Albert Hirschman and the power of intellectual trespassing

Is there any hope left for development? Is ‘small’ beautiful and are ‘mega-projects’ necessarily calamitous? Can intellectual trespassing be more helpful in guiding policy design than fashionable instruments with their often-bogus claims to ‘rigour’?

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are fading into an invisible distance. There is talk of ‘the end of Development’ and a ‘post-aid’ era. There has been a loss of confidence in one-size-fits-all economic development outfits and even ‘neo-liberalism’ (what Perry Anderson called the most successful ideology in human history) is challenged increasingly not only by academics but by political practice.

In this context, the subtle, inter-disciplinary, context-rich, model-wary approach of Albert Hirschman may be even more helpful and relevant than it always has been. His ‘bias for hope’, and the way he was alert to how crises and tensions were often a source of reform and innovation, may be a welcome source of constructive proposals.

DLD hosts a Conversation on Hirschman’s enduring relevance and significance. We bring together Jeremy Adelman (Princeton and Cambridge), historian and author of the biography Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman; Arkebe Oqubay, acclaimed Ethiopian policy official and British Academy Global Research Professor at SOAS; and the distinguished economist John Sender, Emeritus Professor of Economics at SOAS.

Header image credit: John Gibbons via Unsplash.

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Host or Publisher SOAS, Development Leadership Dialogue (DLD)