By the middle of the 1970s, Albert O. Hirschman’s bias for hopefulness was under siege. Gloom pervaded the social sciences. And the real world gave ample justification to those who preferred to analyze failure and futility. By then, Hirschman had left Harvard University and had joined Clifford Geertz in the creation of a School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, one which would resist the quantifying and formalizing turns in American social sciences. There, the pair would become a formidable intellectual team.
