Harvard University Press Blog

Empire, 2000

“Empire is materializing before our very eyes.” So begins Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, one of the 100 significant works we’ve chosen to highlight as we celebrate our centennial. You can read an excerpt from Empire at our centennial site, and, below, a look back on the book’s reinvigoration of the left by HUP sales representative John Eklund.

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I’ve been representing university press books for fifteen years now and I’ve noticed two kinds of scholarship.

One approach tackles a big subject by nibbling away at the edges, hoping to find the loose strand that will unravel the whole project. Every season we publish many books of this type and I love them for their patient, long-term, sometimes-stealthy style of argument.

But the other kind of book I enjoy selling is the full-blown, frontal assault, big idea book. These are scarcer, but when they happen it’s as if you can feel the unacknowledged givens, our invisible social and political assumptions, shift beneath your feet. Like the writings of Herbert Marcuse in the late sixties, which were anxiously awaited and debated with relish, everyone who cares about social progress has to grapple with books of this sort when they appear. Such a book was the 2000 cri de coeur by an Italian revolutionary and an American scholar, Empire.

A decade before its release, the non-capitalist world collapsed and evaporated. Even committed leftists sat shiva for socialism, and the ideological cheerleaders of global empire gleefully declared the case closed. The triumph of market capitalism seemed complete.

But along came Hardt and Negri to argue that the diffusion of power we’ve come to know as globalization is not necessarily the savior of capital but its gravedigger; that Marx was right, there is a forward momentum to history, and that it arcs toward throwing off oppression; and, perhaps most surprisingly for readers of left criticism accustomed to turgid, joyless polemics, that the rebuilding of a revolutionary movement can be accomplished in a spirit of romance and optimism. In the beautiful final pages of Empire, we are warned “against sadness.”

But wait! What’s really new and big about this argument? Aren’t Hardt & Negri simply riffing on an old and very well known ideology? What’s really being overturned? What’s staler than the assorted leftovers of a failed worldview?

A Theory of Justice, 1971

In 1971 Harvard University Press published several books of unusual importance, including E. O. Wilson’s The Insect Societies (his first book with the Press) and the landmark Notable American Women, Volumes 1-3. That year also saw the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, one of the most influential works in our history, and one of the 100 significant works we’ve selected to commemorate our centennial. Below, HUP Executive Editor-at-Large Ian Malcolm considers the book’s initial impact and enduring significance.

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John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has sold well over three hundred thousand copies since its publication in 1971. It’s an astonishing number for any academic book, let alone a 600-page work of abstract and uncompromising philosophy. It’s a rare book, though, that has had such a transformative effect on its field. Reviewers immediately recognised the book as a masterpiece, the most significant work in political philosophy since the nineteenth century, and it has been indispensable reading ever since. Its future looks assured too: in a 2010 poll, philosophers voted Rawls the contemporary most likely to be read in a hundred years. Not bad for a book that Rawls thought would be of interest only to a small circle of colleagues.

When Rawls (1921–2002) wrote the book, political philosophy was in a moribund state. It was dominated by old utilitarian ideas about achieving the greatest good for the greatest number, with Marxism running a distant second. There had been no important systematic works in the field for decades. A Theory of Justice, a comprehensive defence of liberal egalitarianism, galvanized the subject. It did so in part by returning to the social contract tradition that utilitarianism had displaced, a tradition according to which political legitimacy arises from some sort of agreement between governors and the governed. But the book was no mere variation on the tradition, a modest reworking of Locke, Rousseau, or Kant. Rawls drew on the resources of modern analytic philosophy to take, step by careful step, a new approach to the moral foundations of political life, working out the implications of a thought experiment about the kind of society people would design if they had no idea where in that society they would end up. A society designed under such a “veil of ignorance,” he wrote, would guarantee that “each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” Every person would have the right to as much liberty as is compatible with the liberty of others. Social and economic arrangements would be designed to benefit everyone: inequalities would be acceptable only if they are unavoidable in a system that, overall, raises the conditions of the worst off.

Great State Autism

In The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, published last year, Edward Luttwak introduced the concept of “great state autism,” a collective national lack of situational awareness that reduces a country’s ability to perceive international realities with clarity. While the U.S. and Russia each suffer from obvious cases of the condition, Luttwak labels China’s autism an “especially virulent” strain, due to its ancient development in relative isolation and its sheer size, among other factors. Luttwak sees the affliction when, say, China flexes its military muscle in the face of a neighbor one day and then is surprised by the rebuff of a trade delegation to that same neighbor the next.

