Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 231 shaping their contours." The presence of Gulf Oil in Angola represents the classic example of relations governed by economic necessity rather than ideology. Young's message to U.S. policymakers and businessmen is clear: Whether socialist or capitalist, African states, aware of their less-developed status and poverty, are pragmatic. The position of Mozambique, a Marxist state that does not wish to become another Bulgaria or Cuba and thus seeks relations with the Soviet Union as well as the United States and South Africa, is typical of Africa's pragmatism, espoused even by new, adamantly anticolonialist states. The role of ideology in Africa will continue to evolve as new formulas are tried and old ones improved, as new regimes like those of Doe and Rawlings in Liberia and Ghana take power, and as countries like Zimbabwe and Namibia emerge. The virtue of Young's work is that it provides an early, realistic drawing of the ideological map of the continent without drawing meaningless conclusions or arguing for one ideology over another. As a broad introduction to the confusing subject of ideology and development on a continent tht harbors fifty infant nations, it is a prerequisite for any further study ofthe subject. Even ifYoung cannot clear up all ofthe confusion surrounding the issue, his empirical approach establishes the right framework for future debate. ShiftingInvolvements: PrivateInterestandPublicAction. By Albert O. Hirschman. Princeton , N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. 138 pp. Reviewed by Gianfranco Pasquino . Individuals engage in a variety of activities at different times. Periods of involvement in public action seem to alternate with retreats into private life. Understanding the motivations behind these fluctuations and the nature of cycles, if any, has become an important task for sociopolitical scientists. In his latest work, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action, Albert O. Hirschman asserts that "societies are in some way predisposed toward oscillations between periods of intense preoccupation with public issues and of almost total concentration on individual improvement and private welfare goals;" In setting out to analyze the phenomenon of man's shifting involvements, Hirschman provides an encompassing interpretation of our recent history and present predicament and identifies his major explanatory variable: disappointment. Hirschman's starting point seems rather noncontroversial: "It is only since pursuit of private interests had been widely and explicitly recognized as a serious rival to involvement in public affairs that the private-public cycle . . . can claim to exist at all." He provides excellent documentation for changes in consumers' preferences, and his explanation ofwhy consumers move into the public arena to obtain individual and collective goods is particularly lucid. In so doing, he also offers a persuasive interpretation of the welfare backlash, stressing that "it is . . . precisely when a society makes a determined effort to widen access to certain services that the quality of these services decline, with obvious negative effects on the morale of both new and old consumers." 232 SAIS REVIEW As in his previous books, Exist, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) and The Passions and the Interests (1977), Hirschman raises significant questions and sheds light on some hotly debated subjects. One such theme is "the paradox of voting," the phenomenon that people vote, even though their individual influence is going to be extremely limited, and their individual cost is comparatively high. In the end, however, many other questions are left unanswered. One of the most intriguing ofthe questions concerns the possibility ofattributing to groups the sum qualities of individual activities. Hirschman cannot explain satisfactorily why individual consumers become dissatisfied with their private lives and move to public involvement in order to obtain better goods; why, as Hirschman appropriately stresses, consumers receive satisfaction from the very act of involvement , since the higher the involvement, the greater the satisfaction. Discussion of this development of individual disappointment into collective motivations for public action is not adequately pursued. The same kind ofcriticism can be leveled at Hirschman's sweeping generalization concerning the dynamics of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Two points are in need of a more convincing explanation. First, Western societies andJapan underwent a similar process of mass involvement, and the author claims to be able to explain this collective involvement in terms of indigenous factors. Yet...