Albert O. Hirschman, Ewing resident, WWII freedom fighter and economist, dies at 97

Mike Davis/The Times By Mike Davis/The Times The Times, Trenton
Follow on Twitter
on December 18, 2012 at 8:10 AM
hirschman.JPG Albert O. Hirschman, Institute for Advanced Study economist, and Ewing resident died Dec. 10, 2012  

EWING — Freedom fighter, savior to hundreds of European intellectuals during World War II, and an esteemed social scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Albert O. Hirschman died Dec. 10 at the age of 97.

Hirschman during the war helped famed artists and writers to escape the clutches of the Vichy government in France, which was sympathetic to the Nazis and other Axis powers.

Hirschman was a pillar of the institute from his arrival in 1972 until his death.

Jeremy Adelman, a Princeton University professor who is working on a biography of Hirschman, said he was attached to the institute, and he remained in Mercer County until his death.

“Princeton became an important hub,” Adelman said yesterday. “He and his wife, Sarah, became very integrated into the Mercer County scene.”

Sarah, who died in January, founded People & Stories, a Trenton nonprofit that works to bring literature to those with limited opportunities to read and discuss it.

Born in Berlin on April 7, 1915, Hirschman left Germany in 1933 for France, where he studied economics, finance and accounting. In 1935, he received a one-year fellowship at the London School of Economics. From London he went to Barcelona to fight in the Spanish Civil War, saying, “I could not just sit and look on without doing anything.”

After receiving his doctorate from the University of Trieste, in Italy, Hirschman joined the French Army in 1939 during World War II.

He fled to the south of France in 1940 and met American journalist Varian Fry, who had come to Marseille to rescue endangered refugees, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp.

“Hirschman really took the lead on screening people who were trying to get out to figure out who was just displaced versus who would generally be arrested and sent back to Germany to face who knows what,” Adelman said. “Because Hiirschman had a background as this socialist activist, he knew very well the landscape of the European left and could figure out who was genuinely in threat and who wasn’t.”

His work with Fry, helping some 2,000 refugees escape from France, involved significant illicit activity, Adelman said. Hirschman laundered money to fund the operation, paid off counterfeiters to produce fake identification papers, and helped find the pathways leading to Spain, Portugal and eventually the United States.

“He had his fingers on the Marseilles underground operation,” Adelman said. “He really understood how parallel markets functioned, the official market and these black markets. He became a real artist at figuring out how to manipulate them.”

A renowned economist and social scientist, Hirschman’s best known work remains “Exit, Voice and Loyalty,” a 1970 treatise on stakeholders’ options to express their dissatisfaction with an organization: to quit, voice their discontent or remain loyal.

“He went through many different phases of his life,” Adelman said. “Early in his life, he was mainly focused on the European economies and how Europe reconstructed after war. He was an early, early advocate of European economic unification.”

“He became a real pioneer of what was then Third World economic development and, in the 1970s, he became a sage of the problems of how capitalism and democracy interact with each other,” he said.

After immigrating to the United States, Hirschman joined the U.S. Army and served as German translator during World War II criminal trials. At war’s end, he worked for the Federal Reserve Board and eventually as an economic adviser to the South American nation of Colombia.

“In Colombia, he encountered a major intellectual challenge: not so much the problem of poverty itself, but questions about the reasons for poverty and the search for strategies to diminish its effects,” a news release from the Institute for Advanced Studies states. “This led to Hirschman’s realization that economics needed to draw on moral imperatives and a complex and ever-changing reality.”

Hirschman retired from the institute in 1985, after creating the School of Social Science.

Hirschman is survived by his daughter, Katia Salomon of Paris, two sons-in-law, four grandchildren, nine great grandchildren, and a sister, Eva Monteforte of Rome.

He was predeceased by a daughter, Lisa Hirschman Gourevitch, in 1999, and his wife.

Contact Mike Davis at (609) 989-5708 or