“In all great states,” writes Luttwak, “there is so much internal activity that leaders and opinion-makers cannot focus seriously on foreign affairs as well, except in particular times of crisis.”

They do not have the constant situational awareness of the world around them that is natural in small countries of equal advancement. After all, individual sensory and cranial capacities are much the same in smoothly operating states of a few million people, and in megastates such as the Russian Federation, the United States, India, and China, whose leaders face internal urgencies if not emergencies each day somewhere or other, in addition to their ordinary decision-making sessions and ceremonial obligations.

The result is not mere inattention. On the contrary, it is not only possible but common for great-state leaders and even entire ruling elites to make much of foreign affairs if only as welcome diversion from the harder choices of domestic politics, in which almost any decision that pleases some must displease others—and not mere foreigners whose political support will not be missed.

Great-state autism is worse than inattention because in the absence of the serious and earnest study that domestic urgencies make impossible, decision-makers cannot absorb in-depth information with all its complexities and subtleties, even if it is offered to them (which is unlikely: when intelligence officers adhere to the rule that their highest duty is to tell top leaders what they do not want to hear, their careers suffer). Instead, decisions on foreign affairs are almost always made on the basis of highly simplified, schematic representations of unmanageably complex realities, which are thereby distorted to fit within internally generated categories, expectations, and perspectives.

Now, in the recently-published Israel Has Moved, Diana Pinto describes Israel as suffering from its own case of autism, despite being a nation of far less territory than Luttwak’s Russia, China, India, or the United States. Pinto’s book is an unsettling take on Israel’s decades-long drift away from the European shadow in which it was founded and towards a new insularity. On the one hand are the country’s world-leading science and technology sectors, on the other its less successful international relationships.

Super-Israel at the technological heart of the new world economy suddenly becomes Israel the autistic with Asperger syndrome, the bipolar, the schizophrenic, the paranoiac, the psychotic, and even the psycho-rigid: in other words, an entity that denies the very principle of reality. These are very powerful, even terrifying, metaphors. They are not mine. Israelis from all camps—whether ultraorthodox or extremely secular, young or old, and coming from the most diverse cultural origins—used them freely before me as so many self-evident truths.

She writes of Israeli autism:

This condition, which occurs among the young (and Israel is both very young as a state and very old as a people), who are often quite brilliant in certain fields, defines those who cannot think of themselves as living in a world populated by others. They do not register the gaze or the emotions of others and are therefore unable to communicate or interact with them, because they do not grasp or understand what might motivate them… As with autistic people who feel threatened, Israel can reply to the aggressions of others (in its case most often real and not imagined) only by an excessively forceful and uncontrolled reaction, of which it often becomes its own victim.

Interestingly, while Luttwak makes no mention of Israel in his discussion of great state autism, Pinto cites China as the only other civilization whose “self-centeredness” resembles that of the Jews. Also striking are the contrasting conditions of each affliction’s incubation: Luttwak points to China’s ancient history of isolation from other states, whereas Israel’s defining characteristic is its keystoning of the lands along the Mediterranean Sea. In either case, the label seems a useful lens through which to observe these two major factors in the pursuit of geopolitical stability.

The Economics of Voting Rights

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, a case challenging a major provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That provision, Section 5, holds that before making changes to voting procedures, jurisdictions in all or part of 16 states must convince the federal government that the changes won’t amount to “denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.” Despite the law having been repeatedly upheld by Congress—with overwhelming support as recently as 2006—Shelby County, Alabama, argues that the law is outdated, unnecessary, and unfair.

After oral arguments and questioning made the position of the Court’s conservative Justices clear, it’s widely assumed that Section 5 will be struck down, in what Court-watcher Linda Greenhouse characterizes as an all but certain “evisceration” of the Voting Rights Act. For those seeking to understand the case, its place in the Roberts Court’s pattern of rulings on the “sordid business” of race, and how it’s happened that the Court now seems poised to give itself a power that should reside with Congress, Greenhouse’s reporting is a great place to start.

Here though, we’d like to consider a recent study of the Voting Rights Act that shows its effects to have been even broader than is often understood. The Act’s standing as a watershed moment for the extension of civil rights in this country is of course a given, but in a new book, economic historian Gavin Wright shows that the VRA was also extremely significant to the advancement of economic equality in the covered regions. In Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South, Wright outlines the commonly overlooked connections between the civil rights movement and the struggle for economic justice, arguing that breakthroughs like the VRA were an economic boon to African Americans with no commensurate setback for southern whites.

