The Relevance of Sidney Hook Today

A good interpretation of Hook's work still awaits

Paul Kurtz Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist, by Christopher Phelps (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-801-43328-2) 257 pp. Cloth $35.00.

CHRISTOPHER PHELPS

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SidneyHook, who died a decade

ago was, during his lifetime, and apparently still is today, one of

the most controversial figures in American intellectual life. He was, in his early years, a Marxist, perhaps the leading Marxist philosopher that America has yet produced. As a bril-liant student of John Dewey, he became an exponent of pragmatism and experimental naturalism. In his earliest writings he attempted to unify Marxism and pragmatism and to emphasize what they held in common. As he matured, Hook's major focus was on the democratic society and the methods of scientific intelligence.

Hook was also a secular humanist. Indeed, he was one of the founders of the Council for Secular Humanism and a charter subscriber to FREE INQUIRY magazine. The first issue of FREE INQUIRY (Winter 1980/81) contained an article by Hook entitled "The Ground We Stand On: Democratic Human-ism." In it he remonstrated that the forces and institutions of intelligence and democracy are on the defensive throughout the world, and he deplored the growth of religious fundamental-ism as a strong political force and its

Paul Kurtz is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Editor-in-Chief of FREE INQUIRY.

hostility to scientific inquiry. But in Young Sidney Hook,

Christopher Phelps, a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Oregon, heralds the fact that Hook began his career as a revolutionary socialist. Indeed, young Phelps's inter-pretation of Hook's philosophical career is so patently biased, as seen through his own ideological prisms, that he can hardly qualify as an objec-tive biographer and historian. This is particularly the case, given Phelps's entirely derogatory view of the later Hook. Nonetheless, we can learn much about Sidney Hook from Phelps's ren-dition of his career.

he young Hook visited the Soviet 1 Union and Germany in 1928-29, edited the works of Lenin, and strongly defended revolutionary class action. In 1933, Hook published Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation. Phelps considers this book to be Hook's most original contribution to leftist ideology and Marxist scholar-ship, and a guideline for today. For Hook, dialectical materialism was not to be viewed as an "objective law of history" or a "dogma," but as a "method of social action." Hook, like Dewey, was concerned with pragmatic action, and he attempted to test ideas experimentally by their consequences

in practice. For the early Hook, Marxism should be viewed both in the-ory and practice as a method for achieving a social revolution.

Phelps attacks the post-revolution-ary Hook, especially from 1938 onwards. He considers him to be a neo-conservative reactionary. Thus, for example, he excoriates Hook for accepting the Medal of Freedom from President. Ronald Reagan in 1985, and he condemns Hook for helping to lead an "anticommunist crusade," for being an "apologist" for the capitalist estab-lishment, and by implication the "house writer" for the New York Times.

I myself first met Sidney Hook in 1948 as a student at New York University in his class on the Philosophy of Democracy. I main-tained contact with Hook for 40 years until his death in 1989, beginning espe-cially in 1959 when my wife and I spent six weeks with Ann Hook and Sidney Hook at the East/West Philosophers' Conference in Hawaii. For long periods of time I kept in close touch with Hook either by letter or by phone, often on a weekly basis. I remember when he was about to receive the Medal of Freedom. He chuckled and asked me, "Did Reagan know that I am a secular humanist and a socialist?" Hook deplored the "neo-conservative" label that some of his students such as Irving Kristol had assumed, and he maintained through-out that he was a committed social democrat and a sociologist.

In Young Sidney Hook Phelps criti-cizes the two festschrifts that I edited in Hook's honor, claiming that I distorted Hook's position by maintaining that there was a unity in the thought of the early and later Hook.* I pointed out that during Hook's entire philosophical career he never abandoned his commit-

*Sidney Hook and the Contemporary World: Essays on the Pragmatic Intelligence (New York: John Day and Company, 1968); and Sidney Hook: Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1983).

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ment to experimental naturalism, sci-entific method, or his devotion to democracy, socialism, and human-ism—whereas Phelps insists that there was a sharp rupture between the early and later Hook.

It is only the early revolutionary Hook of which Phelps approves. "The American Left," says Phelps, "is once again in need of hope to carry it through hard times. The questions that Hook considered in his writings on revolution and democracy remain vital, and many of the solutions he put forward years ago have remarkable rel-

evance today" (p. 242). Phelps believes that Hook's earlier insistence on the need of working people to change society and to control their lives is again meaningful.

I quite agree with Phelps that the liberal-left forces and the working class in America (and the world) are in disarray, given the massive expansion of global capitalism, and that there needs to be a new coalition; but I am skeptical of Phelps's own Marxist sympathies and his implication that revolutionary means are today an option for social change. I concur that it would be a mistake to ignore Marx's insightful sociological interpretation of history entirely—that the forces and relationships of production are key determinants of social change. Marx's analysis of the tendency for mergers and acquisitions to lead to greater con-centration of ownership—which he saw in the nineteenth century—contin-ues unabated today. The decline of real wages, the increasing disparities in income and wealth, and the fact that the labor movement is held hostage by the threat of exporting jobs abroad are all serious problems. Indeed, no coun-try is today able fully to solve its inter-

nal problems given the power of the global economy. I do not think that Marx's solution for these problems is in any sense adequate. Surely we have learned that from history, as did Sidney Hook, though evidently not Phelps.

ook did change his views about the Soviet Union, Lenin, and rev-

olution. Although never a member of the Communist Party, he was an early ardent supporter of its programs. He broke with the CP-USA and Earl Browder in 1933, as he details in his autobiography Out of Step: An Unquiet

Life in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1987): he would not take orders from the Central Committee and he became acutely aware of the contradictions between the ideals of dialectical theory and actual political practice. Hook's views about the nature of Stalinism soon led him to denounce the Soviet gulag. No doubt Hook, like so many other intellectuals on the left, was influenced in this regard by Leon Trotsky. In 1938, Hook was instrumental in organizing a spe-cial commission in Mexico City, headed by John Dewey, to investigate Stalin's charges against Trotsky. That commission declared that Trotsky as well as the defendants of the Moscow show trials were innocent, and that these were trumped-up charges—though both Dewey and Hook deplored Trotsky's defense of terrorism and his abandonment of democracy.

With the rise of fascism and Stalinism and the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, Hook came to believe that the primary conflict facing the world was not the conflict between capitalism and socialism, but between totalitarianism and democracy. He insisted that polit-ical democracy (free elections, the

legal right of opposition, a free press, due process of law, etc.) is a necessary precondition of any just society. Hook maintained throughout his life that he was a democratic socialist. He was highly critical of the laissez faire eco-nomics of Friedrich A. Hayek, Ludwig van Mises, and Milton Friedman, for he thought that both economic and social democracy were essential for the democratic society.

Many on the Old and New Left have never forgiven Hook for his attacks on Leninist-Marxists over the decades, but in retrospect, Hook proved to be right about the nature of the Soviet Union, and he has been vin-dicated by history. Many of his former comrades-in-arms also never forgave him for defending George Meany, the AFL-CIO, the Social Democratic Party, the League for Industrial Democracy, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, for they were all viewed as "anticommunist." Many on the New Left later criticized Hook because he opposed student violence on the campuses and sought to defend academic freedom and integrity in the face of it, or his view that Ho Chi Minh was not simply a "democratic agrarian nationalist" but a Stalinist.

Hook recognized that market economies generally enjoyed higher standards of living than socially planned or nationalized economies, and there had to be a significant free market sector. But he wished to sup-plement this with welfare policies, an idea that has become unfashionable in the United States since the Reagan years, but is still supported by the democratic socialist parties of Western Europe.

There is much in Phelps's book that is fascinating. He describes in great detail many factional quarrels that embroiled the left in the 1930s. Hook was a master polemicist. He was able to demolish his foes in the internecine squabbles. It is also revealing to learn how many of those who were devoted to communism as the wave of the future later became disillusioned.

It is not the revolutionary Hook, I submit, but the democratic and humanist Hook that needs special attention today.

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There is at the present juncture a need for new political directions.

These, I submit, are not to be found by turning back to either Marx or Mill of the nineteenth century, but by developing new principles and meth-ods appropriate to the global society of the twenty-first century. Phelps is evidently sympathetic to romantic revolutionary Marxism, but he would

have done far better if he had learned to appreciate the pragmatic liberal democratic methodology of Dewey and the mature Hook, a position far more relevant to the current American scene—given the dominance of doc-trinaire right-wing religious ideol-ogy—but also pertinent to the world at large. Fortunately, there is currently a strong revival of interest in Dewey's

writings. Inasmuch as Sidney Hook contributed mightily to the philoso-phy and practice of pragmatic liberal democracy, a fairer reappraisal of Hook's middle and later works would be most relevant to current realities. It is not the revolutionary Hook, I sub-mit, but the democratic and humanist Hook that needs special attention today.

HEIDEGGER, NAZISM, AND POSTMODERNISM

MARLIN BIII Cooke HEIDEGGER •

BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL

It is one of the features of the depressed state of end-of-millen-nium philosophy that Martin

Heidegger (1889-1976) should be experiencing a tremendous upsurge in popularity. Heidegger, once rele-gated to a chapter in the literature on existentialism, has recently re-emerged as a central intellectual influence on the current fashion of postmodernism.

At the same time, the extent of Heidegger's collaboration with Hit-lerism has become even clearer. This has developed to such an extent that David Harvey, a Marxist postmod-ernist, has admitted Heidegger's Nazi past (and that of Paul De Man, another prominent postmodernist thinker) to be a "major embarrassment" for post-modernism.

Bill Cooke is a lecturer in the School of Art and Design, Manukau Institute of Technology in New Zealand. He is the author of Heathen in Godzone, a study of Rationalism in New Zealand.

FASCIST ROOTS

Heidegger was born into a staunchly Catholic family of modest means in the southwestern corner of Germany in 1889. Acknowledged early on to be brilliant, he was nurtured through the Catholic education system of his region. In his youth he repaid that confidence by advocating a very conservative, authoritarian Catholicism. During the First World War, Heidegger worked in the censorship office, reading soldiers' mail. It is widely thought he used his position to read the mail of colleagues and rivals for the various academic posts he was applying for at the time.

After the war Heidegger came under the influence of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), at the time Germany's most influential living philosopher. Husserl recognized Heidegger's genius and lobbied extensively on his behalf to secure an academic position. Within weeks of securing the position at Freiburg that he had coveted, Heidegger stopped visiting Husserl. When Husserl,

a Jew, was forbidden to lecture by Nazi legislation, Heidegger didn't lift a finger to help him. He didn't even attend his funeral.

Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in May 1933, only four months after Hitler's rise to power. He was by now Rector of Freiburg University and had enthusiastically launched into a pro-gram of reorganizing the university on Nazi principles. This included compul-sory military training for students, a militarist code of honor for the staff, and active encouragement of book-burning at the university. Heidegger also abolished all of the university's governing bodies.

Those at the heart of the ideological power centers of National Socialism suspected Heidegger was merely "play-ing at National Socialism," and they appointed other people to important positions in German curriculum and university administration. After about a year in the job Heidegger resigned as Rector, although he retained his party membership.

After the war the de-Nazification commission banned Heidegger from lecturing until 1949 and holding any official university position. It was decided that his support of the Nazi regime had been significant because his international reputation as a philoso-pher had given the Nazis respectability that helped cement their control of the country in those early months. Heidegger remained bitter about his treatment, feeling that he had been sin-gled out unfairly. But he never retracted any of the statements he made during

Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, by Rüdiger Safranski (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-674-38709-0) 474 pp. Cloth $35.00.

Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, by Julian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 0-521-58276-8) 232 pp. Cloth $49.99.

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