Jon Elster

Raymond Aron died of a heart attack on 17 October, a few weeks after the publication of his memoirs. He died on the steps of the Paris courthouse where he had been testifying on behalf of his friend Bertrand de Jouvenel, who had been violently attacked in a book on French Fascism. The case was not a simple one, as de Jouvenel had said and done some imprudent things in the Thirties. Yet Aron, painting truth in its grey on grey, had no difficulty showing that the attack was fundamentally anachronistic: that it imputed to de Jouvenel and his contemporaries knowledge of events that had not yet occurred. In court he said that ‘nous, les hommes de cette génération, nous étions désespérés de la faiblesse des démocraties.’ In the Memoirs he is more specific: ‘il m’est arrivé par instants de penser, peut-être de dire tout haut: s’il faut un régime autoritaire pour sauver la France, soit, acceptons-le, tout en le détestant.’ The honesty is characteristic. No less typical, and more central to an understanding of his character, is the fact that he did not commit his thoughts to paper, or transform them into action. Though desperate, he was too lucid to embrace a remedy that would be worse than the disease.

The publication of these two books is a landmark in the development of economic theory. Singly and jointly, they represent a fundamental challenge to the reigning neoclassical orthodoxy. The more sophisticated practitioners of that theory have long recognised that it is in deep trouble, but have stuck to it because of the lack of a viable alternative, on the principle that you can’t beat something with nothing. Whatever objections one may have to neo-classical economics, it certainly is something: a highly-developed and formalised body of thought which has been applied to a wide range of practical and theoretical issues. One would hesitate before saying that the work of Marx, Schumpeter or Herbert Simon was ‘nothing’, and the ‘sophisticated practitioners’ referred to above would certainly not make any such judgment. Yet they would tend to say that their writing, though not lacking in insights, is amorphous, their ideas unformalised and unformalisable. They might well agree with Lord Robbins, who is reported to have said of Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that it was a piece of ‘supremely intelligent after-dinner talk’. In any case, they would insist on the global and general character of these theories, and the absence of testable hypotheses to be derived from them.

There might appear to be something inherently unscientific in the designation ‘Marxist social science’. Following Whitehead’s dictum that ‘a science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost,’ one could argue that Marxism – the valuable parts of Marxism – should simply merge with the mainstream of social science and lose its identity as a separate current. Indeed, there is much to be said for this view. In the confrontation between Marxist and non-Marxist social theory over the past century, some of the main Marxist tenets have been decisively refuted, while others have been absorbed into the shared framework of all social scientists. If these were the only consequences of that confrontation, there would perhaps be no point in referring to a specifically Marxist social science. I believe, however, that there remain elements of Marxist thought which, while valuable and important, are yet not sufficiently appreciated outside the Marxist camp – and I have to add, not always within that camp either. These elements include the dialectical method, the theory of exploitation, a theory relating class interest to state policy, and what one may refer to as a theory of endogenous belief formation. These do not form a fully coherent theory, but a loosely integrated whole, with much scope for further development.–

A few years ago I was flying from Paris to Copenhagen on a day of calm and perfect weather. The flight took me over the sea beyond the coast of Holland, and looking down I was able to see in full detail the landscape below sea level, with its hills and valleys and – astonishingly – a lake: an accumulation of dark-blue water at the bottom of a valley, sharply separated from its lighter surroundings and maintained by some unknown physical process. This lake at the bottom of the sea forcefully evoked the idea of an inner nature of things, normally hidden by an opaque veil and only occasionally discernible by the senses. It has remained with me as a moment of ultra-clear vision, an experience of being absorbed into the world rather than having it represented on a screen of consciousness.

In Anglo-American social science Albert Hirschman occupies a position at once central and peripheral, or at least anomalous. Of his centrality there can be no doubt. As one of three permanent members of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he has a unique vantage-point for gathering and influencing scholars from all over the world. His Strategy for Economic Development (1958) had an immense impact on development economics, by introducing the notions of backward and forward linkages, and by preaching the virtues of unbalanced growth. The short and incisive Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970) was an instant classic of political science no less than of economics. In that book he looked at ‘exit’, i.e. taking one’s business elsewhere, and ‘voice’, i.e. protest against the leadership, as alternative ‘responses to decline in firms, organisations and states’. This way of rephrasing the distinction between economic and political behaviour proved very useful, although the main virtue of the book lay elsewhere. Drawing on an extremely broad range of empirical knowledge, sifted, purified and rearranged by an acute and imaginative analytical mind, it generated a state of almost intolerable intellectual excitement in the reader. For many of us it provided a durable model of what a work in the social sciences should be like: free of jargon, devoid of abstract theorising, wide-ranging in application, yet with an intense analytical focus. Among current practitioners of the social sciences only Thomas Schelling and Amos Tversky come to mind as demonstrating to the same extent Hirschman’s quality of controlled imagination.