A key contribution of Wright’s book is the simple reminder that, on the ground and in the moment, economic concerns were always part of the push for equal rights:

From the bus boycotts of the 1950s to the sit-ins of the early 1960s, demands for equal access to services were almost always coupled with demands for jobs providing those services. In December 1955 the Montgomery Improvement Association called for “employment of Negro bus operators in predominantly Negro residential sections,” a demand that was actually quite radical for the time because of the quasi-legal powers bus drivers held. Flyers like the one [pictured below] from Warrenton, North Carolina, were circulated during public accommodations disputes throughout the region. The appeal for “equal opportunity for employment” and the complaint that stores “do not hire any Negroes in responsible jobs” are, if anything, more prominent than the demand for fountain service. In Birmingham, pickets wore sandwich boards reading “Don’t buy where you cannot be a salesman” and continued their pressure until each downtown department store hired at least one black clerk.

The Ever-Deeper Ideal of Freedom

Last week we heard from John Burt, author of Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, on the promise of equality in Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. In the piece below, Burt further explores the historical allusions in Obama’s speech, and considers the contingent and expanding ideal of freedom in American history.

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President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address expresses optimism about our country’s seeing its way clear to the next step, rather more optimism than Lincoln felt. To see the difference, consider the way Obama juxtaposed three different allusions to speeches of Lincoln about the lessons of the Civil War:

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by the sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

The first sentence quotes a famous sentence from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. In Obama’s version, the blood drawn by the lash of the master and the blood drawn by the sword of the soldier are the (high) price of a lesson by now thoroughly learned. Lincoln’s version is rather darker. What Lincoln said was:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

In saying this, Lincoln imagined that God may have in mind a course of retribution for the United States so severe that the not-yet-ended Civil War will seem only like the first act; furthermore, should this dire fate befall the Union, Lincoln conceded that it will be a fate the Union has richly deserved.

The phrase about how no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free alludes, of course, to Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of 1858, and it does capture one of the main lessons of the Civil War. But when Lincoln referred to the same subject in the opening sentences of the Gettysburg Address, he saw the question not as whether a republic divided into slave states and free states could survive (he already knew that that question had a negative answer) but whether any republic that chose to test the proposition that all men are created equal could endure. That is a related but distinct problem and the question it raised was in Lincoln’s mind still an open one.

Finally, the phrase about making ourselves anew alludes to the key paragraph of Lincoln’s December 1862 Annual Message:

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Lincoln here did not just imagine the Republic learning a hard-earned lesson. He imagined the Republic reinventing itself completely, freeing itself from illusions about itself to which it has been enthralled, enslaved. Now the Republic has indeed moved forward together since the Civil War, and President Obama certainly knows as well as anyone else does how messy and slow and partial that progress was.

The Promise of Equality

Within days of President Obama’s second inauguration the country and the government had returned from the moment’s pageantry to the social and fiscal challenges we face. His inaugural address, though—with its echoes of hallowed American oratory and its own appeals to posterity—deserves far greater consideration than afforded by the swift turn to business. In the piece below, the first of two, John Burt examines the ways in which the speech links Barack Obama’s sense of American identity to that of Lincoln. Burt’s new book, Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, is a deep engagement with the limits of liberalism and with democracy’s inability to settle moral conflict.

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President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address draws together, in an organic whole, themes from the speeches and acts of the Presidents he most admires. Its vision of an economy of mutual care, in which young and old, rich and poor, sick and well, share an ethos of responsibility for each other and express that responsibility in law and policy, derives, with allowances for changed political circumstances and chastening experiences, from the thinking of Franklin Roosevelt, and Roosevelt’s great successor, Lyndon Johnson. Its vision of America’s place in the world looks back, in ways tempered by harsh experiences, through President Truman’s Marshall Plan to President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. But most of all, Obama’s vision of what it is to be an American, his argument that a shared sense of the moral equality of all people is not only an important political value but the ground of American identity itself, the thing that makes Americans a people, ties his sense of what American nationality is to Lincoln’s.

