Sidney Hook

Sidney Hook (December 20, 1902 – July 12, 1989) was an American philosopher of pragmatism known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, political theory, and ethics.

After embracing communism in his youth, Hook was later known for his criticisms of totalitarianism, both fascism and Marxism–Leninism.

A social democrat, Hook sometimes cooperated with conservatives, particularly in opposing Marxism–Leninism.

After World War II, he argued that members of such groups as the Communist Party USA and Leninists like democratic centralists could ethically be barred from holding the offices of public trust because they called for the violent overthrow of democratic governments.

Sidney Hook was born on December 20, 1902, in Brooklyn, New York City, to Jennie and Isaac Hook, Austrian Jewish immigrants.

He became a supporter of the Socialist Party of America during the Debs era when he was in high school.

Katz had studied at the Rand School in the early 1920s.

In 1923, he earned a BA at the City College of New York and in 1927 Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he studied under pragmatist philosopher John Dewey.

He married Carrie Katz in 1924, with whom he had one son.

In 1926, Hook became a professor of philosophy at New York University and was head of the Department of Philosophy from 1948 to 1969.

He attended the lectures of Karl Korsch in Berlin in 1928 and conducted research at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in the summer of 1929.

In the late 1930s, Hook assisted Leon Trotsky in his efforts to clear his name in a special Commission of Inquiry headed by Dewey, which investigated charges made against Trotsky during the Moscow Trials.

The Great Purge encouraged Hook's increasing ambivalence toward Marxism.

In 1931, Hook began teaching at the New School for Social Research through 1936, after which he taught night school there until the 1960s.

At first, he wrote enthusiastically about the Soviet Union, and, in 1932, supported the Communist Party's candidate, William Z. Foster, when he ran for President of the United States.

By 1933, Hook and New School colleague Horace M. Kallen were serving also on the ACLU's academic freedom committee.

At the beginning of his career, Hook was a prominent expert on Karl Marx's philosophy and was himself a Marxist.

However, Hook broke completely with the Comintern in 1933, holding its policies responsible for the triumph of Nazism in Germany.

He accused Joseph Stalin of putting "the needs of the Russian state" over the needs of the international revolution.

However, Hook remained active in some of the causes of the Marxist left during the Great Depression.

In 1933, with James Burnham, Hook was one of the organizers of the American Workers Party, led by the Dutch-born pacifist minister A.J. Muste.

Hook also debated the meaning of Marxism with radical Max Eastman in a series of public exchanges.

Eastman, like Hook, had studied under John Dewey at Columbia University.

The couple separated in 1933.

In 1939, Hook formed the Committee for Cultural Freedom, a short-lived organization that set the stage for his postwar politics by opposing "totalitarianism" on the left and right.

By the Cold War, Hook had become a prominent anti-Communist, although he continued to consider himself both a democratic socialist and a secular humanist throughout his life.

He was, therefore, an anti-Communist socialist.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hook helped found Americans for Intellectual Freedom, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom.

These bodies—of which the CCF was most central—were funded in part by the Central Intelligence Agency through a variety of fronts and sought to dissuade American leftists from continuing to advocate cooperation with the Soviet Union as some had previously.

Hook later wrote in his memoirs that he, "like almost everyone else," had heard that "the CIA was making some contribution to the financing of the Congress."

On February 6, 1953, Hook discussed "The Threat to Academic Freedom" with Victor Riesel and others in the evening on WEVD radio (a Socialist radio station whose call letters referred to SPA founder Eugene V. Debs).

In May 1953, the John Day Company published Heresy, Yes–Conspiracy, No, a 283-page book expanded from a 1952 pamphlet (Heresy, Yes–Conspiracy, No! ), itself expanded from a 1950 New York Times article called "Heresy, Yes–But Conspiracy, No."

In the 1960s, Hook was a frequent critic of the New Left.

He was opposed to a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Vietnam War and defended California Governor Ronald Reagan's removal of Angela Davis from her professorship at UCLA because of her leadership role in the Communist Party USA.

Hook was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965 and ended his career in the 1970s and 1980s as a fellow of the conservative Hoover Institution in Stanford, California.

He retired from the University in 1972.

In 1973, he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.

The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Hook for the 1984 Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

Hook's lecture was entitled "Education in Defense of a Free Society."

Hook was a lifelong agnostic.