Albert O. Hirschman

An innovator in contemporary thought on economic and political development looks here at decline rather than growth. Albert O. Hirschman makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organizations: one, exit, is for the member to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing...

Years before he became renowned as one of the most original social scientists of the twentieth century, Albert O. Hirschman played an active role in the rebuilding of postwar Europe. Between 1946 and 1952, he worked as an economic analyst in the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Board of the United States, focusing on the reconstruction of Europe and...

In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests—so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice—was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism,...