Quotations from Lincoln, whether direct or oblique, recur throughout President Obama’s speech. What most descends from Lincoln is the way Obama reads the promises of the Declaration of Independence:

We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional—what makes us American—is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

What is Lincolnian about this passage is its sense that in America a never completely fulfilled vocation for moral equality stands in the place that shared blood, or shared language, or shared religion stands in other countries. Lincoln argued, in a speech in Chicago in July, 1858, that it is the belief that the promises of the Declaration are “the father of all moral principle in them,” that gives all Americans, wherever their ancestors may be from, a right to claim American nationality “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.” It is a calling for equality, Lincoln maintained, that distinguishes America as America and defines its place in the world. This calling to advance equality is what is exceptional about America, and its success or, all too often, failure, to live up to the demands of that calling, both within its borders and in the world at large, is the measure of its success or failure as a nation. What is more, the course of American history, as Lincoln argued in the Gettysburg Address, is a test, a test in which the rest of the world has a stake, of the viability of equality as a political ideal.

It is by virtue of equality, by virtue of recognizing each other as equal citizens with an equal claim to dignity and public respect, that we share a public world, and it is our participation in that world that shapes our collective identity as a nation and our private identities as citizens. Identity is not atomic; we are what we are because we are already bound up with each other, and equality assures that however else we may be connected with each other, we are also bound up in an ethos of mutual care that shapes our being and gives it a moral vocation. We are what we are as individuals because we share the promise to acknowledge each other as citizens and to take up the obligations toward each other that go with citizenship, with a shared investment in the common life of our republic.

Nixon's Fake Right

Let’s spend a moment this winter Wednesday on Richard Nixon, who would’ve turned 100 today. A couple of years back we published a book called No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America, in which David Courtwright shows that, despite the common conception, America took no severe turn away from liberalism during the conservative golden age engineered in the wake of Johnson’s Great Society. In the excerpt below, Courtwright details how Nixon won the allegiance of conservative power-brokers without actually delivering the reforms they sought. (Spoiler: Portnoy takes the fall.)

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Nixon saw himself as the leader of a band of tough-minded intellectuals who could achieve power and reverse the national decline by making common cause with the white working class. What hard-hats and beauticians lacked in learning they made up for with an uncorrupted moral sense. The same applied to the Hispanics. “They do have some concept of the manly life, at least,” Nixon told John Ehrlichman, his chief domestic-policy adviser. “They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do.” The nominally Protestant Nixon was all for priests knocking some sense into their charges. He never lost his conviction that religious belief was indispensable for public order. He trusted, and was trusted by, voters of morally conservative temperament. They embraced him as one of their own, despite the peculiarity of his youthful Quakerism and the vagueness of his adult beliefs. Nixon lived what Clare Luce foresaw: temperament supplanting creed in politics. He thought this way himself. When he railed against “the Jews,” Nixon meant left-liberal Jews, not the Orthodox.

Nixon was discreet about where he did his railing. When Billy Graham privately complained that Jews were behind pornography, that their grip on the media had to be broken, Nixon immediately agreed. “Boy, I can’t ever say that,” he admitted. “But I believe it.” Nixon often held his tongue. Everyone knew that public schooling was lousy, he complained to Ehrlichman. The thing was, you couldn’t say so, or you’d provoke the education establishment. “We’ll praise them—pat them on the ass. A demagogue could make a lot of votes on this issue—we’ve got to live with them.”

It was a revealing piece of hypocrisy. Given his right-conservative temperament, Nixon would have preferred a domestic policy aimed at reducing taxes, bureaucracy, union influence, crime, vice, spending, and the supply of money. That he did none of these things consistently, that he presided over an erratically liberal domestic policy, was due to a fateful combination of circumstances. Nixon was the first elected president in 120 years to assume office with the opposition party controlling both houses of Congress. Democrats commanded Capitol Hill, their bureaucratic allies the granite-clad buildings that ran like outworks beneath it. To call Nixon paranoid, Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman observed, was to ignore very real enemies throughout the government, the press, and the establishment. They could block any reactionary policy shift.

Not that domestic legislation was Nixon’s primary concern. He could use his executive authority to keep faith on key issues. He would nominate judges who were conservative on crime. He would cast his attorney general, John Mitchell, as a “helluva crime-fighter,” Dick Tracy with a pipe. He would propose bills halting busing to achieve racial balance, softening the blow with more money for inner-city schools. He would pursue peace with honor in Vietnam, the doves be damned. “North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that,” he told 80 million television viewers on November 3, 1969. The silent-majority address, the most important of his presidency, gave Nixon a bump in the polls and time for a fateful gamble. He thought he could prevail in peace negotiations by building up South Vietnam, intimidating North Vietnam, and getting the divided Soviets and Chinese to back off their client. As in poker and football, two obsessions that shaped Nixon’s worldview, what counted was the gutsy call at the right time. Foreign-policy decisions made or broke presidencies. Domestic mistakes were fixable. Congress could tinker with the details. The Kremlin was less forgiving.

