Intelligence and Freedom
AUERBACH, CARL A.
WRITERS and WRITING Intelligence and Freedom By Carl A. Auerbach Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin THIS TREASURY OF 34 essays, Political Power and Personal Freedom (Criterion, $7.50),...
...Hook has performed this function for our generation courageously and effectively...
...Resolute words alone will not suffice to create a contrary impression in the Soviet mind...
...Because of his understandable and commendable desire to reconcile the AAUP and Hook, Fuchs contented himself with a general and ambiguous statement on this point...
...That would bring the danger of a world holocaust much nearer...
...This part alone suffices to give the book permanent value...
...What is essential...
...Hook also continues to espouse the cause of democratic socialism...
...And Hook acknowledged that he was open to argument on this academic question on which "every lover of freedom and life is on uncertain and tragic ground...
...Understanding its role, the judiciary would not require the legislature to tolerate any political movement which sought to destroy these freedoms...
...If this aim is to be achieved we must, as Hook so well argues, run the risk of annihilation in the effort to preserve freedom in the world...
...The debates between Max Eastman and Hook on this issue are set forth in Part Four...
...Hook explores this ideology in the eight essays in Part Two, "Studies in Communism...
...Only those who ignore the strategic significance of the political freedoms can apologize for Communist tyranny by contrasting "political democracy" with "economic democracy...
...I think it is implicit in Hook's views that he could not...
...there is...
...This is precisely the question Hook answers in the affirmative...
...When specific programs are evolved to achieve the moral ideal of democratic socialism, they may be accompanied by a realignment of political forces within democratic societies which will make controversy about the meaning of socialism, though not democracy, obsolete...
...While I agree with Hook's basic position...
...The American way of life, he insists, is embodied in the political freedoms, and a socialist economic order is not necessarily incompatible with the maintenance of these freedoms...
...But the subject matter of these essays calls for Hook's exceptional polemical gifts...
...In the concluding essay, he tells us that the social function of the intellectual is "to think, and to act in such a way that the results of his thinking are brought to bear upon the great issues of our time...
...To strengthen our will and moral commitment to freedom is Hook's purpose...
...Here Hook exposes the fallacies in the fashionable notion that the hopes of underdeveloped countries for modernization, industrialization and economic well-being can best be realized by some form of authoritarian, if not totalitarian, government and in the optimistic assumption that democracy and freedom will inevitably follow...
...I must confess a sympathy with Eastman's remark that Hook "is defending his logical right to 'believe in' democratic socialism rather than declaring his allegiance to any practical effort to produce it...
...And no one can read this book without appreciating that these gifts are used in an intelligent, eloquent and passionate defense of human freedom...
...Why should it be troublesome to incorporate into the theory of democracy the principle of an independent judiciary to safeguard "the entire complex of freedoms on which the democratic way of life rests...
...No one can be certain that the Soviet rulers will not come to think that the leaders of the Atlantic democracies are dominated by fear of annihilation...
...Some of the essays raise a number of questions which I hope Hook will find occasion to go into further...
...The core of the democratic creed, Hook writes, is not "a fixed common doctrine or a fixed body of truths, but a common method or set of rules" by which differences are settled and "government by virtue of the freely given consent of the governed" is made possible...
...Is there, the professor asked, "a basis in neutral principle for holding that the Constitution demands that the claims of association should prevail...
...In any case, as Hook points out, the Communist teacher has practically disappeared from the campus...
...In a number of essays, he attacks the too-easy identification of freedom with free enterprise" which...
...Because these rules presuppose freedom of speech and assemblv...
...Eventually...
...He is a vigorous exponent of civil rights and in one of the essays presents a sorely needed discussion of the moral issues in the Supreme Court's school desegregation cases...
...It all depends upon the men who exercise it and how they are controlled...
...Hook, too...
...But Hook nowhere says whether this burden can ever be discharged by a teacher who insists on remaining in the Communist party...
...The essays in Part One also examine the conflict between the ideas of majority rule and minority rights and the role of the United States Supreme Court in resolving this conflict...
...Misunderstanding of the nature of the Communist threat has been the cause of much folly in the approaches to problems of internal security taken by those whom Hook calls the cultural vigilantes and the ritualistic liberals...
...In the end, Russell complained that the question whether Soviet world domination should be preferred to world annihilation was "a purely academic issue," a question of "theoretical ethics...
...It is difficult to avoid a feeling of great uneasiness in evaluating this controversy because the issues were originally posed in such stark and admittedly unrealistic fashion...
...Contrary to the views expressed by a number of writers recently, Hook takes the position that Communist ideology is still "the most important key" to Soviet behavior...
...Party membership, he argues, warrants a presumption of unfitness which should throw the burden upon the teacher to prove his fitness...
...Hook is not an apologist for the status quo in Western democratic societies...
...The weakness of the democracies in their conflict with Communist totalitarianism...
...The Hook-Russell debate is set forth in full in this part of the book...
