Albert O. Hirschman and the post-American, post-liberal conjuncture

The economics profession shares responsibility with others for the current crisis of liberal democracy. In this context, the paper discusses the embrace of coherence and what I term “ism-ism” as a serious flaw in dominant traditions in economics until the crisis of 2008. The paper draws on the work of Albert O. Hirschman. It’s time to recognise Hirschman as an economist for our times, whose broad corpus of work has received only selective attention. I explore those aspects of Hirschman’s work that are most salient to understanding where the profession went wrong from the post-WWII through the neoliberal era, where it’s going now, and how some of his insights can make sense of this dangerous time. I illustrate the empirical salience of a “Hirschmanian mindset” by exploring the emergent “post-American, post-liberal” conjuncture in which a new global financial configuration is unfolding.