Hirschman, Albert Otto (born 1915)

Abstract

Hirschman was born on 7 April 1915 in Berlin. After attending the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics he obtained a doctorate in economic science from the University of Trieste in 1938. His early career was dominated by the struggle against fascism in Europe (Coser 1984). He actively supported the underground opposition to Mussolini while in Italy in the mid-1930s, fought with the Spanish Republican Army in 1936 and later with the French Army until its defeat in June 1940. He stayed on in Marseilles six months more, engaging in clandestine operations to rescue political and intellectual refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. He avoided arrest by leaving France for the United States in January 1941. There he produced his first book, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1945), which introduced some of the main themes of what is now called ‘dependency theory’.

This chapter was originally published in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 1st edition, 1987. Edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman