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HOOK, SIDNEY 1902-1989

PHILOSOPHER, EDUCATOR

Prominent Intellectual

A well-known college professor who expressed views on virtually all the major political and social issues of his times, Sidney Hook was among the notable American intellectuals whose political thinking underwent a major shift between the 1920s and the late 1940s, as he and other leftists became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet Union. Hook embraced Marxist theory in the 1920s, but by the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s, he had turned to a conservative defense of democracy.

Early Years

Hook was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and began studying philosophy as an under-graduate at the City College of New York. After receiving a B.S. in 1923, he began teaching in New York City public schools and enrolled in graduate studies in philosophy at Columbia University. Hook got a master's degree in 1926 and won a university fellow-ship to continue his doctoral studies with philosopher John Dewey, who had a profound influence on Hook's thinking. He completed his doctorate in 1927. His dissertation, The Metaphysics of Pragmatism (1927), displays Dewey's influence and includes a preface by Dewey in the published version. Hook began as an instructor in philosophy at New York University in 1927 and continued to teach philosophy there until his retirement in 1970. In 1929, as a Guggenheim Fellow, he studied in Berlin, Munich, and Moscow, where at the Marx-Engels Institute he pursued what he called his "active interest in the theory and practice of the working class movement." After his return to New York the following year, he began lecturing at the New School for Social Research while continuing to teach at New York University and writing Towards the understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (1933). One reviewer called this book "the best presentation of the social philosophy of Karl Marx in the English language."

A Shifting Away from Marxism

Hook was expelled from the Communist Party in 1932 for expressing his philosophical differences with party ideology and defending Leon Trotsky after he fell out of favor with Joseph Stalin. While Hook continued to espouse revolutionary Marxism—helping to launch a new communist party, the American Workers Party, in 1933—a shift in his thinking became evident in his 1940 book, Reason, Social Myths and Democracy, in which he pointed to the propaganda of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin as threats to democracy. Hook warned that "those who believe in democracy must distinguish intelligently…between honest opposition within the framework of the democratic process [and an opposition dictated from without, which] must be swiftly dealt with if democracy is to survive." A review in the Nation described Hook's attitude toward Marxism as "moving from heresy to apostasy."

Cold War Anti-Communist

By the late 1940s Hook became a solid defender of democracy against communism. In 1949 he organized Americans for Intellectual Freedom, a group of two hundred intellectuals, cultural leaders, and artists, to protest the allegedly Communist-controlled Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace then convening in New York. In April of that year Hook went to Paris as a representative of Americans for Intellectual Freedom, in opposition to the Communist-backed Congress of Partisans for Peace, which was meeting at the same time. Hook's group then created the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, with Hook as its chairman, speaking out against "the distortion of words in Communist practice."

The McCarthy Era

During the 1950s Hook increased his anti-Communist activities among scholars abroad, associating with the group that published the CIA-funded Encounter magazine. Hook especially attacked "ritualistic liberals"—progressives with good intentions who, Hook believed, confused the political situation and paved the way for authoritarian Communists. Alarmed at the growing right-wing attack on American education, however, Hook tried to distinguish between legitimate academic freedom and illegitimate Communist indoctrination—a distinction ignored by the right-wing "witch hunters" trying to purge American classrooms of all left-of-center teachers.

Later Years

In the 1960s and 1970s Hook remained consistently anti-Marxist in voicing his opposition to the New Left, but fewer and fewer people listened. As Irving Howe once commented, "It was Hook's fate as an ever-poised polemicist, that almost anyone could find some-thing to disagree with…in his writings and therefore dismiss his genuine contributions." Hook once told a philosophy class: "I've always been out of step: A premature Marxist. A premature anti-Fascist. A premature anti-Communist."