Sidney Hook: Marxist Pioneer

WHAT CONTRIBUTIONS TO 20TH-CENTURY MARXIST THOUGHT have com out of the U.S.? Not many, seems to be the consensus. Although researchers have been rediscovering the richness of U.S. working-class culture in the first half of the century, the marginality of Marxists in U.S. politics and the extirpation of anything vaguely Marxist in the universities in the 1950s ensured the virtual invisibility of U.S. Marxist thinkers for years. Most people who have written about "Western Marxism" focus on western Europe, above all Germany, France and Italy. In the early 1980s, when Perry Anderson noted in his In the Tracks of Historical Materialism the prominence of U.S. and British writers in contemporary Marxist scholarship, you could almost hear the note of surprise.

Even those who have gone in search of a U.S. Marxist tradition have usually had little time to spare for Sidney Hook, who has gone down in history mainly as the tired, right-wing social democratic Cold Warrior of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Christopher Phelps' excellent study of Hook in the 1930s^* shows how wrong they are. Hook's best books, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933) and From Hegel to Marx (1936), have aged surprisingly well. Hook's thought also shows intriguing affinities with better-known Western Marxists like György Lukàcs and Karl Korsch. Where his intellectual trajectory diverges from theirs, in fact, the contrast does not always work out to their advantage.

A U.S. Korschian Trotskyist?

HOOK'S PERSONAL BACKGROUND HELPS EXPLAIN HIS AFFINITY with Central European Marxism. Both his parents came from the pre-World War I Austrian empire: his father from Moravia (in the present-day Czech republic), his mother from Galicia (in present-day Poland). Though Jewish, their culture was Central rather than East European; "Hook was given to the German rather than the Yiddish phrase," Phelps says.[19] This may help explain why Hook decided to study philosophy. It does help explain how he was able to read Lukàcs' History and Class Consciousness in the mid-1920s, four decades before it was translated into English. Hook also spent a year in Germany in 1928-29 studying the Young Hegelians; attended lectures by Korsch; was among the first Western scholars to gain access to the Marx-Engels Institute archives in Moscow, at director David Riazanov's personal introduction; and translated several of Engels' letters criticizing the German Social Democrats' timid legalism into English for the first time.

Hook's knowledge of German Marxist philosophy is not in itself news. But Phelps does a good job of showing the extent of Hook's affinity with Lukàcs and particularly Korsch. Like them, Hook refused to see Marxism as a body of received truths, defining it instead as a method of revolutionary action. Like them, he rejected the supposedly "scientific" dialectical materialism that the Second International had distilled from Engels' later writings, insisting that the dialectics of class struggle are qualitatively different from anything that can be "discovered" in physics or astronomy. Like them, he celebrated Lenin's rediscovery of the radical core of Marx's method -- and was heresy-hunted by the Third International for his pains.

But while Lukàcs and many other "Western Marxists" accommodated more or less uneasily to Stalinism, Hook broke decisively with Stalinism in the early 1930s. Pushing aside Hook's later distortions of his own history, Phelps links Hook's defense of socialist democracy to his decade-long, close association with Trotskyism. In 1931-33, Phelps points out, Hook was a "sympathizer of Trotskyism working within the Communist Party milieu" who gave Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution a glowing review in 1932.[64] Hook's break with the Communist Party (CP) in 1933 not only resulted from the CP's stupid attacks on Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, but coincided with Trotsky's decision that the Comintern was past saving. In 1933-36, without joining the Trotskyist movement, Hook "consistently acted in solidarity with the American Trotskyists."[91] He described Trotsky in 1933 as "indisputably the most brilliant Marxist in the world today."[96] As late as March 1938, then-Socialist Workers Party leader Max Shachtman said that Hook "nine times out of ten agrees with the party."[170]

Hook never mechanically parroted the Trotskyist line, however. Throughout the '30s he emphasized the radically democratic character of Marxism, which is a recurring theme in Phelps' book. He wrote, memorably, that "difference, uniqueness, independence and creative originality are intrinsic values to be fostered and strengthened; and indeed one of the strongest arguments against capitalism is that it prevents these values from flourishing for all but a few."[108]¹ He also worked hard to Americanize Marxist thought and writing. He was a founder and leader of the American Workers Party (AWP), which proved itself both intellectually and practically during its brief existence, notably in the Unemployed Leagues and Toledo Auto-Lite strike. Phelps stresses the richness and rootedness that the AWP brought to its 1934 merger with the Trotskyist movement, and reminds us that Hook was the driving force behind the merger.

Pragmatism and "Liberal Values"

SO WHAT TURNED HOOK INTO THE RIGHT-WING SOCIAL DEMOCRAT he was from 1938 until his death, a man who ultimately voted for Nixon and praised Reagan? Most Marxist critics have blamed Hook's betrayal on the pragmatist strand in his philosophy. Interest in John Dewey's instrumentalist approach to philosophy was a constant in Hook's thinking from the mid-1920s until his death. As Phelps points out, this in itself makes nonsense of the usual explanation. Why should pragmatism be blamed for Hook's right turn in the 1940s if it could co-exist with his revolutionary insights of the 1930s? Phelps also notes that Hook's "liberal formalism" in his last years had "little in common with the experimental and radically democratic thought of John Dewey."[236] Dewey never went as far to the right as Hook. In fact, Dewey criticized Hook's notorious 1950 article, "Heresy, Yes -- Conspiracy, No!," which justified witch-hunting Stalinists out of academia, as an example of rigid thinking at odds with philosophical pragmatism.

