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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... qui peut,’ he said. ‘Il faut se débrouiller.’ Get out of this as best you can. Albert Hirschman would say that he’d been a débrouillard all his life. He’d left Berlin in 1933, sought an education in Paris and London, fought in Spain, worked in Trieste, fled back to France, enlisted, and with the rest of his émigré platoon now ...”

“... exit again. In his classic treatise from 1970, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, the economic theorist Albert Hirschman articulated the different ways power is exerted in the economy. In principle, competitive markets are systems in which ‘exit’ counts for everything. If I am unhappy with the quality of my washing powder, I can simply decline to buy it ...”

“... the theories discussed (related to the works of Alfred Marshall, Theodore Schultz, Arthur Lewis, Albert Hirschman, Gunnar Myrdal and others) are not specifically concerned with India as such. Indeed, that chapter provides a remarkably pithy and illuminating account of some of the most basic issues of development analysis and economic policy, and it ...”

“... 1920s Syria and 1860s Afghanistan. The arguments against intervention are neatly itemised by Albert Hirschman as ‘perversity’, ‘futility’ and ‘jeopardy’: an intervention could be dangerous (for us or for Libya); it could achieve nothing; or it could achieve exactly the reverse of what it intended. This line can be bolstered by the ...”

“... whites, whose average incomes are higher, to spend to defend their status in their own community. Albert Hirschman has extended this to propose that the ‘relative income hypothesis’ is strictly conditional. In homogeneous societies, societies which Douglas and Isherwood would perhaps describe as weakly grouped and weakly gridded, an increase in ...”

“... In​ The Passions and the Interests, published in 1977, Albert Hirschman revisited the 18th-century argument that the pursuit of worldly self-interest might be the most effective way of controlling destructive emotions like anger. The pursuit of interests that are constant and predictable potentially offers an escape from the see-saw effect of trying to curb one passion with another ...”

“... sin to scintillation) career is without equal, even in the labile field of early modern passions. Albert Hirschman brilliantly argued that during this period greed was grudgingly elevated from vice to interest, on the grounds that it usefully curbed more destructive passions such as anger and ambition, an important step towards the moral acceptance of ...”

“... construe economies in analytical/quantitative terms. To compound all this there are scholars like Albert Hirschman who insist on seeking new ‘connections’ between phenomena, and indeed ‘connections between connections’ (as Jon Elster described it, LRB, Vol. 4, No 17). These bridging speculations perform their magic either by deliberately leaving ...”

“... enormous human cost. It is also the case that the economies of most Latin American republics, as Albert Hirschman long ago pointed out, are overly dependent upon a limited number of staples with weak, and sometimes non-existent, manufacturing sectors. Cuba was, and remains, almost wholly reliant upon sugar; Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras ...”

“... security protectorate. Nato, not the EEC, laid the military conflicts of the past to rest. As Albert Hirschman once caustically put it: ‘the European Community arrived a bit late in history for its widely proclaimed mission, to avert further wars between the major Western European nations.’ A beneficiary of the Pax Americana rather than a ...”