Leaders: Sidney Hook

I thank John Gehl for this account of Sidney Hook, whom I knew well. "American educator and socio-political philosopher Sidney Hook (1902-1989) came to prominence in the late 1920s as both the star pupil of John Dewey and an eminent Marx scholar.

Born and educated in Brooklyn, New York, Hook studied at City College and Columbia University. He was among the first U.S. scholars to analyze Marxism. He was firmly opposed to all forms of totalitarianism, holding liberal democracy as the most viable political structure for social and scientific advancement. After receiving a doctorate from Columbia University in 1927, Hook taught at New York University (1927-69) until he retired to become senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University (1973-89).

An exponent of pragmatism, secularism, and rationalism, he advocated a general philosophy of personal development. He wrote and edited more than 35 books including Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (1933), The Hero in History (1943), Education for Modern Man (1946, In Defense of Academic Freedom (1971), and Revolution, Reform, and Social Justice (1975). His autobiography, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century, was published in 1987.

Hook moved from an early ideological commitment to Marxism to active support of anti-communist causes. He was certainly a most controversial figure in American philosophy, and currently seems a forsaken figure in the philosophical community at large. Early in his career he was active in political activities that clearly marked him as a Communist Party fellow traveler, but just prior to World War II his political stance began to shift towards the Right. Hook was an outspoken participant in many of the principal political debates of the last century, and should be remembered for his vigorous defense of political and academic freedom and his stand against totalitarianism in all forms.

In his writings he distinguished the moral and intellectual gulf between the humanistic ideals he saw in Marx and the communist orthodoxy in the Soviet Union. During World War II he argued that the Soviet Union should be regarded as a cobelligerent rather than an ally, and after the war he opposed Soviet influence but never indulged in the excesses of McCarthyism. As a professor during the sixties, he deplored the student radicals who denied freedom of speech to those who disagreed with their views. A prolific writer of books as well as book reviews and articles (he had more than one thousand publications to his name), Hook became well known for his strong opinions and keen logic, not only to intellectuals, but also to the public at large".