Albert Hirschman’s Legacy: Works and Debates, by Peter Lang Publisher, New York
Possibilism and evaluation Judith Tendler and Albert Hirschman
Peter Lang, 2022
Albert Hirschman affirmed that “Judith Tender’s fine insights into the differential characteristics and side-effects of thermal and hydropower, and of generation and distribution, contributed in many ways to the formation of my views.” Judith Tendler, in turn, wrote that Hirschman had taught her “to look where I never would have looked before for insight into a country’s development,” and that in Albert’s work a researcher who was “patient enough” would find “a rich complexity of both success and failure, efficiency alongside incompetence, order cohabiting with disorder.”
Reconstructing the theoretical roots of interpretive social science, this text shows how Hirschman’s possibilism lies at the base of the original way Tendler practiced evaluation and anticipated many current developments. The continuing vitality of their thought enables us to trace the outlines of possibilist evaluation.
Sociologist Nicoletta Stame (PhD, State University of New York and Catania University) Is emerita professor at Sapienza University of Roma, past president of the European Evaluation Society and Associazione Italiana di Valutazione, a member of the editorial board of Evaluation, and vice-president of A Colorni-Hirschman International Institute.
Foreword by Luca Meldolesi
Three Continents political Economy and Development of Democracy in Europe, the United States and Latin America
Peter Lang, 2022
With an astonishing unity of inspiration that serves as a counterbalance to the richness and variety of his themes and positions, Albert O. Hirschman, great political economist of our time, introduces us to the study of Western Europe, the United States and Latin America. From his own memories of the fascist period retold on the occasion of his honorary degree to two previously unpublished writings on the origins of European integration, from a group of illuminating essays on the contemporary economic and political realities of developed Western countries to a selection of texts on South America containing the provisional balance sheet of long experience, this is an intellectual lesson in the truest sense. Through his original way of penetrating the realities of our time, the author unveils a series of concrete issues and new and unlikely ways forward, constructing a tenacious and possibilist scientific pathway aimed at the unstinting encouragement of mutual understanding, economic and civic growth, and the democratic development of three continents.
Albert O. Hirschman (7 April 1915-10 December 2012) was an economist and the author of several books on political economy and political ideology.
Luca Meldolesi is Professor of Economic and Financial Policy at the University of Naples.
How Reforms Should Be Passed
Peter Lang, 2021
Well-known as a pioneer of economic development, Albert O. Hirschman has been the flag-bearer of possibilism and reform-mongering in political science.
How Reforms Should Be Passed is an anthology of texts chosen personally by Hirschman on the latter production line-as he was to call it informally-that is rooted in his long and quasi-exclusive concern for development and Latin America. Key essays on the formation and the evolution of Hirschman’s point of view on the subject are collected: from “Ideologies of Economic Development in Latin America” to Journeys (and later “A Return Journey”) on policy-making; from “Obstacles to the Perception of Change” to “The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding.” They show an extraordinary turn of the mind in the making that will be very useful for the United States and the developed world as well-as the final texts of the book on democracy and Europe (Italy, Germany and France) bear out. This book represents a unique opportunity for becoming familiar with many original and perceptive lenses provided by Hirschman to look at the world we live in, and especially to favor social change-focusing (first of all) on the cultural and political side of the matter.
Albert O. Hirschman, born in Berlin in 1915 and a refugce from Nazi Germany, graduated from the University of Trieste in 1938. He moved to the United States in 1940, joined the army during the war, worked in the Marshall Plan for the Federal Reserve, and then, for the World Bank, advised the Colombia Government on development. Hirschman taught at Columbia and Harvard universities and has been Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Luca Meldolesi, born in Rome in 1939, taught at the universities of Rome, Calabria, and Naples, collaborated with Hirschman on numerous books and articles and has applied Hirschman’s point of view in his teaching, grass roots initiatives and in government on behalf of the Italian South.
How Economics Should Be Complicated
Peter Lang, 2021
An anthology of essays by Albert Hirschman, edited by Luca Meldolesi, has been published by Peter Lang publishers, New York. We hope that this anthology will become an instrument of (democartic, economic and social) advancement – particularly fo young people all over the world.