A Man in the Fray

...and Milton R Kon-vitz' close reading and critical appreciation of Hook's contributions to the legal and moral aspects of freedom Sidney Hook's vigor is attested by his continuous and impressive publications record, included in this tribute He is someone for whom the life of letters is the letter of life-ie has thoroughly internalized the Enlightenment belief that words and ideas count But it also has to be sadly stated that the words and ideas of others tend to matter much less in his way of thinking, criticism often spills over into raw ammus Hook's contributions to social criticism, to a critique of totalitarianism, far exceed those he has made to positive philosophy He is much more a child of his century than a sage for all centuries That is not said to detract—very few scholars succeed on either term Immortality is for a select few who crowd out of our consciousness other "immortals" formerly thought to be indispensable The ability to employ theoretical constructs to illumine big chunks of contemporary reality is a rarity—and with it comes scorn from narrow professionals and from free-swinging ideologists The task of construction has long passed from the hands of the philosophers to those of the social and physical scientists Left to the philosopher has been the role of criticism, the negation of error This is essentially how Hook must be appreciated Marxism and Beyond provides a showcase for an elder scholar who is exceptionally gifted and knowledgeable in the fundamentals of Marxist literature Very few younger Marxists know the literature as he does, and this collection of essays is a timely corrective to the banalities and insipidities of today's Marxism Sidney Hook's message is a warning to the West—properly rendered and surely appropriate His philosophy is a blend of John Dewey and Karl Marx largely hberatedof their continental exaggerations His politics is an uncanny blend of social democracy and economic welfarism, with rarely any thought about the costs of creating such a social order He does not so much employ Marxism as a tool of analysis as see in it a beacon by which tyrannies are perpetuated in its name Hook epitomizes our incomplete century He has settled accounts with 19th-century doctrinal disputations—for that, after all, is what Marx is about—but has not come to grips with new empirical developments of the 20th century In Hook's world, there is little outside the United States and the Soviet Union no Asia, no Africa, no Latin America There is little outside the revolutionary-liberal axis the social outrages of Stalin and Hitler at one end, and the social decencies of Franklin D Roosevelt at the other The struggle over the means of communication and the place of technology in the moral order seem extrinsic In fact, everything from the service economy to high technology to the Third World seems alien to Hook's vision The metaphysical vice of considering all things temporal as eternal appears to have caught up with him—and perhaps with many of his celebrators as well How unprag-matic' Although his Festschrift comes at the end of the 20th century, Sidney Hook's singular achievement has been to close out the 19th The problems he has dealt with have centered around the failure of justice and history to march lockstep toward a social paradise Twentieth century varieties of communism and socialism have not measured up to the ideals of l9th-century Marxism In that "contradiction" Hook found his voice, and we are deeply indebted to him But the contradiction remains unresolved There is still a job for him to do...

...A Man in the Fray Marxism and Beyond By Sidney Hook Rowman & Littlefield 225 pp $19 95 Sidney Hook- Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism Edited by Paul Kurtz Prometheus 360 pp $18 95 Reviewed by Irving Louis Horowitz Hannah Arendt Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Rutgers University Sidney Hook recently passed his 80th birthday As befits an elder intellectual statesman who has survived in the academic trenches, he has been receiving various honors—among them a Festschrift edited by Paul Kurtz The participants in this collective homage, those whom Hook influenced either directly or otherwise, are for the most part "old-timers" in their own right That is in no way intended to denigrate the distinguished cast of characters, it is merely to note the age gap between old Marxists and new Marxists, old radicals and new revolutionists, for scarcely anyone under 50 graces the pages of this tribute To its loss, Hook simply does not figure in the community of what currently passes as Marxism For his part, he makes clear in his latest collection of essays, Marxism and Bevond, that he views such groups as the Frankfurt School and individuals like David Caute, John Kenneth Gal-braith, Robert Heilbroner and Michael Harrington as having betraved the democratic essence of Marxism Unlike his writings on pragmatism, these expositions are not constrained b\ walking on eggs or stepping on toes The essay on the Frankturt School alone is worth the price of this selbist-bildrus...

...A few choice quotes must suttiee "The Frankturt School has so Hegehanized Marx that it repiesents a form of revisionism more radical than that of Eduard Bernstein Once we dismiss the causal priority of the mode of production in considering the structure of society and its changes, we eviscerate the theory of historical materialism beyond recognition Undisguised paternalism is incompatible with any conception of a democratic policy It is reminiscent of the tradition of enlightened despotism from Plato to modern totalitarianism " Hook is the guardian of a pure Marxism purged of Lemnism-Stalmism-Maoism, and contemptuous of everyone from Sartre to Horkheimer who sought to improve on the original by modernization The only problem is that he must also dampen those elements in Marx proper that not only admit but make inevitable the sort of doctrinal melange the theorist might indeed have scornfully disavowed Thus throughout these pieces Hook himself commits a fundamental dualism that Marx was for the most part careful to avoid a confusion between anti-Communism and pro-democracy Too many of his political statements, from his observations on post-war Germany to those on present-day Poland, reveal this serious chasm His analysis of neo-conservatism, for example, lacks the bite and dash of his assaults on neo-Marxism This said, it must further be recorded that Marxism and Beyond provides a glimpse of Hook at his best engaged, concerned, and very often on target What are the origins of the profound split in the ranks of those whose shared value is a reverence of Marx...

...No easy answer is possible In the case of Hook's treatment by today's Marxists, there are a range of explanations extending from his pugnacious personality to his strong opposition to Communist and Left intellectuals purged during the McCarthy era By all accounts he was an academic autocrat whose ideas of democracy were benign, yet whose standards struck terror in the hearts of many young scholars Perhaps this is one reason why academics now on the Left have chosen to ignore him On occasion, Left critics-dgar Z Fnedenberg in his 1970 review of Academic Freedom and Academic Anarchy, or Philip Green in his 1980 review of Philosophy and Public Policy—have lashed out at Hook, in the main, though, they have been sent in to tame the lion rather than beard him Hook is a brilliant polemicist, well capable of responding to challengers, savaging them when necessary Polemics no less than formal philosophy was his mother's milk, in that sense, he is as much a child of the Russian Revolution as of German philosophy His commitment to pragmatism as a practical stance has been strong, but his commitment to socialism m the struggle against totalitarianism has remained even stronger We come, then, to the heart of the matter The arguments inspired by Hook are not so much about the importance of Marxism in the contemporary world, or the place of pragmatism, rather, they are about the uses of Marxism to defend Soviet tyranny and attack American democracy, and conversely, the uses of pragmatism to attack Soviet tyranny and defend American democracy If there is a monochromatic coloration to Hook's works, it is because the primary issue for him is not and never has been the status of Marxism as a social theory or philosophic system, but its status in the fight for the mmds of the masses, its deployment in the centra] battle of the 20th century between open, democratic societies and sealed, totalitarian states Hook's friends and enemies are forged on these grounds, not on shared premises about the experience of pragmatism Although encomiums are very much part of honoring a colleague, the number and intensity of them in Sidney Hook Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism almost embarrassingly outweigh any sort of serious analytical discussion Irving Knstol speaks of Hook as a "great legal mind " Knstol finds it "impossible to doubt that he would have been the outstanding jurist of this century in the English-speaking world Nor is it fanciful to think that he would have ended up as a justice of the Supreme Court, in which case his reputation would have been overshadowed only by John Marshall, if by anyone " Nicholas Capaldi notes that "there is nothing more deeply ingrained than Hook's commitment to democracy, and that is why he is so resented by radicals, lunatics, and extremists who would gladly sacrifice democracy on the altar of some Utopian scheme " Too many of the papers also were prepared for other occasions, and while some are interesting in their own right, they have little to report on Hook's work The Festschrift, however, does have several thoroughly outstanding pieces Especially notable are Daniel Bell's examination of the histoncism and relativism of Hook's pragmatism, Richard Rorty's brilliant critique of Hook's "scientistic strategy" in the study of morals and religion...