chapter, which contains some lovely nuggets of Hirschmanian insight for anyone who thinks about reform, in any context. (I'll admit that the first few chapters are unusually tedious for Hirschman, since they are largely exposition; the real meat of analysis is at the end.) Two key ideas stuck with me. The first is Hirschman's analysis of how reform-mongering is shaped by rhetorical needs: reformers must often degrade or underplay previous achievements as superficial or coopted, in order to create the sense of urgency for further pushes forward. Of course, if the current round of reforms is successful, amnesia again sets in, and a future generation may in turn downplay the achievements of the current one. Not that this is bad, per se—but it does explain, say, the recent progressive souring on Obama's first term.1
The second is Hirschman's critique of the Leninist / Luxemburgian dichotomy between peaceful but toothless reform and violent but meaningful revolution. Through his case studies, Hirschman points out that there is a range of possibilities between these two caricatures, analogous to the states of conflict that exist between peace and total war. The land invasions of poor tenant farmers in Colombia and the general strikes against inflation in Chile—both of which resulted in substantive policy change—were far from tidy legislative maneuvers, but nor were they outright revolution. Rather than seeing reform reduced to a palliative that excludes the possibility of revolution (which, ironically, may be a view shared by frightened conservatives and hardened communists), Hirschman shows how these two impulses can work in conversation with each other to produce meaningful and lasting change.
NB: this was written in 2020.