OUT OF STEP
An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century
Sidney Hook
New York: Harper & Row, 1987
606 pp., $29.25
Sidney Hook is the archetypal intellectual of the twentieth century - in love with reason, fiercely independent, devoutly atheistic, opposed to totalitarianism and committed to freedom, pragmatic about means as well as ends, and, above all, convinced that humans have the power to make "the world around us better or worse." He is not an ivory-tower intellectual but a philosopher activist who has, in his tumultuous eighty-four years, been involved in such controversies as the growth of communism during the Great Depression, the Moscow Trials of 1936 and 1937, U.S. entry into World War II, the origins of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the student revolts of the 1960s.
In his autobiography, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century, Hook recounts his life as a young Jew in Brooklyn who escaped from poverty through education. Hook went on to become chairman of the Department of Philosophy at New York University, author of seminal works on Marx, Hegel, and John Dewey, and one of the most respected intellectuals in America. His book is rich in anecdotes about men and women of ideas and action - Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Whittaker Chambers, Bertolt Brecht, Freda Utley, James Burnham, and Albert Einstein, with all of whom he had various disagreements. Indeed, it may be said of Sidney Hook that he never met a man he didn't argue with; it was his way of arriving at truth. He protests that all he ever wanted was to immerse himself in philosophical speculation, but the real man is hereby revealed:
Despite appearances, and any involvement in polemical exchanges with Catholic authoritarians and communist totalitarians, I am not conscious of having sought out these encounters. I engaged in them most often because no one else was willing to do so. Time and again, after resolving to devote myself to the sweet uses of technical philosophy, I would be urged again once more to enter the fray, often by the very people who had advised me previously that I ought to turn my back on politics and write books for eternity.
An Eager Combatant
Hook has never needed any urging to enter any fray but has invariably created an encounter, driven by the need to address what he considered an issue important to the cause of freedom. In so acting, he has frequently been out of step with other members of the American academy.
One characteristic in particular that sets Hook apart from most intellectuals, of any nationality, is his willingness to admit that he has been wrong. Early in his autobiography, he confesses that he and his fellow socialists were so convinced of capitalism's ultimate doom that they failed to record the shift of countless workers into the middle class as well as the pervasiveness of solid middle-class values among the people, which accordingly generated more freedom and welfare under capitalism than socialism. Hook also states that he and other New York Jewish intellectuals were indifferent and even hostile to Zionism, regarding it as "another variety of Nationalism." Their attitude changed with the founding of the state of Israel and
...
Read Full Article
|