Phelps sees the influence of Dewey's pragmatism as helping Hook "arrive at the particular type of Marxism that he espoused, one opposed not only to capitalism but also to the philosophical determinism and political bureaucracy of both Stalinism and social democracy."[8-9] Here Phelps' own book provides evidence to refute his argument. The characteristics of Hook's thought that Phelps credits pragmatism with -- seeing Marxism as a method rather than dogma, deep attachment to democracy, and so on -- can be located just as easily in Marxist sources like Lukàcs, Trotsky or Marx himself. Phelps points out that in the early 1930s Hook, despite his continuing close relationship with Dewey, "did not so much as mention Dewey's name in a single one of his major writings on Marx."[54]

On the contrary, Phelps notes, Hook criticized Dewey throughout the 1930s for filing to see the crucial importance of working-class struggle as a means of social change. "Classes do not experiment to determine what the consequences of their own non-existence will be," Hook wrote.[104]2 What Phelps fails to acknowledge is that Dewey's refusal to give preference a priori to this one method of social change was a logical consequence of his pragmatist insistence on judging each instance empirically, case by case. In other words, Dewey refused to see society as a whole, as a historically-produced totality, as Marxists such as Lukàcs and Hook stressed that it must be seen. Hook's best period, the period of Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, seems in this light to be the time when Dewey's influence on him was at its weakest.

A more serious problem in Phelps' book is his tendency, following Hook, to describe democracy and free inquiry as "liberal values." If we look at the founders and main exponents of classical, 19th-century liberalism, we see that they neither were nor pretended to be democrats. The British Liberals who fought for the 1832 Reform Bill and against protective tariffs did not hesitate to crush the Chartists who organized for universal adult male suffrage, for example. So prominent a Liberal as Gladstone was uneasy at Disraeli's extension of the suffrage in 1867, and changed his mind only later, in the 1880s. Classical liberalism also deeply distrusted working-class organization and agitation. Those who first instituted universal adult male suffrage, the Jacobins in France and Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats in the U.S., neither described themselves nor were seen by others as liberals.

Karl Marx, who identified with the radical republican tradition from the early 1840s on, defended democracy and freedom of expression in his early, middle and late writings. Marxists were thus defending these basic working-class demands while liberals were opposed or hesitant. Giving liberals retrospective credit for these "liberal values" -- rather than associating liberals, more appropriately, with Victorian Poor Law workhouses or massacres in Algeria and India -- needlessly puts an ideological weapon in their hands. It gives credence to the idea that we can defend democracy and freedom by defending the capitalist state -- an idea that Hook seized on as he turned against Marxism beginning in 1938.

"Retreat of the Intellectuals"

THIS IDEOLOGICAL FACTOR WAS PROBABLY NOT DECISIVE in Hook's rightward turn, however. Phelps is more likely looking in the right direction when he looks to Hook's own career and the broader social and political context for explanations. Hook, typically, for a socialist of his generation, did not leave a biographer much evidence to work with on his personal or professional life. But as Phelps is perceptive enough to see, "Until the middle of the 1920s Hook's commitment to revolutionary action and passion for philosophy acted as countervailing forces and ambitions, pulling him first one way, then the other."[16]

The book suggests that the same tensions were at work in the 1930s. Hook demonstrated extraordinary courage as an untenured instructor and then assistant professor at New York University. Isolated as a Jew, a leftist, in fact as "almost certainly the only openly Marxist academic philosopher in the United States"[51], he still had the nerve to chair a William Z. Foster-for-president rally at NYU in 1932. But his active membership in the American Workers Party was an exception in his life. He apparently never joined the CP during the years he was close to it; he declined to join the Workers Party of the U.S. when the AWP and Trotskyists merged to form it, at his urging, in 1934; nor did he join the Socialist Party (SP) or Socialist Workers Party (SWP) later. Phelps suggests that a "desire to retreat from politics" lay behind the decision -- though Hook always tried to exert political influence even when he avoided political affiliation -- and that Hook may have grown still "more cautious and concerned about his job security" after his second marriage in 1935 and the birth of his children in 1936 and 1938.[119, 130]

Phelps is also plausible when he sketches the social context in 1938-40 in which Hook moved so quickly to the right: the CIO's retreat in the face of an employer-AFL offensive, the looming threat of world war, the left's increasing isolation. That Dewey chose this time to challenge Trotsky openly was hardly an accident. This was a time in which the space for open revolutionary Marxism in the academy and media, always small, drastically contracted. Only a tiny minority of those intellectuals who identified as Marxists in the 1930s kept that identification past the '40s.

It is interesting to compare Hook's rightward swing to that of his NYU colleague James Burnham. Burnham, an SWP member and leader, moved more slowly than Hook at first. When Hook first openly attacked the Russian revolution in mid- and late 1938, Burnham joined with Shachtman to counterattack scathingly in their article, "The Retreat of the Intellectuals." In response to the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939, Burnham and Shachtman together began the process of taking a critical look at Trotsky's analysis of the USSR within a Marxist framework, a process that led to the founding of the Workers Party (WP) in May 1940. In that same period, however, Burnham was succumbing to the same pressures as Hook. The result was his open repudiation of Marxism and break with the WP within days of its founding; an event that led the WP to stress all the more its continuity with revolutionary Marxism.

With both these processes unfolding simultaneously, it is understandable that an observer like Trotsky had problems keeping them distinct in his mind, and confused innovations within Marxism with (far more common) capitulations to a hostile environment. Hook's example helps make clear how difficult it can be for intellectuals to remain Marxists. Even more important, though, his work helps make clear how indispensable democracy, debate and creativity are to the survival of a living Marxism. Phelps' book makes a major contribution to giving Hook's work the attention it deserves.

Notes

* Hook, "Communism Without Dogmas," in The Meaning of Marx, ed. Sidney Hook, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934, p. 142. return

1. Hook, "Our Philosophers," Current History 41 (March 1935), p. 703. return

Contents of No. 25