US government service, 1943–1951 Hirschman served in the
United States Army from 1943 to 1946, where he initially enlisted in the infantry as a private in April and then was assigned to the
Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the
CIA) in the autumn, on the basis of his language skills. He shipped out to Europe in February 1944. He spent seven months in
Algiers, working as a French instructor. He was next assigned to follow the front up from Italy in September 1944, beginning in Monte Casserta, then to
Florence, and finally to
Udine. After the end of the war, he served as the interpreter for German general
Anton Dostler at the first Allied
war crimes trial, concluding with Dostler's execution December 1, 1945. While away, his wife gave birth to their first daughter, Katia, in October 1944. After returning, he struggled to find government intelligence work due to FBI security concerns over his prior involvement in the and at length he took a job in the
United States Department of Commerce's Clearing Office for Foreign Transactions. His prior colleague Gerschenkron recruited him to the
Federal Reserve Board by the end of 1946 and he became chief of the Western European and British Commonwealth Section from 1946 to 1952. In this role, he conducted and published analyses of postwar European reconstruction and newly created international economic institutions His first year was overshadowed by a vicious controversy around the IAS appointment of
Robert Bellah, but he nonetheless made important, lasting contacts with colleagues
Pierre Bourdieu and
David Apter. He was unanimously offered a permanent position and opted to return, in large part to permanently escape teaching duties. He visited Latin America again in the summer of 1973, and, concerned about a collapsing political middle, he wrote "The Changing Tolerance for Income Inequality in the Course of Economic Development." Ten days before the
1973 Chilean coup d'etat, Hirschman was made chairman of the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the
Social Science Research Council in New York City, and he immediately used the position to support Latin Americans fleeing authoritarian government, such as Osvaldo Sunkel,
Alejandro Foxley,
Fernando Henrique Cardoso,
Guillermo O'Donnell, and
Tomás Eloy Martínez. He organized a multinational collaboration to organize this research while moving to the IAS and then brought in
Indiana University political scientist
David Collier, then visiting Princeton at its
Center of International Studies, to coordinate the project. He was also assisted at the IAS for two years by Brazilian economist
José Serra. Hirschman took another trip to Latin America in the summer of 1976, visiting Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. The project's focus became the nature of authoritarianism in the heavily industrialized countries of Latin America. One of its culminating achievements was the anthology
The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (1980). In this period, Hirschman's work went to the historical roots of political economy and ideological justifications for capitalism in a project that would result in
The Passions and the Interests (1977). Hirschman's book originated in reflection on a quote of
Montesquieu's that became an epigraph for the manuscript: "It is fortunate for men to be in a situation where, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked, they have nevertheless an interest in not being so." At this time he returned to
Hegel for the first time since childhood via a book of Paul Chamley's, via a manuscript of
Judith Shklar's on
The Philosophy of Right, and via
Shlomo Avineri's ''Hegel's Theory of the Modern State'' (1974), which together brought him to
James Steuart. Simultaneously, he worked with
Quentin Skinner at the IAS and became familiar with the
Cambridge School in the history of ideas and developed a close intellectual relationship with
Amartya Sen, who had married his niece Eva. After the publication of
The Passions and the Interests, Hirschman began collaborating with more European social scientists at the IAS, such as
Alessandro Pizzorno and
Claus Offe, as well as the visiting
John Rawls. An IAS group formed to discuss crises of liberal
welfare states, discussing
Mancur Olson's
The Logic of Collective Action and
Jürgen Habermas's
Legitimation Crisis. At the same time, Hirschman and Geertz worked to expand the School of Social Science at the IAS, recruiting
Michael Walzer. In the summer of 1979, at the invitation of Robert Bellah, Hirschman attended the "Morality as a Problem in the Social Sciences" conference at Berkeley with Habermas,
Richard Rorty,
Charles Taylor, and
Michel de Certeau. After 1979, Hirschman increasingly moved away from development economics and began to speak of it as past work, as in the lecture "The Rise and Decline of Development Economics." In order to counter what he felt were pessimistic and fatalistic conclusions in Olson's work, Charles Taylor's and others', such as
Christopher Lasch's
The Culture of Narcissism, he wrote his next book
Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (1982), which introduced the
Hirschman cycle. In the spring of 1982 he gave the
Marc Bloch Lecture at the
Sorbonne at the invitation of historian
François Furet. After
Shifting Involvements was received relatively poorly, Hirschman returned to Latin America at the behest of the
Inter-American Foundation' s director
Peter Hakim and produced
Getting Ahead Collectively: Grassroots Experiences in Latin America (1984). For this trip, from January to June 1983 he visited forty-five development projects across six countries: the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. Hirschman described the book as "not a scholarly treatise" but rather a "reasoned travelogue." Hirschman retired from active membership of the IAS in 1985, but continued working emeritus; his final major book was
The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) and his final fieldwork was in Berlin after the
fall of the Berlin Wall, winter 1990–1991. He became the namesake of the Albert O. Hirschman Chair in Economics at the IAS, which first went to game theorist
Eric Maskin. He had four
festschrifts: one at the
University of Notre Dame in 1984, one at the IAS in 1988, one in 1989 at the
University of Buenos Aires, and finally one at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Social Science Research Council created an Albert O. Hirschman Prize, first awarded in 2007. Hirschman began to decline in health after a fall in the
Swiss Alps in July 1996 that caused a
cerebral hematoma. He became unable to write and speak, but took up painting. He died at the age of 97 on December 10, 2012, less than a year after the death of his wife of over 70 years, Sarah Hirschman (née Chapiro), in January. ==Work==