Interesting Ideas from an Interesting Man

Via Mark Thoma, Rajiv Sethi celebrates Albert Hirschman's 96th birthday:

Interesting lives make for interesting ideas, and Hirschman's is a case in point. Born to a German family of Jewish origin in 1915, he was baptized (but never confirmed) as a Protestant. His education was in French and German, though he would later become fluent in Italian, and eventually in Spanish and English. By the age of sixteen he had joined the youth movement of the Social Democratic Party. Through his sister Ursula (who was a major influence on his life and thought) he met Eugenio Colorni, whose Berlin hotel room was used for the production of anti-fascist pamphlets and fliers. Ursula would later marry Colorni, and one of their daughters, Eva, would go on to become an economist in her own right and marry Amartya Sen. (Eva's untimely death and her influence on Sen's thought is acknowledged in the emotional leading footnote of this paper.)

Hirschman watched the rise of Hitler with increasing alarm, and fled Berlin for Paris alone at the age of 18 just a couple of months after the Reichstag fire. Over the course of the next few years he would live in France, England, Spain, and Italy. He spent a year at the London School of Economics in 1935-36, taking courses with Robbins and Hayek, but finding greater intellectual affinity with a younger group of economists among whom was Abba Lerner.

When war broke out in 1939 he joined the French Army and, for fear of being shot as a traitor by approaching German forces, was compelled to adopt a new identity as a Frenchman, Albert Hermant. By 1941 he had migrated to the United States, where he met and married Sarah Hirschman. (They have now been married for seventy years.) He joined the US Army in 1943, and found himself back in Italy as part of the war effort soon thereafter.

At the end of the war Hirschman returned to the US and was involved with the development of the Marshall plan. He subsequently spent four years in Bogota, first as an adviser to the government on development policy, and then as a private economic consultant. After a sequence of appointments at Yale, Stanford, Columbia and Harvard, he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where he and Sarah remain. 

Hirschman feels, "a dislike for too unilateral and uniform diagnoses."  The ability to see similarities and differences and nuance from one circumstance to another seems very important to me.  I sometimes fall into the trap that when one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and definitely that is the default setting in the political world.  Being able to find the little things that make one situation different from another, and seeing unique solutions to each problem are skills I would like to acquire.