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conditioned on the confirming reflection that these pleasures are in
step with the larger good his political involvements promote. Let the
pleasures turn to tedium, the friendships to mistrust, and the activist
will still be sustained, for a while, by the reflection that he
ought
to
want to do politics. But the commitments of a person in that spot
have become brittle. He has become ripe for a reordering of his
preferences and a revision of the ideological "metapreference" that
judges the preference ordering. Should the larger ends of his politics
fall into doubt, the tedium, the strain, and the inevitable disappoint–
ments can be acknowledged: what had seemed not only fun but a
good way of life can be recast as a life petty, corrupt, or trivial. Not
just a recalibration of the balance of public and private pleasures,
but a revulsion against, and so an abrupt withdrawal from politics is
the likely result.
So, too, it is in moving from private to public. A life devoted to
the private pleasures of consumption is equally in need of a larger
ideological justification. Hirschman notes the way that Adam Smith
and other eighteenth-century thinkers supplied such a rationale for
the emerging commercial classes of that era, showing how their pur–
suit of private interest might conduce to the public weal. And
similarly the contented consumer, homeowner, do-it-yourselfer of
the 1950s was seeking not only a set of distinct pleasures, but was
also in some measure trying to live a version of the American dream.
But new gadgets and new vistas of consumer expenditure too can
pall. As such "rivulets of disappointment" build up, the
point
of it all,
the larger justification for concentration on private affairs, can come
into doubt. And so the consumer becomes ripe for a new set of
preferences and a new confirming metapreference, ones that may
propel him back into politics with considerable velocity.
Hirschman's book reads like a novel- a
Bildungsroman
he styles it
at one point. This is important because his characters have
histories,
a dimension (like intrapersonal conflict) that neoclassical actors con–
spicuously lack. The historical dimension brings with it a vul–
nerability to confusion, to guilt, and to mistakes. The rational con–
sumer-voters of neoclassical political economy, lacking such histories
and motivational complexities, can be expected to perform without
the ambiguities and oscillations Hirschman has characterized. But
the neoclassical theories turn out, unfortunately for their analytical
adequacy, to leave notably less room for ambiguity than the reality
they aim to describe. Hirschman cites the example of Mancur Olson's
