Sidney Hook Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Sidney Hook (1902–1989) was an American philosopher, Marxist, and exponent of pragmatism. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from City College in 1923 and received his PhD from Columbia University in 1927.While at Columbia, he absorbed the tradition of American pragmatism from one of his professors, John Dewey. Hook then joined the philosophy department at New York University, where he remained until 1972. After World War II (1939–1945), Hook became involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization designed to influence intellectual opinion away from communism and which later was revealed to have received CIA funds. As the 1960s unfolded, Hook became horrified by the assault of student radicals for academic freedom on campus. In response, he helped establish the University Center for Rational Alternatives and its journal Measure. In his 1987 book, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century, Hook described the purpose of the organization and journal as “to defend the relative autonomy of the university and to resist attacks against the freedom to teach and freedom to learn from without and from within.”

Despite his long career of anticommunism and his abhorrence of campus radicalism, Hook remained on the left in domestic matters. He never accepted free market economics and the notion that capitalism for all its flaws is the most rational system. In 1985, Hook was given the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan. His final institutional affiliation was with the Hoover Institution in Stanford.

Hook was a pragmatist and a naturalist who belonged in the tradition of Dewey, Charles Sanders Pierce, and William James. Hook also attributed significant influences in his development to American philosopher Morris Cohen and British philosopher Bertrand Russell. One simple principle stands at the core of Hook’s thought from which radiates all his secondary views: his rejection of metaphysics and his insistence that all true knowledge is practical and contingent rather than purely theoretical and unchanging. For Hook, there could be no eternal verities apprehended by the exercise of the purest rationality, and he absorbed the insight of Scottish philosopher David Hume, who Hook believed had shown that pure reason did not exist. A clear statement of Hook’s position is given in his 1989 American Scholar review of American author and philosopher Allan Bloom’s best-selling The Closing of the American Mind (1987). “The difficulty with Bloom’s position,” Hook says, “is that, like Leo Strauss, he has not emancipated himself from the Greek notion that the cosmos is an ethos, and that what is good and bad, right and wrong for man is essentially related to the cosmic order rather than to the reflective choices of men and women confronted by problems of what to do.” It is “consequentialism” then, or the “rational modification of interests and passions,” and not the conformity of conduct to certain transcendent standards which constituted Hook’s standard of morals.

With the rise to prominence of American philosopher Richard Rorty, who died in 2007, the debate over the meaning and contemporary relevance of pragmatism is again near the top of American philosophy’s agenda. With these changes, it is possible Hook may receive the kind of attention impossible during the fractious days of the 1960s and 1970s and not seen since Hook’s tenure as one of the world’s foremost authorities on Marxism.

Bibliography:

Cotter, Matthew J., ed. Sidney Hook Reconsidered. Amherst, Mass.: Prometheus Books, 2004.
Hook, Sidney. “The Closing of the American Mind: An Intellectual BestSeller Revisited.” The American Scholar 58 (1989): 123–135.
From Hegel to Marx. New York: Humanities Press, 1950.
The Hero in History. London: Secker and Warburg, 1945.
The Metaphysics of Pragmatism. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1927.
Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
Kurtz, Paul. Sidney Hook: Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1983.
Phelps, Christopher. Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

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