David Ellerman relates a deep theoretical groundwork for a philosophy of development, while offering a descriptive, practical suggestion of how goals of development can be better set and met. Beginning with the assertion that development assistance agencies are inherently structured to provide help that is ultimately unhelpful by overriding or undercutting the capacity of people to help themselves, David Ellerman argues that the best strategy for development is a drastic reduction in development assistance. The locus of initiative can then shift from the would-be helpers to the doers...

Albert O. Hirschman is renowned worldwide for theories that have been at the forefront of political economics during the last half century. In these twenty essays he casts his sharp analytical eye on his own ideas, questioning and qualifying some of his major propositions on social change and economic development. Hirschman's self-subversion, as well as the self-affirmation that is also present here, reveal the workings of a distinguished mind. They also bring us fresh perspective on the material in his twelve previous books and countless essays.In the substantial essays that open this...

With engaging wit and subtle irony, Albert Hirschman maps the diffuse and treacherous world of reactionary rhetoric in which conservative public figures, thinkers, and polemicists have been arguing against progressive agendas and reforms for the past two hundred years.

Hirschman draws his examples from three successive waves of reactive thought that arose in response to the liberal ideas of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to democratization and the drive toward universal suffrage in the nineteenth century, and to the welfare state in our own century....

Why does society oscillate between intense interest in public issues and almost total concentration on private goals? In this classic work, Albert O. Hirschman offers a stimulating social, political, and economic analysis dealing with how and why frustrations of private concerns lead to public involvement and public participation that eventually lead back to those private concerns. Emerging from this study is a wide range of insights, from a critique of conventional consumption theory to a new understanding of collective action and of universal suffrage.

The experience accumulated in the wake of more than two decades of sustained effort to promote growth and change in the low-income countries presents a rich field for scholarly inquiry and new insights into the development process. The success and failures of such projects, the new skills and attitudes they impart, and the internal tensions they sometimes generate obviously have an important bearing on the next stages of a county's development effort. Yet little has become known about these truly formative experiences which are due to the behavior --and misbehavior --of development...

Originally published in 1967, the modest and plainly descriptive title of "Development Projects Observed" is deceptive. Today, it is recognized as the ultimate volume of Hirschman's groundbreaking trilogy on development, and as the bridge to the broader social science themes of his subsequent writings. Though among his lesser-known works, this unassuming tome is one of his most influential.

It is in this book that Hirschman first shared his now famous "Principle of the Hiding Hand." In an April 2013 "New Yorker" issue, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an appreciation of the principle, described by...