...Above all, he warns, the possibility of this evolution, as well as the peace of the world, depends upon preventing "democratic resolution from faltering, isolationism from reviving and the mood of appeasement from taking root...
...Seven essays in Part Three, "Problems of Security and Freedom," discuss these approaches...
...Fuchs implied that in particular cases a teacher might be able to retain both his membership in the Communist party and his post...
...Hook's views on academic freedom, it seems to me, still leave an important question open...
...Hook refuses to identify any particular economic program with the realization of "the moral ideal of social equality in the most comprehensive sense of that phrase," which is the aim of his democratic socialism...
...To this end, Hook elaborates the humanistic and libertarian tradition in Marxism, convinced that this tradition can contribute significantly to the "liberation by evolution" to which he looks forward, particularly in the satellite countries...
...There was a real difference of opinion between him and Ralph Fuchs, former Secretary of the American Association of University Professors...
...he said...
...It is true, as Max Eastman says and this book proves, Sidney Hook "can wield the blackjack, not to mention the rapier, with the best of them...
...No force beyond the reach of man will determine the amount of freedom he will enjoy...
...To harden democratic resolution was of course the aim of Hook's criticism of Bertrand Russell's views on the issue of freedom and survival...
...They "enable us to win new freedoms and check the excesses of the old...
...By resolving to do so, we impose the same risk on the Soviet leaders, and the chances of some accommodation that will minimize the mutual risk, without sacrificing freedom, become greater...
...Here, too, Hook proposes a strategy of political warfare against the Soviet Union...
...but I am not certain...
...The essays are grouped in four parts...
...In the eight essays in Part One, '"Studies in Democracy," Hook restates and justifies the basic beliefs which sustain a free society...
...Unfortunately...
...He also analyzes the thought and psychology of the "liberal spirits of the West" who are attracted by the Soviet myth because it purports to rest upon the humanist ideal and pleads for an intelligent attitude toward the fellow-traveler and ex-Communist...
...Political power, Hook teaches us, may be used to crush or expand personal freedom...
...he maintains, rests upon a belief in economic determinism shared by the doctrinaire Communist...
...freedom of inquiry and teaching, freedom of the press and other forms of communication, freedom of cultural opportunity and development, these freedoms are "strategic" in a democracy...
...That the liberties of a people can be protected without a Supreme Court to declare the acts of the supreme legislature unconstitutional, as Hook correctly states the English experience indicates, does not prove that a Supreme Court cannot or should not contribute to the preservation of the strategic freedoms in the United States...
...says Hook, "is a sense of genuine participation among individuals, of meaningful, uncoerced contribution to the world's work, a sense of counting for something in the concerns and decisions of the community...
...Russell agreed with Hook that the basic aim of our policy should be to make it unnecessary for us ever to have to make suoh a desperate choice...
...Hook advocates a disengagement plan for Central and Eastern Europe...
...has not been explicit on this question...
...The first concerns the role of the Supreme Court in our democracy...
...But the difficulties begin, as Hook himself emphasizes, when we seek the "operational equivalent of ideals...
...Eleven essays in Part Four, "Socialism, Freedom and Survival," deal with foreign policy and the issues in the debate with Eastman already referred to...
...Democratic socialists the world over have so far been unable to find it...
...Together with Hook's previously published Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No and Common Sense and the Fifth Amendment, these writings throw beacons of light and sanity on issues which should never have been permitted to become acute and were agitated in terms which inflicted harm upon the United States...
...He has expressly disassociated himself from Arthur Love-joy's position that Communist party membership justifies the automatic dismissal of the teacher...
...If "organizational membership is not made in itself conclusive evidence of professional malfeasance...
...To encourage such an evolution...
...Hook demonstrates the impossibility of economic democracy, or even economic security, without political democracy, and the incompleteness of political, without economic, democracy...
...no quarrel between the AAUP and Hook...
...In fact...
...Hook has long argued, is their failure to comprehend the "Communist theory, strategy, and tactics of world revolution...
...But if accompanied by resolute actions, they may carry conviction...
...The most effective way of weakening the Communist party dictatorship in the Soviet Union, he suggests, is to criticize it from the point of view of its own professed ideology...
...For Hook, the political, not the economic, factor is now of prime importance...
...It should be read by everyone who may have been taken aback recently by the argument of a noted law professor that freedom of association, not discrimination, is the basic question in these cases and that while segregation restricts freedom of association, integration forces an association upon those for whom it is repugnant...
...Is it not time, then, to halt the remaining federal and state legislative inquiries into the extent of Communist infiltration of our institutions of higher learning, which seem to be doing more harm than good to the cause of the democracy they are designed to promote...
...WRITERS and WRITING Intelligence and Freedom By Carl A. Auerbach Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin THIS TREASURY OF 34 essays, Political Power and Personal Freedom (Criterion, $7.50), was written by Sidney Hook during the last decade and stores his views on the fundamental problems of domestic and foreign policy confronting democratic societies in their struggle with Communist totalitarianism...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 35
