Abstract
In this chapter, Abdul Shaban examines the career and unorthodox economics scholarship of Albert O. Hirschman, who was a product of implosion in Central Europe during 1930s and 1940s and who, like many other scholars, was forced to migrate to safer places. In the USA, he grew as a scholar and carried out pioneering research extending our understanding of regional and development economics. The chapter illustrates Hirschman’s unique approach, detailing his contributions related to unbalanced growth strategy, the relationship between social overhead capital and directly productive activities, linkages, grassroots development, trade and regional development, non-economic factors in development, and rival interpretation of capitalism or varieties of capitalism.
Among luminary economists and regional scientists, Hirschman stands out because of his wide-ranging work on seemingly unconnected aspects of economic and social life, his unorthodox methods of investigation, and his quintessentially liberal ideological approach. Hirschman combined German idealism, English-US empiricism, and political economy and Italian liberal socialism, providing insights about the development process based on his observations rather than formal development models and turning economic theories on their heads by extending alternative explanations while always looking for endogenous social and development theory.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is based on the lecture ‘Great Minds in Regional Science: Albert O. Hirschman’ delivered in the session ‘In the Footsteps of Walter Isard’ at the joint workshop of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) and Regional Science Association (RSA), India, on ‘Big Data and Methods in Regional Science’ held at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, October 21–25, 2019. I am very grateful to Peter Nijkamp (Vice President, The Regional Science Academy) and Karima Kourtit (Executive Director, The Regional Science Academy) for the invitation to deliver this lecture, and Sumana Bandyopadhyay, President, RSA, India, for her facilitations in many ways.
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Shaban, A. (2023). Albert O. Hirschman (1915–2012): An Unorthodox Regional Scientist. In: Batey, P., Plane, D. (eds) Great Minds in Regional Science, Vol. 2. Footprints of Regional Science(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13440-1_7
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