Computerized Trading and “Internet Democracy”

In his 2009 book The Cultural Logic of Computation, David Golumbia argues against the still-common notion that internet access and rampant computerization will be inherently democratizing forces. Rather, he says, it’s just as likely that the undeniable empowering effects of computerization will serve to exacerbate imbalances of wealth and power. Or, as he summarizes the argument in a new essay on High-Frequency Trading: “it is probably correct that the rising tide of computerization does in fact lift all boats, and there is no reason to think that computerization comes along with some kind of built-in circuit breaker that prevents it from empowering the most powerful.”

Golumbia uses the rise of automated High-Frequency Trading (HFT)—drawing on real examples as well as its dramatization in the film Margin Call—to demonstrate the fallacy of assumptions about “internet democracy.” Web-based tools for automated financial trading are said to have leveled the playing field, allowing individual investors the same access to the markets that the high-powered brokerages and banks have long enjoyed. Just as critical as the ability to trade has been access to requisite information like real-time prices, trading volume, etc. And yet, these same seemingly-democratizing developments (automated trading, freely available information) are also what have allowed the market to become dominated by the algorithmic designs of the world’s top engineers, in the employ of its most highly-capitalized banks.

So, just as computerization lowers the barriers to entry in market trading, it underwrites a transformation of financial mechanisms on a scale such that the newly-welcome individuals haven’t a chance of keeping up. Just because all boats are higher doesn’t mean the smallest won’t still drown in the wake of the large.

The abstract of Golumbia’s article, forthcoming in Social Semiotics:

The development of High-Frequency Trading (HFT)—automated trading of stocks, as well as bonds, options, and other investment instruments—provides a signal example of the political effects of computerization on a discrete social sphere. Despite the widespread rhetoric that computerization inherently democratizes, the consequences of the introduction of HFT are widely acknowledged to be new concentrations of wealth and power, opacity rather than transparency of information flows, and structural resistance to democratic oversight and control. Even as computerized tools undoubtedly provide individual investors with more power relative to what they had before, they also provide powerful actors with relatively more power as well, in some cases effectively excluding the majority of individuals from insight or meaningful participation whatsoever, especially with regard to the political impacts of market activities. Reports on recent financial crises, and the 2011 film Margin Call provide narrow windows into the operations of HFT and the challenges it poses to democracy; these in turn raise significant problems for the view that computerization inherently democratizes.

At Golumbia’s website you can also read a pre-press version of the full paper.

Poverty Reduction Is a Growth Strategy

All through the American election season we saw fierce debate and even fiercer backroom speechifying on governmental “entitlement” spending. Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, family services, housing assistance, unemployment; all were pilloried for undermining our economic recovery and fostering a culture of dependency. And the rhetoric didn’t end with the election, of course, as entitlements swiftly took center stage in the ongoing fiscal cliff negotiations.

Though they represent opposing views on the worth of these programs, both the mainstream right and the mainstream left essentially accept the terms of the debate. For the right, these are programs that we simply cannot afford, and it’s morally bankrupt of us to mortgage our children’s futures in order to provide for people who should be able to take care of themselves. For the left, the structure of our economy leaves some people needing assistance through no fault of their own, and so these programs are expensive but necessary, and we must abide by the moral compulsion to preserve them. One side thinks “us” and the other thinks “them,” but in both cases entitlement spending is essentially construed as a public burden that we can either accept or reject; neither side seems to countenance the possibility that there could be economic arguments for the maintenance or even extension of the American welfare state.

Underlying the fights over entitlement spending is one of the central questions of comparative political economy: why is there so much more poverty in the United States than in any other developed country? As Monica Prasad explains in The Land of Too Much, for a century scholars in sociology, political science, and economics have invariably come to the same conclusion: the United States has more poverty because the American government doesn’t do anything about it. This explanation rests on the received wisdom that the United States is a “liberal” or laissez-faire country that distrusts the state and favors the free market.

