Albert O Hirschman, the influential German economist and social scientist who died in 2012 at the age of 97, was fond of the “rule of three” in writing. He frequently used tripartite mottos in the titles of his many books and essays, including in his two most famous works: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States and The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.
Hirschman’s work is relevant to Australia’s debate about a First Nations Voice to Parliament. He provides useful insights into the different approaches and objectives of Indigenous activists, as well as the argumentative styles of their opponents.
Most significantly, the author’s hope and optimism — vital characteristics of his overall approach to politics and economics — provide a spur for those fighting for Indigenous recognition and self-determination, regardless of the outcome of the referendum.
First Peoples’ choice: exit or voice?
In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), Hirschman weighed up two possible responses — exit or voice — for individuals dissatisfied with an organisation in which they’re involved, whether as a family member, a customer of a profit-seeking business, a member of a voluntary association, a citizen of a nation-state, or just about anything in between. Put simply, his dichotomy proposes that one can either quit the body and find another, or raise one’s voice in protest in the hope for improvements.
Orthodox economists, with their faith in the sanctity of free markets, tend to favour the exit strategy. In this view, which holds more weight in commercial endeavours, the rejection of one entity will lead a consumer to adopt a better alternative. The original entity will then suffer the consequences — the invisible hand of the market working as it should.
But Hirschman rejected this, preferring voice as a strategy of institutional change. In contrast to the economist’s desire for cold efficiency, Hirschman appreciated the messiness of voice, which can range from faint grumbling to violent protest. “Voice is political action par excellence,” he wrote. Critically, voice is tied to and reinforces the loyalty of the dissatisfied member. If one is listened to within an entity, one is much more likely to feel closely aligned with its values and goals.
Faced with terror, dispossession and neglect at the hands of the state, the exit option holds considerable appeal for many Indigenous peoples. An example is the Aboriginal provisional government, established in 1990 on the principles of Aboriginal sovereignty, self-determination and self-government. The next generation of this approach is typified by the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR), which formed in 2014 and is committed to decolonisation and Aboriginal nationalism. Though these organisations of course raise their voices in protest as well, they ultimately seek exit from the state’s colonial apparatus.
In contrast, countless Indigenous activists have for many decades sought a voice within the state through various organisations, consultative bodies, petitions and protests. With 2017’s Uluru Statement from the Heart, they sought to enshrine such a Voice in the Australian constitution.
In doing so, the authors state that First Peoples’ never-ceded sovereignty co-exists with that of the Crown’s, implicitly acknowledging a kind of “loyalty”, using Hirschman’s framework. The statement declares: “With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.”
For 235 years, the assimilationist colonial state has demanded the loyalty of Indigenous peoples while denying them either exit or a meaningful voice. The Voice to Parliament can be seen as an elegant way of asserting First Peoples’ rights, while offering the state an opportunity to work together to eliminate the injustices they face.
Anti-Voice rhetoric: perversity, futility, jeopardy
What, then, of the Voice’s critics? Here we turn to The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991). Surveying the currents of thought in response to three major movements for social change across the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries — the French Revolution and demands for equal rights; campaigns for universal suffrage; the development of the welfare state — Hirschman identifies three distinctive oppositional theses:
- Perversity, in which any attempt to improve social conditions will exacerbate problems that exist;
- Futility, in which the attempt will not change anything;
- Jeopardy, in which the attempt will endanger previously accomplished gains.
While Hirschman mostly associates these argumentative styles with “reactionaries” of the right, he also considers the ways in which they are adopted by liberals and leftists.
The right-wing case for voting No to the Voice to Parliament — led by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, Coalition Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine, backed by virtually the entire conservative commentariat, and outlined in the AEC’s official referendum pamphlet — has embraced all three of Hirschman’s theses in its campaign to date.
The left-wing No case — articulated most prominently by independent Senator Lidia Thorpe and the Blak Sovereign Movement — has also drawn on the three styles, albeit in different ways.
To the right, the Voice is perverse, because rather than bringing Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians together, it will permanently divide the country. Furthermore, Dutton has argued that the Voice will create division among Indigenous peoples by being composed of a Canberra-based elite of Indigenous academics with little to no experience of issues faced “on the ground”. Needless to say, this view has been emphatically rejected.
The left’s perversity argument is more complex, in that the Voice is seen as a way for governments to continue to delay action on the issues that matter most to them. Why, for example, does the federal government need a First Nations Voice to tell it to implement in full the recommendations from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the Bringing Them Home report, both of which have been sitting on Canberra desks for more than a quarter of a century?
The futility thesis is where the left and right No cases find themselves in almost total agreement. Both see the Voice as simply doing nothing to help Indigenous peoples — it will neither close the gap in social and economic outcomes nor achieve reconciliation. The main difference is that the left would prefer a body with real teeth, negotiated through treaties, whereas the right sees any such proposal as an even greater threat than the Voice.
Finally, conservatives and leftists have their distinct versions of the jeopardy thesis. On the right, the Voice presents a genuine risk to our system of government: it leaves all legislation open to legal challenge, risks political dysfunction and opens the door for activists to push for further radical change. It will even reverse the gains of the 1967 referendum, which, according to this skewed reading, brought an end to racial segregation in Australia. On the left, the jeopardy thesis hinges on one simple issue: the notion that Aboriginal sovereignty will be ceded with the establishment of the Voice.
Hirschman’s hope
Confronted by the extraordinary difficulty of constitutional change and a barrage of objections from right and left, the Voice to Parliament is in serious jeopardy. But Yes campaigners might find solace in the deeds and words of Hirschman.
Hirschman lived a remarkable life. At enormous risk as a Jew, he had escaped the Nazis twice by the time he was 25 — from Germany in 1933 and France in 1940 — along the way finding time to fight fascists in Spain and helping more than 2000 Jews and leftists to escape from Nazi-occupied France. He later made it to the US, where his long career as an economist and academic began.
Despite the trauma of his youth, Hirschman was a hopeful and optimistic thinker to the end. This approach was rooted in what he called his “possibilism” — searching beyond the probable for ways in which seemingly eternal political and economic problems may be resolved: “The fundamental bent of my writings has been to widen the limits of what is or is perceived to be possible, be it at the cost of lowering our ability, real or imaginary, to discern the probable.”
The Voice grew out of a similar kind of possibilism — a creative way to resolve the inherent tension of First Peoples’ relationship to the Australian state. Whether the referendum succeeds or not, First Peoples and their supporters will have to continue to imagine what it is possible to achieve, rather than be constrained by the limits of our constitutional framework.
