On the Hook (The Boston Globe)

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On the Hook
Neoconservatives love him. Young radicals do too.
Who will control the legacy of the world's greatest
Marxist-Reaganist philosopher?

By Matthew Price, 11/3/2002

Despite the brief ruckus, the conference in question, ''Sidney Hook
Reconsidered: A Centennial Celebration,'' went off as planned last
weekend at the City University of New York's Center for the Humanities.
Kramer and Himmelfarb stayed home, but Diggins, West, and 23
other panelists showed up to debate the legacy of one of the most
polarizing figures of postwar intellectual life. With his early works,
Hook made a name for himself as a daring and original interpreter
of Marx; later, he became an ardent supporter of Ronald Reagan
and secular humanism. A philosophical pragmatist with a dogmatic
streak, a cold warrior and a socialist, and an erudite pugilist, Hook
was a man of lively contradictions who lived for vigorous debate,
often making short work of his antagonists.

In his later years, Hook's reputation as an

anticommunist scold tended to obscure - if not taint - his reputation
as a philosopher following in the footsteps of his mentor, the more
mild-mannered John Dewey. Though there was much talk of Hook's
politics at the forum, it wasn't the only theme. ''We wanted to make
the case for Hook's philosophical importance,'' says conference
organizer Matthew Cotter, a graduate student at CUNY.

For all the contentious advance publicity, the two-day conference
had a distinctly civilized air. The participants, decked out in brown
tweed and navy (all save West, who sported his familiar sleek black
preacher's suit), had mostly come to praise Hook, not bury him.
Hook's son Ernest, a geneticist at Berkeley's School of Public Health,
added his own sometimes quarrelsome voice to the proceedings,
correcting matters of fact and contesting numerous claims about
his father's anticommunism. Sidney Hook himself even showed
up - in interview footage projected for the audience. It was a bizarre
sight: The neoconservative icon stood in front of the Berlin Wall on a
bleak winter day in the early 1980s, enthusing that ''Karl Marx
represents
the spirit of freedom and independence.''

But there were many Hooks on display at the conference. ''He has a lot of

different irons in the fire, and sometimes it's difficult to see how
they're
all connected,'' says Neil Jumonville, a historian at Florida State
University
and author of ''Critical Crossings,'' a 1991 book on the so-called New
York intellectuals. Jumonville says Hook remains an important voice
against absolutism in all its forms - religious, philosophical, and
political. (In a Partisan Review essay from 1943, Hook brazenly
denounced Catholicism as ''the oldest and greatest totalitarian
movement in history").

For Paul Kurtz, editor of Free Inquiry magazine, where Hook was a
contributor, Hook's worth lies in his stout defense of science and
reason.
(Some of Kurtz's fellow secular humanists have adopted the punning
mantra ''Hook, Quine, and Pinker'' in tribute to their intellectual
heroes.)
Kurtz disputed the commonly held notion that Hook, a devout atheist,
was a neoconservative, adding that today, ''all too few intellectuals are

stepping forward as religious dissenters.''

Cornel West, in an impassioned perfomance, responded that for all of
Hook's hostility to religion, there was an important theological element
to his thought. ''We haven't adequately accented the Jewish dimension,''
West said, noting that Hook, like the Hebrew prophets, wrestled
throughout his career with ''the problem of evil and human suffering.''
In contrast to some other American pragmatists, Hook emphasized
the inescapability of tragedy and moral conflict; his was a ''haunted
humanism.'' But haunted by what? Christopher Phelps, author of the
1997 book ''Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist,'' used his
talk to lament Hook's later rejection of revolutionary politics and
obsession with communism's menace.

It's easy to see Hook's life as another
young-revolutionary-turns-old-reactionary
story. Born in 1902, Hook grew up in the slums of Williamsburg, Brooklyn,

where he won a reputation as a spirited brawler, in the streets and
in the rough-and-tumble world of socialist politics. At City College,
which became legendary as an incubator for a generation of Jewish
intellectuals, Hook studied under philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen,
who was celebrated for his exacting, even brutal teaching methods.
In his autobiography ''Out of Step,'' Hook would write, ''We became
logical hygienists, and terrorized our families and friends and
especially other teachers with the techniques... we picked up
observing Cohen in action.''

After his graduation, Hook taught in New York City's public schools
for five years while doing graduate work at Columbia with John Dewey,
whose activist pragmatism influenced his outlook. But Marxism also
took on a scholarly allure for Hook. In the late 1920s, a fellowship
allowed the young NYU professor to travel to Moscow, where he did r
esearch at the Marx-Engels Institute. Hook never joined the Communist
Party - he found orthodox Stalinism repellent. Instead, he set about
reclaiming Marxism from its official guardians, infusing it with Dewey's
spirit of pragmatism, and steering it towards democracy. In his ambitious

synthesis, ''Towards The Understanding of Karl Marx'' (1933), Hook threw
down the gauntlet. ''Orthodox Marxism,'' he charged, is ''an emasculation

of Marx's thought.''

