Hook, Sidney

HOOK, SIDNEY (1902–1989). Born in New York City to Austrian-Jewish immigrants, Sidney Hook became a socialist at an early age. At Boys High in Brooklyn, he opposed American entry into the First World War and supported Morris Hillquit’s Socialist mayoral campaign. Attending City College (B.A., 1924) and Columbia University (Ph.D., 1927), Hook retained his left-wing sympathies while becoming the favored pupil of his Columbia adviser, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey.
In the late 1920s, Hook traveled to Germany to study post-Hegelian philosophy, spending an additional three months at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. He returned to write two brilliant expositions of Marx, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933) and From Hegel to Marx (1936), which gave him the reputation, as Edmund Wilson wrote in the New Republic, of being “a professor with enough courage and independence to occupy himself openly with a subject outlawed by academic philosophy.”

Hook publicly endorsed the 1932 Communist Party ticket, and his teaching post at New York University made him one of the few openly Marxist academics in the United States. In 1933, however, Hook’s criticism of Communist sectarianism in Germany, which he believed had facilitated the Nazi triumph, in combination with crude attacks on Hook’s philosophy in the Communist, led Hook to renounce the Communist Party and join the newly created American Workers Party. The Soviet Union, he argued, routinely violated the norms of workers’ democracy. While he remained a revolutionary communist, he maintained that Marxism would be far more democratic and experimental if informed by pragmatism.

Hook helped the American Workers Party to merge with the Trotskyists (the Communist League of America), and a few years later he facilitated the Trotskyist entry into the Socialist Party. But during the fallout from the Moscow trials, Hook, like many others, began to back away from revolution and Marxism. In 1939, he formed the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which espoused an anticommunist liberalism shorn of the anticapitalism of his earlier anti-Stalinism. During the 1940s and 1950s, Hook became a major Cold War ideologue, organizing the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and arguing in Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No (1953) that Communist Party membership alone was sufficient grounds to fire a teacher. When a new student Left emerged in the 1960s, Hook opposed it, even though its celebration of “participatory democracy” was reminiscent of his own youthful politics. Although Hook called himself a social democrat until his death, his proven Cold War loyalties won him warm invitations to the Nixon and Reagan White Houses.

Hook, Sidney. Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.

Phelps, Christopher. Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Register of the Sidney Hook Papers, Collection Number 90003, Online Archive of California. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf5n39n7hn/