The Wrong Way Round

Geoffrey Hawthorn

• Rival Views of Market Society, and Other Recent Essays by Albert Hirschman
  Viking, 197 pp, £18.95, November 1986, ISBN 0 670 81319 2
• Development, Democracy and the Art of Trespassing: Essays in Honour of Albert Hirschman edited by Alejandro Foxley, Michael McPherson and Guillermo O’Donnell
  University of Notre Dame Press, 379 pp, $25.95, October 1986, ISBN 0 268 00859 0

‘The 20th century,’ Charles Sabel remarks in his essay in the collection in honour of Albert Hirschman, ‘has been a gigantic lesson in the transformability of theories, political programmes and institutions through their recombination in new contexts.’ It is a revealing remark. For although most of what now goes on in the ‘advanced’ societies – in what since the Bandung Conference of 1955 have sometimes been thought of as the First and Second Worlds – has indeed turned out to be very different from what was once expected; and although there is now also an even more varied Third World; that’s to say, although almost everything, event and context, has confounded expectation and will no doubt continue to do so – nevertheless the theories we have with which to understand, expect and direct it all are increasingly antique.