Albert O. Hirschman: Book by Princeton’s Jeremy Adelman
Economics evolved during Hirschman’s lifetime into a discipline that’s all about optimization, preferably expressed in a mathematical model. His influence on his own field thus seems scant. And while he had lots of fans among historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists, it’s hard to detect anything like a “Hirschman school” out there.
If only there were. Hirschman believed in the potential for societal improvement, steering a course between leftist visions of a perfect world and conservative concerns that reforms always backfire. An intellectual and political environment where that was the dominant attitude would definitely be an improvement.