Tuesday, August 6, 2013

AO Hirschman

I am reading this biography and agree completely with Warsh's assessment - both of the biography and the subject:
Thanks to Adelman’s magnificent biography, there may yet be an Ithaca, after all, for one of the greatest action-intellectuals of the twentieth century.
Certainly it is a gripping story, even if you don’t know anything about the history of development economics in the years after World War II. Hirschman was born in Berlin to a family of thoroughly assimilated Jews, and enjoyed a privileged youth in Weimar Germany. He left Berlin for Paris in April 1933, days after his father’s death, two month after Hitler’s accession to the German chancellorship. Already the seventeen-year-old law student’s friends were being arrested. Hirschman spent the next decade fighting the Nazis.

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