Two of his finest books as economic philosopher are The Rhetoric of Reaction, written in 1991 when Hirschman was 76, and Rival Views of Market Society,published in 1987. In Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman goes back several hundred years and identifies three basic strands of conservative argument against social reform that keep recurring. He calls them Perversity, Futility and Jeopardy. These reactionary forms of sophistry are as old as the Middle Ages and as current as the Heritage Foundation and Charles Murray: Reform will actually harm the people it as intended to help (Perversity); it will incur high costs only to fail (Futility) and it will imperil other dearly held values (Jeopardy). On display is Hirschman’s brilliant capacity for synthesis, good humor, and originality as a thinker, and energetic debunking of right-wingers throughout history.
In Rival Views, Hirschman notes that radicals and conservatives, at different times, have viewed markets as supportive—or corrosive—of the glue that holds society together. But oddly, they often switch camps. In the 18th century, conservatives such as Edmund Burke worried that the market forces celebrated by Adam Smith would undermine traditional society. Radicals of the era hoped markets would do just that. But other conservatives such as Montesquieu saw markets as taming aggressive impulses because people who were doing business with each other the were less likely to go to war. By 19thand 20th century, however, it was conservatives who had embraced markets, while Karl Marx warned that as society is marketized “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx actually borrowed the insight from conservatives) and liberals such as Karl Polanyi (and Hirschman) saw markets as destroying social norms. (Source)
I've argued before that conservatives who embrace a traditional values worldview and market ideology at the same time are involved in a contradiction that they don't seem to be aware of. You can have one or the other. Liberals understand that, and have adapted to a world defined by market forces. Liberals are not to blame for the erosion of traditional mores and norms; they simply accept the world that markets have given them.
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