Hook was a maverick, a man who often found himself without a party
(though he helped found one in 1934, the short-lived American Workers
Party). Over time, his passion for Marxism dimmed: By the end of the
1930s, he was opposed to totalitarianism, and had become a partisan
of pragmatic, secular liberalism. By 1947, he called himself ''first a
democrat and then a socialist.'' Though he became a major player in
anticommunist intellectual life, he never entirely lost his affection for
Marx
himself, whom he felt had never truly been understood by anybody - except

Sidney Hook. In 1973, Hook the cold warrior could still write of Marx
that
''any critical but objective assessment of his ideas justifies including
him
in the calendar of fighters for human freedom.''

Nonetheless, Hook's impassioned anticommunism has largely defined
his reputation. At the conference, numerous debates swirled around his
controversial 1953 pamphlet ''Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No.'' Hook thought
himself an advocate of intellectual and academic freedom - he welcomed
dissenters and opposed Senator McCarthy. At the same time, he believed
that membership in the Communist Party should disqualify one from
teaching - party-line dictates, in his view, foreclosed objective
scholarship.
What Hook did and did not say on this question is a matter of some
dispute.
 Michael Eldridge, a lecturer in philosophy at UNC-Charlotte, argued that

Hook's actual position was far subtler than his critics on the left
acknowledge.
For instance, Hook demanded that each teacher's case be considered
individually - and by university officials, not state authorities.

Nathan Glazer, who knew him in the 1950s, argued that Hook had in
essence taken the right position, though he also acknowledged that
the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, a distinguished scholar and
member of the Communist party, complicated the notion that a party
member could not do judicious work. For Christopher Phelps, however,
Hook's position smacks of a ''kindler, gentler form of McCarthyism,''
which
contributed to the ''anti-radical climate of the time.''

But the most stinging attack on Hook's position came not from a
left-winger
but from the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ''Hook's great
error
was letting his anticommunism take over his life,'' Schlesinger said,
contrasting Hook unfavorably with other ex-communists - historian
Richard Hofstadter and journalist Murray Kempton, for example - who
maintained their ''sense of balance.'' Hook, said Schlesinger,
was a man obsessed.

Ernest Hook is bewildered and frustrated by such claims, he says.
He rejects Phelps's criticism of his father's Cold War phase, and
noted that ''it would really require an essay to respond to
Schlesinger.''
At one panel, Ernest displayed some of his father's passionate
tendencies,
forcefully jousting with Leonard Bushkoff, an emeritus professor of
history
at Oakland University. Bushkoff contended that Hook's widow had tampered
with his papers, removing documents that would link him to the CIA's
secret
funding of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, an influential organization
of intellectuals that supported US foreign policy during the Cold War.
Bushkoff backed off in the face of the younger Hook's rebuttal, though
he still insists that Hook's papers have been ''carefully vetted'' by
someone.

Reached by phone in Berkeley, Ernest Hook admits he has ''mixed
feelings'' about the conference. He complains that there ''was a good
deal of sectarian and highly biased criticism,'' noting that the
organizers
refused his request to appear on a panel ''to rebut false accusations
I knew were going to be made.'' For his part, Cotter says he was
delighted by Ernest Hook's participation, but adds that appropriate
panelists included ''historians, philosophers, and sociologists,
not sons of philosophers.''

Of course, one conference will not resolve the question of Hook's legacy.

Did he evolve over the years or didn't he? In his autobiography, Hook
wrote ''I am not aware of having undergone any serious conversions
from the days of my youth, or having abandoned my basic ideals.''
This may strike some as disingenuous. However, Robert Talisse,
a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt University, makes a compelling
case for taking Hook at his word. In a forcefully argued talk, Talisse
contended that ''Analyses of Hook in terms of `Left versus Right,'
`Liberal versus Conservative,' or `Young versus Old' are philosophically
impotent. At no point did Hook adopt any particular party line
wholesale: He died an anticommunist supporter of the Cold War
who was also a pro-choice, pro-union secular humanist and
democratic socialist.''

Looked at another way, though, Hook was simply remaining true
to what he was at heart: a pragmatist. And, says Jumonville, ''I would
be suspicious of any pragmatist who didn't change his or her
views over the course of a lifetime.''


This story ran on page D2 of the Boston Globe on 11/3/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.


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