However, as Prasad shows, this common notion of America’s minimal state intervention has by now been thoroughly dismantled. So, faced with the conundrum of persistent American poverty in spite of a willingly-interventionist state, in The Land of Too Much Prasad offers a new explanation, a demand-side theory of comparative political economy. It’s a brilliant and complicated analysis of agrarian statism, mortgage Keynesianism, American productivity, European protectionism, financial collapse, and credit-based consumption that we won’t even attempt to do justice here today. Instead, we’ll share just a couple of Prasad’s concluding policy recommendations that—while offered with respect to recovery from the 2008 financial collapse—seem particularly germane to these fiscal cliff fights:

Exit, Voice, and Revolution

Esteemed social scientist Albert O. Hirschman died this week at 97, having lived a fascinating life shaped by war, migration, and an iconoclastic perspective on conventional wisdom. He’s best known for Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, a 1970 book that many consider one of the twentieth century’s most influential works of political economy. In his famous formulation, “exit” and “voice” represent two contrasting responses of consumers or members of organizations to what they sense as deterioration in the quality of the goods they buy or the services and benefits they receive. To exit is to simply leave, usually in favor of another firm or organization perceived to be better. Voice, on the other hand, is the act of agitating from within with the goal of recuperating the quality judged to have been lost. Exit is essentially a private decision, whereas voice is typically a public activity. A key theme of the book was that exit often works to undermine voice, as easy availability of exit will undercut any instinct to use one’s own voice or to organize a chorus of others. “The presence of the exit alternative,” he wrote, “can atrophy the development of the art of voice.”

Decades after the publication of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Hirschman revisited his famous framework in an essay for 1995’s A Propensity to Self-Subversion. He’d learned that it’d become common to use his thesis to explain the Eastern European uprisings of 1989, and he spent a year in Berlin considering its applicability. As evident in the passages excerpted below, Hirschman had both the confidence to assess the validity of his career-making insights, and the humility to accept the ways in which they were wanting.

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The year 1989 was greeted with something of a yawn. Its first half would be marked by the elaborate, far-flung, and infinitely wordy bicentenary commemoration of the French Revolution. Everything was laid out well in advance, and the schedule of events was strictly followed up to the appointed climax, the celebrations of the Fourteenth of July in Paris. Thereafter, with the bulk of festivities, conferences, and speeches over, people would return to their usual pursuits. But then, as though the spirit of revolution, once invoked, assumed a life of its own, came the surprise, the “divine surprise” of that year: a series of totally unexpected political and popular movements broke out in rapid succession in Eastern Europe—from Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia to Bulgaria and Romania—overturning the hitherto uncontested power of the Communist parties and thereby altering fundamentally the seemingly stable bipolar world order of the preceding forty-five years.

The most radical of these changes took place in the German Democratic Republic, where the internal convulsion led in short order to the extinction of the political entity in which it occurred. The East German state was unable to survive the collapse of Communist power and was absorbed (geschluck, or “swallowed,” is the expressive term often used) by its outsize twin, the Federal Republic of Germany, within a year of the opening of the Berlin Wall.

Despite a considerable outpouring of articles and books—including some autobiographical accounts by key actors—a great deal about the events of 1989 remains poorly understood. The very fact that they came as a total surprise to both spectators and actors suggests that our capacity to comprehend large-scale political and social change remains utterly underdeveloped. Under the circumstances, any conceptual tool that holds out the promise of providing a handle on the enigmatic events is likely to be eagerly seized. This is what happened in Germany to the concepts of “exit” and “voice,” which I had proposed in a book published in 1970.

The German translation of that book was published in 1974, under a title that means, literally, “outmigration and contradicting.” This was a daringly free, though apt, translation of the terms exit and voice, and it may have been chosen by the translator because even then migration and would-be migration were characteristic alternatives to actual resistance in the German Democratic Republic. So the title, with its accent on migration as a primary form of exit, may have contributed to making the book appear particularly relevant to the commotion of 1989. In any event, only six days after the spectacular opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s most respected daily newspaper, published an article by Henning Ritter, director of the social science and humanities section, with the title “Abwandern, Widersprechen: Zur aktuellen Bedeutung einer Theorie von A. O. Hirschman” (To exit, to voice: On the current relevance of a theory of A. O. Hirschman). According to Ritter, my 1970 thesis was being tested “experimentally on a large scale” by the upheaval in East Germany. Since then, several political scientists and sociologists have made extensive, if on occasion conflicting, uses of the concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty in interpreting the events of 1989, now generally called die Wende (the turn). Eventually the topic even received a degree of official sanction as the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Association), an agency of the Federal Republic, listed the exit-voice approach to the analysis of the Wende among the research projects eligible for its grants.