Albert O. Hirschman has passed away. Hirschman was a deep thinker whose work has been influential in many fields. Most famously with the must-read Exit, Voice and Loyalty. I am also a fan of The Passions and the Interests his study of ideological transformations in the 17th and 18th century which promoted the pursuit of material interests as a way to tame the passions and thus opened the way to capitalism (profitably read alongside McCloskey’s Bourgeois Virtues). Hirschman’s early work in development, on backwards and forwards linkages, is now being rediscovered and formalized. Tyler looks at Hirschman’s work as it relates to development in a video at MRUniversity. Tyler also wrote in 2006:

Hirschman also led a fascinating life. He became a professor only late in life after fighting in the Spanish Civil War, volunteering in the French Army and working in Marseilles to help refugees escape the Nazis. His work in development economics was based on field work when field work still meant working in fields.

As he once said of his work and perhaps also of his life:

Attempts to confine me to a specific area make me unhappy.

Daniel Drezner at the FP annually gives out an award he affectionately calls the Albie. It’s an award for

…any book, journal article, magazine piece, op-ed, or blog post published in the [last] calendar year that made you rethink how the world works in such a way that you will never be able “unthink” the argument.

It’s a fitting award to be named for Albert Hirschman whose simple but powerful ideas do indeed cause you to rethink the world and never to see it the same again.